Intro to UX Curriculum
Updating an undergraduate UX curriculum for the AI era.
AI is creating a seismic shift in the software industry, a shift that is arguably the most disorienting for UX/product designers. Nonetheless, students continue to enroll in the School of Interaction & UI/UX Design at the Academy of Art, where I teach. This summer, I completely rewrote the curriculum for IXD120: Introduction to UX Design, in order to better prepare students for the emerging career landscape.
UX Fundamentals
The course is grounded in human-centered design principles, with emphasis on designing software that addresses verified user needs, pains, and desires. I structured the class in a dual-track format, running UX fundamentals in parallel with current AI practice.
AI Perspectives
Some throughlines in the AI-based material:
AI as something to push back on, not trust: explicit teaching on hallucination and sycophancy; adversarial role framing; treat AI's first response as a draft, not a verdict.
AI as thought partner for divergence: steering AI away from its default "here are five reasonable options" toward volume and breadth.
AI as a first-pass evaluator, cross-checked against humans: AI runs a heuristic evaluation first, how to read agreement/disagreement between AI findings and independent human findings.
AI as assumption-interrogator: surfacing and fatality-ranking assumptions; disagreement between AI's ranking and the student's judgment is the real signal.
AI decoupled fidelity from cost: a prototype can now be high-visual and high-functional for the price of a sketch; fidelity is a tool to be used with intention.
Takeaways
It feels pretty rich to be "preparing students for the future" during a time when the future is so uncertain, but I believe we've struck a good balance between fundamentals, current skills, and providing a framework for asking the right questions.
I started writing/workshopping this material in early 2026, with promising results. Students were catching their assumptions earlier in the semester, pivoting, and producing better projects that I had seen in the past. It gives me hope that AI will, hopefully soon, start helping us make better software, not just make it faster & cheaper.