Skip to main content

Research

Tyler Fox

Spring 2024

From UX to Transitions - Understanding Design Competencies

NOTE: We are seeking a limited number of undergraduate participants to participate in Spring Quarter.

This is a two-quarter DRG. Individuals will be joining an existing team for Spring Quarter. 

In this DRG, we seek to understand the core competencies of Transition Design. Transition Design aims to catalyze socio-technological transition toward more sustainable futures focusing on fundamental change at every level of society through reimagining entire lifestyles and infrastructures like energy, economy, food, healthcare, and education. We are interested to know if and how UX design processes support transition design frameworks, and what implications this may have for both design education and design practice.

This research will be participatory. Participants in these DRGs will work in teams to work with local organizations in winter and spring. In winter, teams will mobilize user and human-centered processes to help our local organizations realize a modest workflow (onboarding for a community-based science project, for example). In spring, teams will work with the same organization to envision a transition for the future directly related to the organization's mission.

We seek both undergraduate and graduate students to participate in this research. We use the term participation with intent. 

This DRG meets Tuesdays 1-3PM in Spring Quarter. To apply, please complete this Google Form.


Spring 2024

Exploring LLMs for UX Design Critique

Note this DRG is full for Spring 2024 and no longer accepting applications.

Your faculty hosts:

  • Dr. Tyler Fox
  • Dr. David W. McDonald

Can an LLM generate a design critique? Well … sure it can. But is it any good? How would you know?

User experience professionals will soon encounter all types of tools driven by LLMs, GPT, or AI that will claim to make their jobs easier, provide feedback, and assess usability of their designs. Having a clear understanding of what these tools can or cannot provide will be important to being an effective professional in the new world of UX.

This DRG will explore how GPT and LLMs can be used to provide important design feedback on early stage design artifacts. Participants in this DRG will work with their own early stage designs - perhaps something they already have designed. Those designs will then be used to examine the quality and effectiveness of different types of critique generated by LLMs. Students will qualitatively evaluate the LLM generated critique to understand the different qualities of LLM feedback. During the quarter, students will work to engineer a ChatGPT prompt that will provide a selected form of critique.

What students can expect to learn by participating in this DRG:

  • Styles and forms of UX critique
  • Qualitative and quantitative assessment of feedback content
  • Prompt engineering techniques for ChatGPT

Skills that would allow you to be successful in this DRG include:

  • The ability to give and interpret (receive) critique
  • Basic technical skills (e.g., ability to understand or learn JSON markup)

This is a 2 credit DRG and will be conducted in-person on Tuesdays 3:30-5 p.m. 


Dr. Fox's Research Group archive