UX Design for Interactive Media

Case study · Learning Design · UX Design

Designing a new Digital Media Arts course from industry competencies: backward-designed, competency-based, authentically assessed, and built to a recognized online-quality standard. This is the course I am the subject-matter expert on.

Goal

Take a Digital Media Arts student from no user-experience background to a defensible portfolio case study, and assess the competency rather than the artifact. The course is designed so that what a student can produce, explain, and defend is the evidence, which is also what makes it resistant to generative substitution.

Audience

Community college students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, many first-generation and balancing work with school, most arriving with a graphic-design or visual foundation and no UX. The design assumes design sensibility but no research, prototyping, or systems experience, and never lets the software become the reason a student stops.

Process

Outcomes

The course is designed backward from its outcomes (Wiggins & McTighe): I start from eleven industry competencies, define the evidence that would prove each one, and only then design the activities that build toward that evidence. Every competency is held in constructive alignment (Biggs), so the outcomes, the assessments, and the activities all point at the same target, and the alignment matrix is built as the course is built rather than reconstructed afterward. Each competency, written with the advisory board, is an observable action at a stated cognitive level (I through VI, low to high).

How success is measured

The course separates formative and summative assessment on purpose. Formative work carries the learning: low-stakes practice, self-checks, a scaffolded critique loop, and interactive simulations that let a student rehearse professional judgment before it counts. Summative work carries the proof: a defended case study built on the student’s own chosen problem.

Every graded task is authentic (Wiggins), anchored to the student’s own work and a real design decision they can defend out loud, which is also what makes it resistant to generative substitution. The through-line project is individualized, students choose their own problem, so no two are alike and a pasted model answer does not fit. Points sit on the process and the reasoning, the research, the rationale, and the response to critique, not only on the finished file. Interactive simulations do the formative heavy lifting:

• Heuristic-evaluation simulator, students inspect a working interface and flag issues against Nielsen’s ten heuristics, then compare to an expert pass.
• Usability-test role-play, students run a task-based test against a synthetic participant who behaves like a real, sometimes confused user, then synthesize what they saw.
• Affinity-mapping and card sort, students cluster research notes into themes to practice synthesis, the step beginners skip.
• Spot-the-barrier accessibility check, students find and name accessibility failures on a sample screen and state the fix.

The summative is the defense: a recorded case-study walkthrough followed by live questions on why each decision was made. A model can generate a screen; it cannot sit in the room and account for fifteen weeks of a student’s own choices.

Pacing and interaction

Eight modules carry the competencies, and a single through-line project runs the length of the course so the work compounds into one defensible case study rather than disconnected exercises.

Underneath the rhythm: cognitive load theory (Sweller), content chunked so a beginner is never fighting the tool and the idea at once; scaffolding, each project built on the last; and self-regulated learning (Zimmerman), students plan, monitor, and reflect on their own work. The course also draws on connectivism and personal learning environments, the focus of my own M.Ed., so students leave building their own network of tools and sources, not just a finished file. Regular and Substantive Interaction is built into every week, an announcement and check-in rhythm, the Discord critique loop with post-by and reply-by cadence, and a stated feedback timeline, rather than bolted on at the end.

Access

The course is designed for learner variability from the start rather than retrofitted for it, applying the three principles of Universal Design for Learning: multiple means of engagement (student-chosen problems, relevance, a critique community), multiple means of representation (every concept in more than one modality, captioned and scripted video, a key-terms glossary), and multiple means of action and expression (varied ways to demonstrate learning, including recorded presentations so no student has to perform live in front of the class). Accessibility is designed to WCAG 2.1 AA from the first draft, not audited on afterward.

Whose course this is

I conceived this course, wrote its competencies with our industry advisory board, and I am the subject-matter expert; design and UX are my field. I design and build it, using my own course-builder skill to help me build and keep it aligned. An advisory panel of expert agents gives me feedback and a second read, but it does not author the course. What follows is the design thinking behind it, in the open.

Technology

I design and build the course myself, using my own course-builder skill to keep it aligned to the standards on every pass. Then an advisory panel of three expert agents reviews each module, each from a different seat, and gives me advice. They do not write the course; they catch what one designer working alone misses and hand me a sharper revision. This is different from my synthetic-SME demonstrations, where the subject-matter expert is itself an AI agent; here I am the subject-matter expert (AI-assisted course design).

No single open textbook spans these competencies, so the course uses a vetted mix, with licensing stated on every resource. It is built to the SUNY OSCQR online-course-quality rubric alongside the department’s alignment and workload criteria, with estimated seat hours on every module held to the credit-hour budget. (OSCQR is applied under a Creative Commons license; Nielsen Norman Group heuristics are cited; not affiliated with or endorsed by SUNY.)

Status

I am building this course out. It is not complete yet, and it will not run until January 2027. The competencies are set with the advisory board and the course is approved for the Digital Media Arts curriculum.