Designers of Hacker News, we'd love your help on 2 things:
1. We'd love your feedback on the curriculum itself. e.g. Do the topics and flow look right? Are the projects sufficient?
2. If you're a UX designer who loves to teach and mentor new professionals, I'd love to talk. We're planning a learning experiment that combines the power of the internet with one-on-one human contact.
It seems rather strange that there isn't a single reference to HCI in a UX curriculum. I know it may sound like the "hard"/science-y part, but HCI is fundamental - quite a few principles (such as Fitt's law or the 10 Nielsen & Molich heuristics) came from HCI research and stood the test of time - they're still valid, today. Usability testing was also built out of HCI research. Also: cognitive modeling, the focus on the user, and so on.
tl;dr: You should introduce HCI from the start. There's open courseware on the subject. You can't claim to know (or teach) the essentials of UX design without a good knowledge of HCI as a subject.
Are there topics within HCI that you think are more fundamental than others?
PS: The pop - up registration form on the website is a fine example of how subscription pop-ups should be done. Only when the user feels that he/she is interested in learning from the website, the pop-up comes up.Its placed well in the website and only shows up when necessary.
There are simply too many invasive and intrusive pop-ups on websites these days that immediately come up when opening the webpage. The worst part is that they keep on nagging you until you either give them your email or leave the website. It ruins the browsing experience and comes of as desperate. Its also a shame that well known websites are now doing this and its really annoying.
If your content is good enough, users will subscribe on their own.
[0] A resource which was developed by Theresa Neil and Balsamiq is great for beginners getting started in User Experience Design.
I am not a fan of using video primarily over text. This is also why I am not a fan of Khan Academy, so maybe it's just my preference and doesn't reflect what most of your users want but I do have facts and reasoning to back up my opinion. Anything that requires sound is going to limit it's use to a private setting, and videos can't be skimmed or used as a reference. I understand their occasional value for supplemental lessons, but I don't they should be required to use tutorials.
There may be a demand for UX designers but as much as I would love to focus my career in that area, I won't because UX is a bike shed. Even if you designed the perfect UI, you would never get it past clueless management without having it mangled. The fight to do your job makes of 90% of your effort, and you will always lose.
If you don't mind, I'll mention it on my blog as well. I've started writing about my process in trying to improve my design skills (http://designwithdave.com), and I think my (few, but growing) readers would find it useful.
Minor annoyance: clicking on "Demystifying Usability Tests: Learning the Basics" leads to an external page where I have to sign in to see the video (no need to sign in for the first video, "What is UX Design"). Do I really need to create another fake account just to see the video?
This is v1 though, and we'll work to make the experience better.
It looks like the only way I can look at the curriculum is by joining sliderule...which I don't want to do, yet.
If you want to code, then learn coding. But if you want to do design, you are going down a very different path and might not have the luxury of ever coding again (even if you know how).
