Abstract:

The professional graduate degree programs including Engineering and Technology Management programs have gained huge popularity all over the world. For most of the programs, the students are the graduates of engineering or similar technical programs with some work experience in the related sphere, and their primary aim is to improve their management skills within the professional & academic network through collective learning platforms. Considering that the students of such programs spend most of their time for their coursework, projects, meetings, and group-studies with their peers, as well as for self-studies, the design of teaching/learning facilities of such professional degree programs is of the utmost importance. This paper presents the re-design of a teaching and learning facility for the students of a master of Engineering Management (EM) program using the User Experience Design (UXD) approach. UXD is a process of interaction between the user and the design of a product or service, which makes a design more valuable, useful, usable, accessible, desirable, and credible to the user. The primary user group in the form of EM students was identified and the re-design of teaching/learning facilities was developed based on the students’ feedback using the most suitable UXD tools such as persona, survey, guerrilla test, storytelling, A/B test, and card sorting. The responses of students showed that there are not enough spaces at the campus that can be used for the effective collaboration and group studies with their peers in the same program and make them feel comfortable, and that the design of the current regular classrooms is far from meeting the expectations of the students. After careful analysis of the obtained results, the most important attributes of the needed facilities were chosen to design and visualize the new facility in a 3D software program. The final proposed learning and teaching space can serve as a place for students to study, connect, collaborate, innovate and co-create with others.

Keywords:

User Experience Design, UXD tools, teaching and learning facilities, professional degree, engineering management.