Phillip Motley is an associate professor in the Communication Design department at Elon University. The university’s School of Communications has five undergraduate degrees, including Communication Design, and one graduate program in Interactive Media. In both programs, they teach digital approaches to visual communication and, as such, UX/UI design is an important component alongside other subfields such as publication design, information design, and motion design. Of the two programs, the graduate program currently covers more UX/UI content and goes into greater depth.

How do you define UX/UI Design?

For our students, we try to define UX design as experience design and UI design as user interface design. We teach them that these are separate but also deeply integrated and related fields of study, and that UX is the larger, more encompassing of the two disciplines. We include in this mix, the subfield of interaction design. So, if you’re a student who receives this content in class, you’ll be taught this information in three categories: user experience design and what a UX designer does (research, problem/solution identification, wireframe mockups, usability studies and testing, etc.); user interface design and the role of a UI designer (visual designs, interactive prototypes, final outputs for specific platforms, etc.); and interaction design and what that entails (understanding how humans use digital products, the affordances of specific input devices, ergonomic issues related to interaction, etc.).

What is your approach to educating students?

As a university, Elon is heavily focused on engaged and experiential learning practices. In the Communication Design and Interactive Media programs this means project-based practices such as hands-on activities that allow students to hone their creative and craftsmanship skills, opportunities to work directly with clients and community partners on projects, chances to learn a holistic approach to visual communication including the research, conceptual development, making, and iterative refinement aspects of the field, or about the importance of collaboration, critique, and feedback to the process of design.

What trends are you seeing in UX design and Human-computer interaction?

Though somewhat obvious, the most important trend that I see in the UX/UI world is one of increasing opportunity. As the world becomes increasingly more digital, in addition to most people walking around with a screen-based device on their person, everyday objects have become screen-based: cars, home appliances, store check-out stations, information kiosks, etc. A quick trip to a home supply store will demonstrate this observation as more and more refrigerators, washing machines, and stoves are controlled via digital interfaces.

Why is this work important?

Similar to my previous response, this work is important for the simple reason that this is the direction that the world is headed. It likely won’t be long before it’s common for homes to have digital devices that a person uses on entry to control lighting, climate settings, and maybe turn on the stove or start a hot shower. At one time, only higher end vehicles had digital screens as a standard component; now, most cars come equipped with a screen that controls various functions for the vehicle. This technological progress means opportunities: someone is going to have to design these experiences and create the visual screen interfaces that are part and parcel of how a user functions with a device or completes a task.

How is this work being integrated with fields like data science, statistics, and communications?

The two programs I’ve described, Communication Design and Interactive Media, are part of a larger communications school that includes majors in journalism, strategic communications, cinema and television, and media analytics, which focuses heavily on data. Data and analytics are now being infused into the other four majors, and the graduate program, so that all students have some experience with this field of study.

What is the role of design thinking in this work?

Design thinking is an excellent companion field to user experience design. At the root of design thinking is a human-centered approach to identifying and solving problems. The same is true with UX design in how it places the user at the forefront of any work that needs to be done. Design thinking techniques such as empathy mapping or journey mapping are also useful in a UX context. Usability testing centralizes the user and the satisfaction derived from an experience with a product.

What is the role of storytelling in this work?

Most people seem to learn about the world and the way it works through stories. We can absorb facts and data, especially if we’ve been taught methods for doing so, but we inherently understand storytelling not just as a form of entertainment, but also as a way of understanding the world. I believe storytelling is the single best method of educating the public about a topic. When explaining a new or esoteric concept, simply including a brief example in the form of an abbreviated story often leads to understanding and insight. In this sense, using storytelling to communicate the advances in technology and how user experience design is an important component of these advances seems like the most productive way to inform the public.

Additionally, when well-crafted, storytelling can be incorporated into user experiences. The ubiquity of video content has made its way into digital interfaces as an important form of content that may be available to a user. On top of this, animation and motion-based interface components are becoming commonplace. While animation in this sense isn’t necessarily storytelling, this type of usage is still a conscious method of exploiting time-based media to further a user’s experience with a product.

Are there design or product development frameworks that you subscribe to?

Alongside UX/UI and design thinking techniques and processes that we teach our students, at the graduate level we also expose them to agile project management approaches to collaborative work such as Scrum. Helping students understand that UX/UI work is rarely a solitary process helps them understand the collaborative aspect of the design and development process. Adding Scrum to the mix gives them better approaches to managing shared, distributive work.

What skills are most important in the development of future UX design professionals?

Outside of having a solid understanding of visual design principles, approaches to research and problem identification, we try to focus heavily on empathy as being the key to fully embracing the human- or user-centered aspect of this work. Getting students, especially, to understand that it’s not so much what they themselves think is important or a good idea, but rather what the end user responds positively to can be hard. Doing so is important, though, as the user is at the core of what defines a successful project.



The other skill that I believe is significant for user experience designers to practice and develop is the simple act of observation. You can learn a lot about a user’s experience with a product just by watching them use it. When teaching UX/UI design, one of the first exercises that I assign to students is to have them go to a local grocery or big box store and observe people as they go through the self-checkout line. I want the students to observe the evidence of users’ successes, frustrations, and even failures, with the checkout kiosks. For example, if a user seems to have a problem, can they tell where that person got stuck? Or, even if there is no clear problem, was there anything about the experience that seemed to frustrate the user or happen less smoothly than it perhaps should have? Students usually report back with interesting insights about how various users experience the checkout process and, in doing so, are able to start thinking about user experience beyond their own past interactions.

What is the future of UX design?

Clearly, this is a tough question to answer. In addition to the growth and spread of digital interfaces, I think we’ll see changes in how they function. As speech recognition quality gets better, I won’t be surprised to see more and more digital experiences happen via voice control. Beyond that, I’ve always thought that the most sophisticated way that we “interface” with information and situations is via other people. We are all incredibly sensitive to the context and clues that can be communicated from another person even without the use of speech (body language, facial expressions, head movements, etc.). I have often wondered if the future of user experience and user interface design will somehow involve projected faces or even full bodies. If so, this advance in technology will likely need holographic or some other type of 3D projection to become subtle enough to be effective.