Have you ever tried to explain information architecture, interaction design, or user research to someone who doesn’t work in the UX field? If you have, you know that defining the things we do is a huge challenge.

Defining what we do isn’t just a challenge when talking to folks outside of the UX field. Experienced UX designers often struggle to define UX terms. How do we explain information architecture, interaction design, or content strategy in a way that’s concise but comprehensive? Where does one discipline end and another begin? How do we explain each unique discipline to someone who is learning UX design?

While developing coursework for User Research Practices, a course that introduces usability testing, user interviews, surveys, and field observations, I worked on Center Centre’s definition of user research.

This definition had to be clear, concise, and easy for anyone to understand. The more I tried to arrive at a definition, the more I felt stuck. So I asked our co-founder, Jared Spool, for help. I shared my working definition of user research with him:

User research reveals the needs and behaviors of our users. Understanding these needs and behaviors allows us to make informed design decisions that serve both our users and our business goals.

Jared built upon my definition and responded with this definition:

User Research is a set of tools and practices to help design teams understand who their users are, what they need, the contexts the team’s designs will live in, and unrealized opportunities for the organization.

At Center Centre, this is our definition of user research.

When students attend Center Centre, they’ll have a shared vocabulary for each UX topic they learn. When we work on projects and participate in classroom activities with a shared understanding, everyone—students, faculty members, industry experts, and partner company mentors—will be able to communicate effectively and efficiently. When a student or faculty member uses a term like “information architecture,” “interaction design,” or “user research,” everyone in the room will know what that term means.

Would you like to become a Center Centre student? Apply to Center Centre today. Do you know someone who would make a great student? Please tell them about us. We look forward to hearing from them.

While developing the curriculum for User Research Practices, a course that introduces usability testing, user interviews, surveys, and field observations, I read Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy. Steve’s book explains how to bring usability testing into your organization’s process.

Below are three principles from the book that resonated with me. We’ve built all three principles into the User Research Practices course.

All sites have usability problems

While some sites have more usability problems than others, every site has usability problems. Usability problems occur when users struggle to understand a site’s content or struggle to complete a task on the site. Students will finish the User Research Practices course knowing that usability testing is the best way to identify those problems and fix them.

Focus on fixing the most serious usability problems first

As Steve says in his book, “it’s easy to get distracted by less serious problems that are easier to solve, which means the worst ones often persist.” It may seem like a good use of time to fix five small problems before addressing one severe usability problem. But focusing on easy fixes first often means you run out of time to fix severe problems.

Students will work on team projects while they’re at Center Centre. When conducting usability studies throughout these real-world projects, students will learn how to prioritize usability problems and focus on the most severe problems first.

You’ll always have more usability problems than you have resources to fix those problems

Even with plenty of budget and plenty of time, it’s challenging to address every usability problem revealed through usability testing. We’ll prepare our students for this reality. They’ll learn to triage usability testing problems so they can spend their resources fixing the things that will contribute most to the user experience.

Apply to be a student

Would you like to become a well-rounded UX designer who can conduct user research studies? Apply to Center Centre today to be a student. Do you have friends or family members who would make great students? Please tell them about us. We look forward to hearing from them.

Have you ever tried to hold a conversation with someone in person while you’re replying to a text message on your phone? Have you ever sat in a work meeting, held your phone under the table, and pretended to listen while someone else is talking? Have you ever brought your laptop to a work meeting thinking that you’ll check email while you participate in the meeting?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you’re not alone. (I answered yes to all of these questions myself.) What we often forget (or ignore) is that multitasking is ineffective. Human beings aren’t wired to do multiple things at once. We may think we’re being effective when we attempt to do many tasks at one time, but we’re not. When we do multiple things at a time, we do them slowly and poorly.

At Center Centre, we designed a learning environment and a culture that supports being present and being productive. We focus on one thing at a time. We focus on that one thing—and get it done right. We plan our schedules so that we don’t rush around at the last minute. We block off time on our calendars each day to get specific tasks done. And lastly, and perhaps most surprisingly, we have tech-free meetings. That’s right—tech-free meetings. No laptops, no phones, no tablets. Nothing that beeps or buzzes comes into our meetings.

We focus on one thing at a time

I’ve always been a planner. I’m a high C on the DISC model, which means that I’m detail-oriented and task-driven. Even though I was planning my work and keeping on top of my tasks, it wasn’t until I worked at Center Centre that I realized my old work habits weren’t very effective.

At previous jobs, I attended meetings with my laptop. I checked email and Basecamp during most meetings, stopping now and then to pay attention to the meeting. I thought I was being productive, but I now realize that I wasn’t productive at anything. I was halfheartedly doing three things—checking email, checking Basecamp, and participating in the meeting—instead of being fully present and engaged in one of those things.

Now, I work very differently. I don’t try to do multiple things at once. For example, while writing this article, I set aside writing time on my calendar. I turned off notifications on my laptop. I left my phone in the other room. I minimized all other tabs in my browser. I focused on writing while I was writing.

Focusing helps me write content effectively and quickly. In one hour, I listed my goals for this article, wrote a rough draft, created a reverse outline, edited my rough draft, found links to external articles to support the points in my draft, and sent my draft to our co-founder, Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, for review.

Tech-free meetings

When I first started working at Center Centre, I couldn’t believe our meetings were tech-free. I had never heard of such a thing. I was incredulous. I thought to myself, “No laptops? How am I supposed to take notes?”

Now, I understand why we have our tech-free meetings rule. I embrace this rule. I can’t imagine going back meetings with phones and laptops that constantly distract us.

When I’m in a meeting, I’m focused on the meeting. I’m listening, I’m contributing, and I’m learning. I’m respecting other people’s time by being fully present. I’m following the printed agenda. (All of our meetings have detailed agendas.) I’m taking notes by hand, which is much more effective than taking them on a laptop. After the meeting, I photograph my notes and add them to Evernote so that I have a digital reference for later.

We do make some exceptions to our tech-free meetings rule. For instance, if someone joins the meeting remotely via Skype, we need to use a laptop. If a staff member is waiting on an important call from her physician, that staff member can bring her phone to the meeting.

Center Centre’s meetings are productive and enjoyable. Everyone leaves knowing what we discussed, what we accomplished, and what our next steps are.

Shaping students into productive professionals

We’re excited to teach our students how to be productive professionals. Students will learn how to schedule time on their calendars to get their projects and activities done. That way they’re set up to focus on one thing at a time, rather than trying to juggle three or more things at once. Students will participate in tech-free meetings, and they’ll experience how productive and useful a meeting can be without constant distractions.

Students will graduate from Center Centre as well-rounded, junior UX designers, and they’ll know how to maximize their time and energy on the job. They’ll be an indispensable asset to the UX team they join.

Apply to be a student

Do you see yourself as a student with Center Centre? Apply today to become a lifelong learner. Do you have friends or family members who would make great students? Please tell them about us. We look forward to hearing from them.

Do you remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid? These books allowed you, the reader, to make choices that determine the main character’s actions and the plot’s outcome. My favorite was Circus of Fear, a fantasy book about an orphaned brother and sister who join a bizarre circus in exchange for food and shelter.

I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books. (It’s true—I’ve always been a nerd.) But as a kid, I struggled to finish many books because they didn’t hold my attention. I felt forced into a long, pre-determined narrative that didn’t captivate me the way that Choose Your Own Adventure books did.

Choose your own learning adventure

At Center Centre, our students get to choose their own learning adventures. For each course, students create a personalized learning plan (PLP)—by choosing from an array of learning activities and projects. Students are the main characters in their learning story and their choices determine their learning outcomes.

We design our learning experiences to fit the needs of our students—not the other way around. Instead of creating one instructional approach for all students, we create many opportunities for students to learn and master concepts. Every student learns differently. What works well for one student’s learning process may not work so well for another student.

In week one of each course, students participate in a two-day, industry-expert-led workshop, followed by three days of individualized learning. During these three days, students create and work on their personalized learning plan (PLP).

Students choose the learning process(es) that allows them to demonstrate understanding of the material. Then, they spend the next two weeks of the course applying what they learn from the industry-expert-led workshop and their PLP to their team projects.

The PLP projects and activities vary with each course. Even though projects and activities vary, students always have an assortment of ways to learn. For example, if a student learns best by reading, she may choose to read a book to learn a course topic. If she prefers to learn through small group work, she may join a small group of students to complete an activity.

The PLP options don’t just shape students’ learning experiences. These options build critical skills for students. For example, learning through group work builds collaboration skills, communication skills, and meeting facilitation skills.

We also encourage students to build skills they don’t yet have. A student may not enjoy reading because she thinks she’s slow at reading. But maybe, as part of her PLP, she chooses to read a book. This choice allows her the opportunity to improve her reading skills. By reading more often, she learns to read more quickly and more effectively.

Below are some examples of PLP projects and activities for one of our courses, Information Architecture UX02.

Socks game

Students bring in the funkiest pairs of socks that they own (clean socks, of course). It’s best if some of the socks don’t match.

Working in groups, students organize the socks. We ask the students, how would you organize these? By shape? By color? By size?

We use this exercise to talk about taxonomies (the arrangement of categories in a user interface), especially top-down, hierarchical taxonomies like site maps. We also talk about metadata (descriptive terms for socks like red, large, and winter) and facets (sock categories that contain metadata like color, size, and season).

Our co-founder, Jared Spool, originally learned how to play the socks game through the Boston UXPA chapter.

Find a book at the local library

We ask students to find a specific book at the library. We also ask them to find books about a specific topic. For example, we may ask them to find a copy of On Writing Well, a book about improving your writing. We may also ask them to find books about a related topic, such as writing content for the web.

We use this exercise to talk about information-seeking behaviors like known-item seeking and exploratory seeking. Finding something specific, such as a copy of the book On Writing Well, is known-item seeking. Looking for content about a subject, like writing for the web, is exploratory seeking. We also discuss mental models—how people imagine a process to be before they embark on a process.

Students keep a journal of the book-finding experience. What do they expect the process to be like before they begin? How do they look for books? Where do they struggle in the process if at all?

Read Abby Covert’s How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Abby Covert’s book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess, is about information architecture. It’s an enjoyable read. It makes complicated principles within information architecture understandable and accessible. It’s also a quick read.

After students read the book, they reflect on what they read. Students meet in groups to discuss the most significant things they learned. They discuss what unanswered questions they have from the reading. They clarify unanswered questions for each other, and they bring unresolved questions to the larger group for discussion and clarification.

Students also apply what they learn to PLP projects. When reading How to Make Sense of Any Mess, students learn about taxonomies, facets, and metadata. They apply what they learn in activities like the socks game and in student team projects.

Become a lifelong learner

When we let our students choose their own learning adventures, they choose a path that’s right for them, and they choose a path that they’re motivated to take. They also choose a path that allows them to learn how to learn. They’ll graduate knowing how to teach themselves new skills and tools in user experience design.

Our goal is to prepare each student to be an industry-ready, junior UX designer. Each student takes a unique learning path to reach that goal. However, the end goal is the same for each student—to be an asset on day one to the company that hires them.

More about choose your own adventure learning

We’ve infused choose your own adventure learning into our curriculum from the very start. It turns out we’re not the only educators who believe in this type of learning. Last week, an article by Dr. Bonni Stachowiak, from Teaching in Higher Ed, appeared in our inbox. Great minds think alike!

Apply to be a student

Do you see yourself as a student with Center Centre? Apply today to become a lifelong learner. Do you have friends or family members who would make great students? Please tell them about us. We look forward to hearing from them.

We’re thrilled to announce that MailChimp is joining us as a Center Centre Partner Company!

MailChimp is a fantastic company with one of the world’s most talented user experience (UX) teams. Our students will improve their skills under the MailChimp team’s mentorship. It’s a perfect match.

We love that MailChimp’s Atlanta offices are only a two-hour drive away from Center Centre in Chattanooga. We expect we’ll see the MailChimp team frequently at the school. They’ll enhance their own skills as they participate in the students’ classes. They’ll share their expertise with frequent reviews of the students’ ongoing project work.

It will be easy for our students to make the journey to MailChimp’s HQ. Our students will see how MailChimp’s work environment supports a productive and creative culture. Students will observe the UX team at work, seeing the wide variety of activities that go into shipping a top-quality product. All this direct exposure with working professionals will show our students what lies ahead in their careers.

MailChimp has supported Center Centre from the very beginning. Aarron Walter, who is MailChimp’s Director of User Experience, built their UX team. Aarron told us:

Center Centre is addressing a significant challenge in the web industry: Today’s students are graduating without the training or skills needed to succeed in design and technology. Center Centre’s curriculum takes a fresh approach. It’s grounded in real-world concepts, and it gives students the opportunity to work with industry professionals before their career begins.

We’re excited to contribute to the learning experience at Center Centre because it’s a program we believe in. We’re looking forward to working with students in the Center Centre classroom and in our offices in Atlanta. There’s no better way to learn than by doing!

MailChimp’s culture embraces UX design

More than 7 million people use MailChimp to create, send, and track email newsletters. You’ve likely received emails sent with MailChimp. Or maybe you’ve sent emails through MailChimp yourself.

MailChimp’s UX team makes their product easy to learn and simple to use. They’ve produced an industry-leading online service with a delightful user experience.

The UX team’s culture is about sharing, and it shows. Aarron Walter wrote Designing for Emotion, a book on how to bring delight into every design project. Kate Kiefer Lee, who is in charge of MailChimp’s content and communication efforts, co-wrote Nicely Said with Nicole Fenton—a book we love. I used Jason Beaird’s book, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, when I was a university professor. We’re big fans of MailChimp’s The UX Newsletter and The UX Reader, two inspiring resources they share with the entire UX community.

As MailChimp’s Chief Culture Officer (yes! Culture is so important, they gave it a C-level position), Marti Wolf told us:

At MailChimp, we believe in empowering people through education and professional development opportunities, and we’re so excited to support an organization that gives students hands-on experience working in user experience design. We look forward to sharing our knowledge with students at Center Centre, and know we’ll learn a lot in the process, too.

We’re so excited to have MailChimp join our Partner Company Program. Working with a company who understands the value of UX is an excellent way to prepare our students to join the workforce as industry-ready, junior UX designers.

Become a Center Centre Partner Company

Our partnership with MailChimp brings us closer to starting the first cohort of Center Centre students. Would you like your organization to become a Center Centre Partner Company? Learn more about the Center Centre Partner Company program and get in touch with us.

Become a Center Centre student

We’re looking for students that are tenacious learners, passionate about helping others, and curious about technology. We don’t require prior design or development experience. Learn more about our program and apply now to be a student.

At Center Centre, we’re not just focused on teaching, we’re focused on learning. We’ve embedded learning techniques in our organization’s DNA. We’re always learning, and we’re always sharing what we learn.

As we’ve been creating Center Center, we’ve had to make millions of decisions, and we’ve learned a ton of new things. We surface what we learn through our daily routine. At Center Centre, we dedicate the greatest, non-replenishable resource we have—our time—on sharing what we’re learning.

Every day our team has a stand-up meeting. Like many organizations, we use this time-boxed meeting format as a way to communicate the challenges we’re facing and the progress we’re making. Everyone on the team answers these four stand-up questions:

1. What did I get done since the last stand-up?
2. What are my goals to accomplish before the next stand-up?
3. What’s preventing me from getting these things done, if anything?
4. What’s the highest risk/most unknown thing right now about what I’m trying to do?

But we don’t stop there. We use our stand-ups as opportunities to reinforce that learning every day. We’ve added a fifth question:

1. What is the most important thing I learned since the last time we met and how will what I learned change the way I approach things in the future?

(Okay, it’s really two questions, but we combine them for efficiency.)

It’s a challenge to come up with an answer for this question every day. It forces us to reflect on our actions.

The first half of the question focuses us on something new we’ve learned in the last 24 hours, whether big or small. The second half forces us to reflect on how we think this new knowledge will influence our behavior going forward. Many times, I’ve surprised myself on how much influence something small can have.

Along with everyone else, Jared and I share what we’ve learned every day. Sharing something new with the rest of the company every day shows our dedication to constant improvement. No longer are we seen as perfect know-it-alls. We’re just like everyone else, working to improve.

Here’s an example of how I answered the fifth question earlier this week:

I was totally stuck on writing a blog post. I just couldn’t get it started. I was really frustrated (which wasn’t helping my writing process). I remembered how successful Jess and I were last week when we combined our efforts and tackled a piece of content together. I asked her if we could do the same thing with the blog post. She said “yes” and that’s what we did.

It’s nice that we have a safe working environment and work with really excellent (and helpful) people. I can be vulnerable, admit I need help, and it’s okay. In the future, when I get stuck, I’m going to remember to ask for help.

Because learning is in our DNA, our students will understand that learning doesn’t end on graduation day. Our students will see how learning is a lifelong pursuit. Incorporating lifelong learning techniques helps our future graduates have the skills they need to be assets to hiring companies.

Become a Center Centre Partner Company

Would you like your organization to have access to graduates who understand the value of lifelong learning? Learn more about the Center Centre Partner Company program and get in touch with us.

Become a Center Centre student

Do you constantly push yourself to learn more? We’re looking for students that are tenacious learners, passionate about helping others, and curious about technology. No prior design or development experience required. Learn more about our program or apply now to be a student.

MailChimp originally published this article in issue 34 of their UX newsletter.

To become a better writer, Center Centre’s facilitator, Jessica Ivins, is reading books and working with a writing coach.

A learning-centered culture

At Center Centre, it’s okay to admit that you don’t know how to do something. It’s not just okay—it’s encouraged. No one holds it against you if you don’t have a solution to a problem or an answer to a question. Instead, we rally to support each other in our learning.

Center Centre is the user experience design school creating the next generation of industry-ready UX designers. Learning is at the center of everything we do. We’re not only a place of learning; we have a learning-centered culture.

When I first started working at Center Centre as a facilitator (full-time faculty), I told Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, Center Centre’s co-founder and institutional director, that I wanted to improve my writing. She was completely supportive of this goal. She asked me how I learn best.

I learn best by reading books. Together, Leslie and I made a plan and we figured out what books were best for me to read. I started with On Writing Well, as well as Everybody Writes, Nicely Said, and The Elements of Style.

While reading these books, Leslie worked with me as a writing coach. She reviewed my writing and made edits when necessary. Her feedback was honest and consistent. She pointed out what worked well and what didn’t. When I was stuck, she encouraged me to persevere, and she shared more writing resources.

By reading books about writing, by writing, and by working with a coach, I learned things about writing that I never learned in grade school or college. For example, I learned when to write with active voice, not passive voice. I learned techniques to get past hurdles like writer’s block.

Leslie and I worked together on writing for about five months. At the end of five months, my writing was significantly better. I even developed my editing skills to the point where I’m able to help Leslie write stronger content. We continue working together on writing. Learning is an ongoing process.

Ways to learn new skills

At previous jobs, I didn’t have many opportunities to learn new things as part of my work responsibilities. I had to work a certain number of billable hours, and I had to focus on client deliverables. At Center Centre, learning how to learn, and making the time to learn, are at the core of what we do. I’m grateful for the time I have to learn because professional development is critical to user experience.

As UX practitioners, we’re always learning new things. Technology constantly changes, as do user needs and behaviors. We must adapt to these changes by learning new techniques, tools, and methods for our work.

Lobby your boss

A former boss once told me, "It’s our job to keep up with the industry outside of work hours." I understand why he would say that. From 9 to 5, we have a lot of work tasks to accomplish. As a manager, it’s his job to ensure these tasks get done.

I wish I could go back in time to continue that conversation. Investing time in learning a new skill now transforms you into a more effective team member in the future.

It took me about five months to improve my writing. Because I invested time up front, I’m now able to communicate clearly and quickly. I’m able to express my thoughts more effectively to my colleagues, my boss, and anyone who wants to learn more about the school.

If you work at an organization like Center Centre, where learning is considered a part of your job and where your boss realizes the long-term value of professional development, take your boss up on opportunities to improve your UX practice. Learning a new skill or improving an existing skill can often fall off to a to-do list. Do your best to make learning a priority.

If you work at an organization that doesn’t allow for professional development during business hours, you may have to lobby your boss for time to learn. Perhaps learning something new is as simple as dedicating three lunch hours to learning every week. Maybe you can also devote three hours of your weekend. That’s a solid six hours of learning per week. Imagine what you can accomplish after six hours per week over the course of a year.

Keeping your boss up to date with what you’re learning, and how you’re applying it to your job, may help make the case for continued education. If your boss sees how learning something new with just a few hours a week helps the organization, it will be easier to get the time you need for learning.

Ask for help

Recently, I wanted to know the best way to learn about information architecture (IA). I was hesitant to ask for help. Imposter syndrome reared its ugly head. I felt vulnerable, and I didn’t want to look incompetent. I thought to myself, "I’ve been in the field for 10 years. I should know this already."

Then, I remembered my experience of learning how to improve my writing: I had to ask for help to become a better writer. I told myself that it was okay to be vulnerable, and I had to be comfortable with asking for help. I reached out to accomplished UX practitioners like Christina Wodtke, Lou Rosenfeld, and Abby Covert. To my relief, these folks and others made lots of recommendations, and I’m now up to my ears on books about Information Architecture.

Asking for help is the first step toward learning something new. Without recommendations from the UX community, I may have wasted time on books or resources that weren’t what I needed.

Find someone who has experience doing what you want to learn. Ask that person to help you meet your learning goals.

You might think, "Everyone’s busy, and no one has time to help me learn." Coaching, however, doesn’t have to take a lot of time—it can take five minutes a day or five minutes a week. The UX community has a lot of smart and kind people who are willing to help you achieve your goals.

Lifelong learning

Learning how to write taught me how to become a better learner. By learning how to learn—and by being open about my process—I’m modeling the behavior of a lifelong learner for Center Centre’s students.

When our students graduate, I don’t want them just to be proficient in UX. I want them to be confident in their ability to learn. By knowing how to learn, our students will be an asset to hiring managers from day one. In the meantime, I look forward to experiencing the process of lifelong learning with Center Centre students.

We’re so excited to announce that Northrop Grumman is Center Centre’s first partner company!

As a partner company, Northrop Grumman will get a first-hand look at our students’ design work as they progress through the program. Our students will gain real-world experience from Northrop Grumman. By working with mentors from Northrop Grumman, our students will strengthen their design skills and have an opportunity to interact with professionals addressing customer challenges. Meanwhile, members of Northrop Grumman’s User Experience team will see what each student is capable of and how they learn new material. For Northrop Grumman, this partnership helps provide a pipeline for talent in this demanding and rapidly growing discipline.

Northrop Grumman is a perfect partner. They design, develop and implement a wide variety of mission-critical systems, systems that are transparent and easy to use and that are enabled by user-friendly interfaces. Northrop Grumman’s User Experience experts help create designs used by people in high-stress environments, including air traffic controllers, police officers, firefighters, and soldiers, all who rely on well-designed software to do their jobs and fulfill their missions effectively. According to Mike Hübler, chief user experience architect and manager, User Experience department, “For people who face life and death situations, safety and accuracy are critical. In these high-stress work environments, having the right user experience is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.”

Dr. Neil Siegel, vice president and chief technology officer, Northrop Grumman Information Systems sector, told us, “We keep the experience of our users at the core of our decisions. User experience is so important to our goals and the services and solutions we deliver that we’ve made it one of our core technology focus areas.”

At Center Centre, we’re impressed with the depth of knowledge and experience of the Northrop Grumman UX team and thrilled they’ll be working alongside our students. Northrop Grumman will appoint four of their team members as mentors. These mentors will work with students throughout their two years at Center Centre. Mentors will regularly meet with students, constructively critique students’ work on an ongoing basis, and share skills that Northrop Grumman looks for when they hire designers.

Northrop Grumman supports a culture of lifelong learning. Each User Experience department member dedicates time to professional development. Their focus on continued education is one of the many reasons we’re so excited to have Northrop Grumman as a partner.

Center Centre students will work with the UX team on real projects for Northrop Grumman. These projects support the Center Centre curriculum. Mike Hübler said, “We look forward to working with Center Centre students, helping them sharpen their skills and as well as getting their perspective on Northrop Grumman projects. We’ll get to share our knowledge with the next generation of user experience experts, and Center Centre students will see what it’s like to work with our team and on the kinds of challenging efforts our customers face.”

Read more about why Northrop Grumman values our partnership.

If you’re working for a large company faced with growing need for UX talent, and you want to be a Center Centre partner company, let us know.

As part of their “New Tech Cities” series, OSTraining interviewed our co-founder, Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman.

We’re a really tight team at Center Centre. We know a lot about each other, and yet we learned some new things about Leslie, Center Centre, and Chattanooga when we read Leslie’s interview.

Some things we learned

Leslie’s had a lot of different jobs—from pushing manure to pushing pixels. She and her husband bought their house off the internet (wait, what?). Leslie loves that Chattanooga has a clean downtown. After a day of walking around a city, Leslie determines how clean the city is by looking at her fingernails (we’re filing that under, “Strange but true”).

Below is part of of Leslie’s response to the question, “Have you had a dozen different career paths, jobs, and educational goals … or just one?”

Designing and learning are at the core of who I am and influence what I do.

When I was about five years old, I was learning how to write my ABCs. I mean really write them. On proper thick ­ruled paper. I was focused on getting my letterforms just right. To achieve this goal, I would write and erase the letters over and over again. So much so that I would wear through the paper and have to start all over again.

When I was five, my mother didn’t scold me for erasing through the paper. She didn’t say, Leslie, you have to stop…this is crazy. Instead, she bought me more paper. She recently told me, I didn’t know it then, but you were kerning—you were letter­ spacing. (I have a pretty awesome mom.)

When I was a kid, my very first job was mucking out horse stalls. It wasn’t a sexy job, but I learned an important lesson early on—there is a right way and a wrong way to muck out a stall. I was fortunate to learn from someone who had experience mucking out horse stalls. I learned their process, and I didn’t get kicked by a horse. Early on, I learned how important it is to work with and learn from people who know more than I do.

At some point, I realized that I’d rather push pixels than manure. There were a lot of steps between mucking out stalls to becoming a designer.

Read the full interview to learn more about Leslie’s career path, what makes the tech scene in Chattanooga awesome, and how Center Centre is a project-based school in a project-based city.

The Unicorn Institute was our research project exploring the gaps between UX education and the UX industry. We evolved this research into the user experience design school, Center Centre.

As you may know…

Center Centre offers a two-year, on-site, full-time program—the first and only of its kind—that prepares students to be industry-ready junior UX designers. Center Centre is authorized as a postsecondary educational institution by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC). We plan to start courses in 2015.

A little secret behind the Unicorn Institute

Something you may not know…

Before we were authorized as a school by THEC, we couldn’t legally call ourselves a “school.” If we did, we’d be in big trouble with the state of Tennessee. We didn’t want that, but we did want to talk publicly about our research and our findings. So we created a research project that allowed us to share what we were learning about the gaps between UX education and the UX industry. We named our research project the Unicorn Institute.

We chose the name Unicorn Institute based on what we learned in our research. We interviewed dozens of UX hiring managers and their teams. We learned that hiring managers needed well-rounded UX designers. These designers needed to do many things like write content, code HTML prototypes, and conduct usability tests. Because well-rounded designers were hard to find, they became known as “unicorns.” Our rebranding process:

• Rebranding is no small feat. We made a lot of changes across different channels. Our rebranding process had many steps:
• We audited the content on the Unicorn Institute website and the Center Centre website.
• We identified what content was still relevant to Center Centre and what content was outdated.
• We determined what content on the Unicorn Institute website was still relevant to Center Centre, but not yet on Center Centre’s website.
• We rewrote this content to match Center Centre’s updated voice and tone.
• We added updated content and new content to the Center Centre website.
• Over time, we removed outdated content from the Unicorn Institute website. (Removing content in phases made the process manageable. It also allowed us to complete other tasks for the school while we rebranded.)
• We reduced the Unicorn Institute website to a landing page that links visitors to Center Centre’s website.
• We updated our email newsletter template with Center Centre’s branding.
• We combined our two Twitter accounts, @UnicornInstitut and @CenterCentre, into one account, @CenterCentre.
• We updated all remaining social media pages like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
• And now, we’re letting you know that we’re officially Center Centre.

We still ♥ unicorns

Even though we’re now Center Centre, we’re still creating unicorns—well-rounded junior UX designers.

Over the past few years, supporters, friends, and family have given us many thoughtful (albeit a bit tacky) unicorn gifts. To honor these special creatures (and the special creatures that gifted them to us), we proudly display the unicorns at Center Centre.

Looking forward in 2015

There’s a lot of magic happening at Center Centre.

We’re lining up partner companies, interviewing student applicants, and further developing assessment criteria, grading procedures, and learning experiences.

We look forward to the rest of the magic that 2015 has in store.