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.

Just reading our course titles makes me a little giddy. I found myself asking myself, “Are we really crafting a learning experience with all this excellent UX info?”

“Yes, we are!” (Confession: Even though I asked the question to myself, I blurted the answer out loud and confused my husband.)

The 30 courses in Center Centre’s UX program include everything from Information Architecture to Front-End Development. We’ve taken a holistic approach to our courses. Every course focuses on both hard, technical skills and soft, interpersonal skills. We design each course to make sure our students graduate as industry-ready UX designers.

Forward-looking courses through backward design

I’ve developed curriculum as an assistant professor at the university level and as part of The Web Standards Education Task Force (WaSP EduTF). Through these experiences, I’ve learned that a well-developed course focuses on each student as an individual learner. A well-constructed course also prepares students for a career after graduation.

There’s nothing simple about crafting a curriculum that:

• is 75% project-based;
• meets students where they are in their current knowledge and allows for equal yet individualized learning;
• includes real projects with real stakeholders and real constraints; and,
• has never been done before.

I knew we needed a structured approach to course design. None of the models I used in the past would support such a nuanced program. After a lot of research and consideration, I determined that we would follow L. Dee Fink’s approach. His book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses is wonderful. Fink’s model puts student learning at the center of each course. It also shares specific steps for designing an integrated learning experience.

We use Fink’s approach of backward design to develop our courses. To do this, we imagine a time when the course is over. We look one to three years into the future, and we ask ourselves:

What is it we hope that students will have learned,
that will still be there and have value, several years after the course is over?

The answer to this question forms the basis of the learning goals for each course. Then we move backward in time to the end of the course and ask the assessment question:

What would the students have to do to convince us and themselves that they have achieved the learning goals?

By answering this question, we clarify the real meaning of the learning goals.

Moving back and forth between time, we develop authentic assessment activities and learning activities that allow students to succeed during their education at Center Centre. At the same time, these activities prepare students for life after graduation. Students will learn the skills they need to excel in a professional work environment.

Do you know anyone who’d make a great UX designer?

We’re accepting applications from those who prove an eagerness to learn, a prowess for professionalism, and motivation to be a UX designer. If you see yourself as one of those amazing candidates, submit your application today. Also, if you know any folks who would make great students, please encourage them to apply. They’re also welcome to contact us with questions about our program.

With Over 1,500 backers helped make Center Centre a reality by contributing to our Kickstarter campaign. To thank them, we’ve added their names and logos to our website. View our digital Wall of Awesomeness to see the individuals and organizations who backed us.

We have a physical Wall of Awesomeness, too

Last week we announced the physical Wall of Awesomeness at Center Centre. We printed each Kickstarter backer’s name or logo on vinyl stickers and placed them on a wall at our school. Read more about how we designed and implemented the physical Wall of Awesomeness.

Donate to our scholarship fund and we’ll add your name

Help us create the next generation of UX designers. Make a tax-deductible donation to the Center Centre Make Awesomeness Scholarship Fund through the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga. After you donate, we’ll add your name to both the digital and physical Wall of Awesomeness!

Over 1,500 backers helped make Center Centre a reality by contributing to our Kickstarter campaign. To thank them, we’ve added their names and logos to our Wall of Awesomeness. Each name or logo was individually laid out and printed on one of 2,000 stickers. Then, each sticker was caringly applied to the wall by our Center Centre team.

So many walls to choose from

We knew we wanted to create a Wall of Awesomeness at Center Centre, but we weren’t sure which wall to choose. There were a lot of walls to choose from in our nearly 7,000 square feet of space. We searched the space to find the perfect location. We chose a wall next to the entrance. Walk off the elevator, turn right, and you’re welcomed by the words we live by, “Make Awesomeness.”

When you enter our space, one of the first things you see is the Wall of Awesomeness

Designing the wall

After choosing the wall, the next step was to design an experience that showcased the incredible support of our backers. We brainstormed, sketched, and iterated. We wanted to honor our backers in a way that was visually interesting and that showed it takes many people working together to truly make awesomeness.

We consulted with several printers on making our idea a reality. Together, we concluded the best option was to print individual stickers onto reappliable adhesive vinyl. This would allow us to apply, remove, and reapply stickers as we implemented the design.

We printed each backer’s name or logo on these stickers. To add visual depth and interest, we used three shades of purple and six different sizes. The size of each sticker was determined by the backer’s contribution level.

We printed the names and logos of our 1,500+ backers on vinyl stickers.

Implementing the design

We found ourselves standing among countless sheets of stickers staring at a blank, white wall. It was time to change the wall into something special.

Using a projector, we projected “Make Awesomeness” onto the wall. Then, we lightly traced the letters with pencil. The first stickers we added to the wall were small, fill-in stickers. These stickers allowed us to define the letters’ edges, reserving larger printed stickers for the negative space around the letters. We left the white wall exposed to reveal the message. Sticker by sticker, our Wall of Awesomeness began to emerge.

We projected "Make Awesomeness" onto the wall, then traced it lightly with pencil.

Sticker by sticker, we added the names of our Kickstarter backers to the wall.

No designer or educator could resist the temptation to fill negative space with stickers.

The final product

After six hours of up close examination, evaluation from a distance, rearranging names, and covering gaps with tiny stickers, we were finished. The Wall of Awesomeness came together even better than we had imagined.

After six hours of solid team effort and an abundance of stickers, the wall was complete.

Visit us to view the Wall of Awesomeness

If you’re ever in Chattanooga, we invite you to meet us, tour our space, and view our wall. Let us know when you’ll be in town and we’ll schedule a time to meet.

View our digital Wall of Awesomeness.

Donate to our scholarship fund and we’ll add your name to the Wall of Awesomeness

Help us create the next generation of UX designers. Make a tax-deductible donation to the Center Centre Make Awesomeness Scholarship through the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga. After you donate, we’ll print your name on a sticker and add it to our wall.