MA User Experience Design

Course units

We are committed to ensuring that your skills are set within an ethical framework, and we have worked to embed UAL’s Principles for Climate, Racial and Social Justice Principles into the curriculum and in everything we do.

As part of this initiative, we’ve shaped our courses around social and environmental sustainability principles that ensure learning outcomes reflect the urgent need to equip you with the understanding, skills, and values to foster a more sustainable planet.  Our aim is to change the way our students think, and to empower you to work towards a sustainable future. 

Autumn, Term 1

UX Studio Practices (40 credits)

This unit aims to provide you with a critical understanding of user experience design in the context of contemporary studio practice.

It will help you position your approach to the subject relative to the current theoretical ideas and working practices of user experience design.

You will also develop a critical awareness of how physical, personal and social contexts shape design processes.

Spring, Term 2

Macro UX (20 credits)
Collaborative Unit (20 credits)

The Macro UX unit involves working with an external partner on live briefs. You can choose to work with industry or third sector organisations around a set of broad themes including; UX for smart city technologies, UX for cultural placemaking, UX for the future of publishing and UX for archives and collections.

The Collaborative Unit is designed to enable you to identify, form and develop collaborative working relationships with a range of potential partners. These could be: postgraduate student colleagues at the college or university level; postgraduate students at other Higher Education Institutions; external parties (e.g. companies, cultural organisations, community-based groups, NGOs, charities etc.)

Summer, Term 3

Micro UX (40 credits)

This unit is intended to allow you to work with a different external organisation, exposing your evolving practice to different views and alternative methods.

Collaborations are organised around broad themes including; UX for health and wellbeing, UX for data visualisation, UX for human-robot relations, and UX for performance and public participation.

You will be expected to initiate and implement a UX design project around two of these themes, drawing on the research journey you devised and the design process you established in Macro UX.

Autumn, Term 4

Final Major Project and Portfolio of Writing (60 credits)

The aims of the Final Major Project and Critical Context Report are to offer you the opportunity to engage in a major research-led project in which the emphasis will be on defining, analysing and developing an individual and focused approach to user experience design.

Selection criteria

Offers will be made based on the following selection criteria, which applicants are expected to demonstrate:

• Sufficient prior knowledge and experience of and/or potential in a specialist subject area to be able to successfully complete the programme of study and have an academic or professional background in a relevant subject.
• Critical knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject area and capacity for research-led design, intellectual inquiry and reflective thought through: contextual awareness (professional, cultural, social, historical); evidence of research, analysis, development and evaluation (from previous academic study and employment) and a grounded understanding of the world of sonic, visual and networked culture and be able to engage in and contribute to critical discussion.
• In the project proposal a description of the area of interest, field of study and the particular focus of their intended project. This should include an overview of how you intend to go about producing the project and the methodology.
• The portfolio should be conceptual and research-based, you must show your thinking and making process and a curious nature to explore, test and experiment.
• A willingness to work in the physical realm with networked digital systems and in areas of design research and practice that challenges preconceptions.
• A willingness to work with networked digital systems and an awareness of how they shape the varied contexts of human behaviour.
• Also to show a willingness to work as a team player, good language skills in reading, writing and speaking, the ability to work independently and be self-motivated.