Join us at SIGDOC 2025, where Heather and Emma will be presenting a talk titled “Embracing and Resisting Industry Practices in UX”
Saturday, October 25, 2035 10-11:00am
3E: Room 233 (SUB Traditions)
In this presentation, we engage with the tension of how we prepare students to work within the UX industry, while simultaneously questioning UX in practice in industry. In our ongoing research project on UX pedagogy (Turner & Rose 2022, Rose & Turner 2025), we have surfaced the desire for instructors and students to focus on social justice in their UX work (Rose, et al. 2018, Gonzales, et al. 2022) while acknowledging that the motivations and outcomes present in UX industry can intentionally, or unintentionally, reproduce oppression. We analyze 6 specific UX stages (empathize, define, design, evaluate, iterate, and implement), their limitations and challenges, and then consider how TPC commitments to social justice can address those limitations. We argue that TPC’s rhetorical foundations and focus on advocacy provide essential perspectives for more inclusive and equitable practices in UX.
First, we caution against the technologically dominant approach which emphasizes the uses of UX tools (Cosgrove, 2023), rather than the focus on process and understanding uses. In this critique, we also critique the concept of synthetic users (Rosala & Moran, 2024), or substituting AI-generated user research, rather than engaging people in the design process. Second, we discuss the limits of empathy. Empathy has long been considered a crucial and differentiating activity within UX. However, empathy has its limits (Lee, Turner, & Rose 2023). Without considering power and positionality, the concept of empathy risks reinforcing the status quo and/or doing harm. We conclude by asking what can be done to prepare students to work in UX while also encouraging them to resist the exploitative and harmful practices that can occur within industry contexts. We explore the concept of metis, or strategic cunning, as one stance that can help encourage students to negotiate within these spaces (Rose & Tenenberg, 2016).