Meet Drew!
Drew Shipka works for the Office of Continuing and Distance Education and has helped improve online classes at Kent State University for over a decade. He leads a team of instructional designers whose primary responsibilities are developing fully online graduate programs. He earned master’s degrees in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and Library and Information Science, and Information Architecture Knowledge Management from Kent State University.
He has been an adjunct for the User Experience Design (UXD) program at Kent State University since 2014, teaching User Experience Design, Usability, and Information Architecture.
Read on for a short interview with Drew about UXD.
Tell us about yourself and your work at Kent State University.
I head up a small team of instructional designers and we assist faculty to create and build online courses. I also have been an adjunct instructor for the UXD program for nearly a decade. I graduated from the program myself, a few more years ago than I care to admit, even before it was called the UXD program.
Why is user experience design important?
Simply put, UXD helps make better products and services. With UXD, people are more likely to enjoy the products they use, and companies are more likely to see a better return on investment (ROI) for their time and effort. Everyone wins.
Why Kent State University’s UXD program?
Kent State’s UXD program is one of the first, and one of the first fully online UXD programs in the country. The program is also taught by a large variety of talented professionals with their own backgrounds that they bring to their courses, so students get a great diversity of real-world experiences.
What are three words that describe the Kent State UXD program?
Practical, Helpful, Convenient
What advice do you have for someone interested in user experience design?
For those thinking of UXD as a profession, this is a growing field with tangible benefits to both companies and consumers. There are job opportunities, jobs where you have a chance to make improvements to products and services people use.
Where do you see the field of user experience design going in the future?
During my time in the program, one of my professors told me that UXD would be like what marketing was in the ‘50s, something that every company would eventually use, and we wouldn’t be able to imagine a business that didn’t have it. We certainly aren’t there yet, and we may never be, but there is a lot of area for growth for the field.
Enroll today in the Online Master of Science in User Experience Design (UXD) Program at Kent State University
The Online Master of Science in User Experience Design is designed to prepare professional user experience designers to work in agencies and within organizations and to immerse students in the following major components of the field: information architecture, usability, content strategy, organization of information, and user research.
For more information on Kent State’s Online Master of Science in User Experience Design, visit https://onlinedegrees.kent.edu/ischool/user-experience-design/home
