MA User Experience Design

The course team welcomes applications from open and inquiring minds of all kinds. Applicants interested in deepening their practice to include user research and in pursuing further study as a way of developing a valuable professional qualification. Students open to learning in a new collaborative and critical way, eager to ground their work in real-world research and be willing to take creative risks and make mistakes along the way.

Applicants will have a portfolio of digital design work that demonstrates awareness of the creative and critical aspects of UX design and may also be returning from adjacent careers in the design industry such as graphic design, information design or interaction design.

The course attracts applicants from a broad range of backgrounds, from all over the world, from an Honours degree course in a subject such as:

• Graphic Design
• Interaction Design
• Interactive Media Design
• Web Design
• Communication Design
• Computer Science
• Digital Design
• Product Design
• Anthropology
• Sociology
• Or those with other, equivalent qualifications.

The course team also welcomes students with relevant experience or those who may have previously worked in the industry, or non-traditional backgrounds, as well as those already within employment. The course has been designed to accommodate flexibility in educational engagement. Your experience is assessed as a learning process and tutors will evaluate that experience for currency, validity, quality and sufficiency.

The educational level may be demonstrated by:

• Honours degree (named above);
• Possession of equivalent qualifications;
• Prior experiential learning, the outcome of which can be demonstrated to be equivalent to formal qualifications otherwise required.

For fees and funding information, please see website 

Graduates of the course could go on to work in commercial agencies such as RG/A and start-ups such as Kano or Onfido. They will also be in demand in public organisations such as GDS, and the non-profit sector such as the Museum of London or Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Career options include:

• User Researcher.
• Interaction Designer.
• Experience Designer.
• Digital Director.
• Interface Designer.

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.