Act like a user, work like a teacher: evaluation of experience design works through peer-testing

Experience design is a growing field that attracts many designers’ attention. One of the challenges of experience design is to be emphatic with the users and be critical about evaluating the results of the design process. This challenge requires several skills and knowledge, which the designers could gain during their higher education. While user-centred design methods have extensively been used, teaching how to critically evaluate experience design from the users’ perspective is barely addressed in design education. To address this challenge, I explored the suitability of peer assessment in two consecutive years of Design and Meaning, a third-year Industrial Design Engineering Bachelors’ course at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. I followed a set of activities and developed peer-testing approach to amplify the role of design students in evaluating experience design works. In this approach, the students tested their peers’ experience design works by pretending to be the users of the experience and assessed the works as if they were the experience design teachers. To prepare the students for this activity, I employed peer feedback and evaluation-preparation sessions during the course. Results showed that peer-testing could significantly contribute to experience design courses' evaluation-related learning goals when the students are provided with sufficient guidance. Results from both years provided promising evidence that peer-testing could be a method for teaching experience design evaluation in higher education design courses.