Students all over campus join the Office of Digital Humanities to form a top-tier UX team where the user always comes first.
Since starting at BYU in 2023, Assistant Professor Kathie Gossett (User Experience Design & Theory) has had one major task: make websites and other projects developed by the Office of Digital Humanities user-friendly. This project has required Gossett to sift through dozens of websites and databases—both old and new—looking for ways to make them more accessible. To accomplish this feat, Gossett assembled a team of undergrads to assist in every step of improving these sites’ UX (user experience), including conducting user research and refining website design.
User at the Helm
While at BYU, Gossett has assisted with many projects conducted by professors in the College of Humanities. Her main job is to make their work widely accessible by creating sleek and user-friendly websites and helping to finesse databases and digital tools for use by a general audience.
One of Gossett’s greatest tools has been her UX team made up of five BYU undergrads, each of which brings new perspectives and skills to the table. These students come from a variety of majors across campus—including information systems, design, English, and sociology. Gossett says, “One of the things I love about user experience is that it’s so interdisciplinary. And, I like having a team of people from different places and different experiences.”
Humanities in ANY Field
Students on this team have the opportunity to design new websites and applications, analyze user habits, and research their products’ effectiveness. Their work is highly collaborative, and they receive constant feedback from Gossett on how to improve their projects. This process teaches students an array of skills that they can use in any field, while also helping them expand how they can approach issues in their own field of study.
Gossett has noticed that each undergrad on her team approaches website improvement differently. When introduced to an issue, students in information systems or computer science first want to create an improved code to fix it; students in design dream up a new website layout; and students in sociology conduct user surveys to see how the site can improve. Gossett hopes to combine each of these unique approaches to make improved website designs. She has found that focusing on the user first is the key to their team’s success. “When we come at [user experience] from the humanities, we think about people first,” Gossett says. “Then we think about how we can make the technology work.”
Gossett believes that this experience in UX work qualifies newly graduated students for many jobs inside and outside of customer experience. “The experience these students are getting is really putting them at a level that, when they go into the workplace, they can be really confident in the work they do,” she explains. “[They] didn’t just study it, [they] worked at it.”
To learn more about the Office of Digital Humanities and their current projects, visit their website.