Ryan HigginsDesign Education · Long-Form Leadership
Curriculum Development
14+ years building and evolving interaction design curriculum — keeping pace with a field that keeps reinventing itself.
Overview
The Work
Since 2011, I've built and taught interaction design curriculum at Wilmington University in New Castle, DE. I wasn't hired to maintain an existing program. I was brought in to build one — and I'm still building it.
Over fourteen-plus years, I've designed three full courses from scratch, adapted them through four distinct phases as the field has evolved — from skeuomorphic mobile apps to flat design to design systems to cross-disciplinary UCD process — and graduated hundreds of students who've gone on to professional design, development, and product roles.
This is a case study in sustained curriculum design: the ongoing work of keeping educational content relevant, rigorous, and honest about what students actually need to succeed in an industry that doesn't stay still.
Challenge
The Problem
Interaction design education in 2011 was still catching up to practice. The tools were Photoshop and Illustrator. The web was the output medium. Mobile was a conversation, not yet a given. Teaching students "how to use software" was a trap I wanted to avoid from the start — the software would change. The thinking had to be durable.
The deeper challenge was teaching judgment in an environment that rewards craft. Fine arts students are trained to see, to make, to iterate aesthetically. Interaction design asks them to also think systemically — about users, flows, failure states, accessibility, and constraint. That's a significant cognitive expansion, and it takes time.
By 2019, a new challenge emerged: the tools had proliferated. Sketch, Figma, InVision, Zeplin, Principle, ProtoPie — students could spend an entire course learning tooling and graduate without being able to think about design independently of it. I had to make pedagogical choices about what to teach explicitly and what to leave implicit.
The tools would always change. I was trying to teach something the tools couldn't do for them.
Approach
How I Worked
I structure curriculum development as a continuous design practice — with distinct phases corresponding to how the field and the student population have shifted over fourteen-plus years and counting.
Phase 1 (2011–2015): Building the foundation
I designed the first interaction design course from a blank slate. The core pedagogical framework: start with principles (hierarchy, flow, feedback, affordance), not tools. Students learned to produce interaction design in Photoshop because that forced them to think carefully — there was no prototype mode, no auto-layout. Every decision was explicit. Projects focused on mobile apps because that was the most concrete, student-legible design surface at the time.
Phase 2 (2015–2019): Adapting to a maturing field
Design systems emerged as a dominant pattern. Flat design had replaced skeuomorphism. Component-based thinking was becoming essential. I rebuilt the intermediate course around systems design — introducing component libraries, style guides, and the relationship between visual language and behavior. I also began integrating cross-functional context: how does a design hand off to engineering? What does "done" mean in a production environment?
Phase 3 (2019–2021): Remote-first adaptation
The pandemic forced a complete rethinking of the studio model. Critique, the backbone of design education, doesn't translate to Zoom automatically. I redesigned the course rhythm around asynchronous critique structures — recorded walkthroughs, written annotations, structured peer review frameworks — that preserved the depth of feedback without requiring synchronous presence. Several of these structures proved more effective than live critique and I kept them post-pandemic.
Phase 4 (2021–Present): UCD as a cross-disciplinary foundation
By 2021, the gap I kept seeing wasn't technical — it was process. Developers, PMs, and designers were all building products together, but only designers were learning how to think about users systematically. I designed CSC 370 to address that directly: a course that walks students through the user-centered design process via real-world scenario simulations, building toward a usability audit and research presentation that a cross-functional team could actually use. The course was designed for future developers, designers, and product managers — not just visual designers.
Solution
What We Built
The three courses form a deliberate progression. DSN 325 teaches students to design — to think about users, build interfaces, and present work to stakeholders. DSN 326 teaches them to systematize — to scale design decisions into reusable components and bridge the gap to code. CSC 370 teaches them to research — to apply the user-centered design process that underpins how products are actually built across the industry. Each course builds on the last, and together they prepare students for the cross-functional reality of professional product work.
Curriculum architecture — three courses designed as a progressive sequence from hands-on design to systems thinking to user-centered research.
DSN 325: Interactive Web Design I
Students take on the role of a designer working in a non-profit incubator focused on addressing real societal challenges through technology. Each student selects a sector — EdTech, HealthTech, Disability Services — and designs a Minimum Viable Product from an RFP I wrote for the course. Over seven weeks, they build wireframes, design systems, and interactive prototypes, presenting their final MVP and pitch deck to an Investment Committee of peers and professionals. In parallel, simulation assignments build practical skills in Figma, ideation workshops, sitemaps, and the role of AI in product design. There's no textbook — the course runs on open-source materials, conference talks, and industry articles, because no single book captures the breadth of the design process.
DSN 326: Interactive Web Design II
Building directly on DSN 325, this course pushes students from designing interfaces to building the systems behind them. Students step into the role of a Design Systems Lead for a real startup they select from ProductHunt — a company experiencing rapid growth with inconsistent UI and no design system. Over seven weeks, they conduct a UI audit, create foundational styles, build reusable components with advanced Figma features like Component Properties and variables, then translate those designs into semantic HTML and CSS. The final deliverable is a documented section of a design system site — foundations, components, and coded examples — that bridges the gap between design and development. Responsive design, Grid, Flexbox, and accessibility are woven throughout.
CSC 370: User-Centered Design
The course I designed to give students — developers, designers, and future PMs alike — hands-on experience with the UCD process used across dominant tech companies. Structured around a 7-week arc, the course moves through the four phases of UCD: understanding users and context, defining requirements, generating design solutions, and evaluating effectiveness. Students conduct a usability audit of an existing product, build a research plan, and present findings the way a cross-functional product team would use them. Each week's work feeds directly into a cumulative final project.
Structured critique framework
I developed a structured critique framework used across all three of my courses. The framework gave students explicit roles (presenter, questioner, synthesizer), time constraints, and a written output requirement. Critique became a skill taught explicitly rather than absorbed implicitly — and student work improved measurably as a result.
Results
What Changed
I've had the honor of working alongside some of my former students — both at Chatham Financial and back at Wilmington University. Seeing graduates show up as colleagues in professional environments is the most concrete proof that the courses work. Others have gone on to roles at major tech and FinTech companies, launched their own studios, or started teaching design themselves.
The three courses I developed are now the backbone of the UX undergraduate certificate and the Interaction Design, B.S. program. Each course carries a core of fundamentals-based content and coursework, and I continuously iterate on structure, assignments, and tooling to keep pace with what the industry actually demands of new designers, developers, and product managers.
Beyond the classroom, I advise the program chair to help her understand how the field is evolving in practice — what hiring managers look for, where the gaps are, how tooling and process are shifting — and I support Faculty Senate presentations when proposing changes to content or degree structure. The work extends past syllabi into shaping how the program positions itself.
Reflection
What I Learned
Teach the thinking, not the tool
Every major tool in my curriculum has been deprecated or replaced at least once. The students who succeeded long-term were the ones who could articulate why they made design decisions — not just demonstrate that they knew how to use Sketch or Figma. Durability comes from judgment, not proficiency.
Assessment design is as important as content design
How you evaluate work shapes what students practice. When I moved from portfolio grades to rationale-based assessment — requiring students to document decision-making, not just show outcomes — the quality of thinking in critiques improved within a single semester. Assessment is curriculum.
The field evolves faster than syllabi do by default
If you teach the same course for fourteen years without rebuilding it, you're teaching 2011 design in 2025. I've rebuilt or significantly revised every course at least twice, and I'm still iterating. The work of curriculum development is never finished — it tracks the field, and the field moves.
Cross-disciplinary juries produce better designers
Inviting engineers, product managers, and researchers to critique student work changed what students practiced. They stopped optimizing for aesthetic approval and started designing for comprehensibility to a mixed audience — which is what professional design actually requires.
Constraints produce clarity
Some of the best student work came from the most constrained briefs. A well-designed constraint — design for one user, one task, one screen — focuses attention and forces precision. Unconstrained briefs produce wandering work. This applies to professional practice as much as education.
Teaching is a design practice
Building a curriculum is not categorically different from building a product: you're defining a goal, understanding your users, designing an experience, testing it, and iterating. The feedback loops in education are longer, but the underlying practice is the same. Teaching made me a better designer. I believe this sincerely.