UXP349 Course Learning Outcomes: Proposed Revision

01 Guiding principle

Every outcome must land in the portfolio

The course is project- and portfolio-focused. The terminal outcome is a defensible case study of the student's own invented game. So the test for every CLO is simple:

Two drafting rules follow from that:

• Measurable verb, durable noun. Lock in the cognitive skill (evaluate, revise, communicate) with a higher-order, assessable verb. Keep the object general (a game interface, a design, design decisions) so the outcome survives tool and industry change.
• No lock-in. Never name a tool, a standard version, a process, a methodology, or a deliverable format. The case study is the artifact today, but the wording must outlive it.

02 Proposed CLOs

By the end of the course, students can:

• 1. Evaluate a game or game-related interface against recognized usability and player-experience principles, using appropriate qualitative and quantitative evidence to prioritize the issues that most affect the player. This is the audit competency. "Recognized usability and player-experience principles" stays evergreen as heuristic frameworks come and go, and none is named. "Qualitative and quantitative evidence" preserves the single genuinely useful idea buried in the current CLOs (measures) while keeping it assessable. "Prioritize the issues that most affect the player" is the severity and triage skill. The object is a game interface, not an existing product: students audit their own invented game, so this never forces a comparison against a real, shipped title. The audit findings open the portfolio case study.
• 2. Assess and improve the accessibility of a game or game-related interface against current inclusive-design standards. The accessibility competency. "Current inclusive-design standards" will not rot when WCAG versions or platform accessibility guidelines change. Two verbs (assess and improve) on purpose: the value is in the fix, not the finding, and those fixes land in the portfolio as before/after evidence. Tool- and standard-version agnostic.
• 3. Revise a design through iterative cycles and justify each decision with documented rationale. Iteration plus rationale, the muscle that separates a designer from a decorator. "Documented rationale" captures the changelog and reasoning work without naming a format. This is portfolio-bound by definition: the rationale is the narrative spine of the case study.
• 4. Communicate a design's decisions and outcomes to a professional audience through structured documentation and presentation. The capstone communication competency. The wording deliberately avoids "case study," "portfolio," "walkthrough," and "recording," even though the case study is exactly the artifact today, so the CLO survives a change in format. "Professional audience" sets the bar at a hiring panel, not classmates. This is the terminal outcome that everything else feeds.

03 The problem

Why the current CLOs are the wrong direction

For reference, the CLOs currently in the catalog:

The problem is not that they are imprecise. The problem is that they describe a different course. They frame UXP349 as an academic UX research study: research questions, hypotheses, a literature review, comparing measures to test those hypotheses. That is a research-methods arc, not a design-build-refine-present arc.

Run them through the guiding principle and they fail it:

• "Draft a literature review" produces an academic artifact that never appears in a game UX portfolio. It gets written, graded, and discarded. By the strip-it-mercilessly test, it should not be an outcome.
• "Compose research questions and hypotheses" frames the student's work as an experiment to be proven, rather than a design to be iterated and defended. A portfolio reviewer wants to see decisions and rationale, not a hypothesis section.
• "Compare qualitative and quantitative measures for the efficacy of their hypotheses" is the one salvageable idea, the habit of backing judgments with evidence. It is folded into proposed CLO 1 as "qualitative and quantitative evidence," where it serves the audit instead of an experiment.

The current set also says "an existing game," which would push the course toward auditing a real, shipped product. Students invent a fictional game and run with it; the work is on their own design, end to end.

04 Net