What Do You Want in This Box?
A student came up to my desk this week holding a worksheet. They had done a user observation. They had filled in the first two columns, what the person said and what the person did on their phone. The third column was empty. They pointed at it and asked, "Professor, what do you want in this box?"
I get some version of that question every class.
This term I'm teaching UI/UX at the American University of Phnom Penh. It's one of the only design-related classes the university offers right now, so the room is mostly computer science majors, with a few students who did some art or design somewhere along the way. We open the course with a three week sprint through user experience: interviews, observation, heuristics, how to give a critique that's useful. I have them rebuild a few of my own designs in Figma so they get their hands on the tool. This week we did personas and problem statements, which is my attempt to get across that designing an interface is more than making it look pretty. There's a person on the other side of the screen who uses this thing every day, and we have to understand them before we draw anything.
For each of these I give them a worksheet. The observation sheet has three columns: what they said, what they did, and what it means to me. The interview guide has a few template questions, space for their own questions, a notes section and an observation section. The persona template walks them through a name, a profile, goals, needs, the problems this person runs into using the app.
The first two columns of the observation sheet are rarely the problem. Students are good at writing down what happened. It's that third column, what it means to me, where a lot of them stall out. The persona sheet goes the same way. They fill in the name and the age and the job, then freeze at goals and needs.
So they come to my desk and ask what I want in the box. And what they mean is: tell me the words you're looking for so I can get a good grade.
I've found this hard to answer. Because what I actually want is your insight. I want the thing you thought was interesting. There is no right answer for that box. When someone told you one thing and then did something different on their phone, did you notice? Did they get stuck? Did they say they use the app every day and then could not find the menu? Did they, I don't know, lie to you a little? Was the interesting part the way they got to the feature, rather than the feature itself? Any of that goes in the box.
That's an unsatisfying answer if you've spent your whole schooling learning that every box has a correct entry. Depending on where my students came up, a lot of the education here still runs on memorization. You learn the material, you reproduce the material, you get the grade. Some of my students are very good at that. They're the ones who take my worksheet, go top to bottom, fill in every field and submit it. The checklist is the assignment. And now I'm handing them a checklist where the most important box can't be memorized.
Personas were the same fight from a different angle. The template was easy. The hard part was getting across that nobody on that sheet actually exists. A persona is a story we tell about a group of users so the group stops being an abstraction and starts being someone we can picture. Once we can picture them, we can start working through the problems they run into with our tool, the other apps they already use, what gets in their way. But you have to be willing to make something up in a disciplined way, grounded in what you observed, and that's a strange ask for a student who has been trained to never write anything down that wasn't given to them first.
The students with an art or design background tend to get it faster. They've been graded on subjective work before. They've had someone look at a drawing and say "why did you make that choice," and they've learned that the question is real, that there isn't a hidden answer key. So when I say I want their opinion, their view, their read on the world around them, they believe me.
The computer science students often don't believe me yet. And I understand why. In most of their other classes the code either runs or it doesn't.
I don't have this figured out. I'm working on it. Right now the best I've got is to sit with them at the desk and walk back through their notes together. What did she say? What did she do? Does that match? No? Okay, write that down. That's the box.
In my other course this term, I'm teaching students to build software by describing it to an AI. That class also comes down to a box. It's a chat prompt. You type what you want, the model writes the code, you look at what came back and decide if it's right.
The two boxes are the same problem.
A student who wants to be told what to type into the observation column is going to want to be told what to type into the prompt. And the model will happily fill in whatever they ask for. Ask it for a persona and you'll get a persona, with a name and a job and a photo-ready backstory, in seconds. Ask it for an app for Cambodian students and you'll get an app for Cambodian students. It will look finished. It will have never met a Cambodian student.
So what is the human actually for, now that the machine can produce the artifact? I think the answer is that third column. Somebody has to have sat with a real person, watched them get stuck, noticed that what they said and what they did don't match. Somebody has to bring that into the room. The model can't. It doesn't know what it means to you, because it wasn't there. The prompt is only as good as the observation behind it, and the observation is the one thing you can't outsource.
That's what I mean when I say I'm trying to build a culture of human centered design at the university, and I'm aware how grand that sounds for a guy with a stack of worksheets. It starts smaller than a culture. It starts with getting one student to believe that what they noticed counts, that the empty column is theirs to fill, and that filling it is the job. Everything else, the Figma, the prompts, the personas, sits on top of that.
I don't know yet how you scale that past one desk at a time. I've spent fifteen years watching tech for good projects in Cambodia skip that column, tools built to a donor's checklist instead of the person holding the phone, and the habit didn't start with the donors. It starts earlier, in classrooms that teach people every box has a right answer. Which means it can end in a classroom too.
What I want is for them to be curious people, asking good questions about the world around them.