Miro: an online collaborative whiteboard to support design thinking and portfolios

User Experience (UX) design postgraduate, accredited Master of Science, has an overarching goal of equipping learners with the theory and practical skills to enter the UX profession in the UK and beyond, successful postgraduates have gained employment as UX designers, user researchers, and brand and product designers. UX Design (Content) module in question, occurs in the second half of the academic year, lasting fifteen concurrent weeks. The primary module learning objective is to introduce learners to design thinking, precisely the Stanford design thinking methodology 2 in the context of contemporary UX design. Students are asked to engage with the non-linear process with an aim to systematically extract, learn, and apply design thinking techniques to solve an in-class group work problem, a rendezvous smartphone application, and individual coursework student chosen problem. Traditionally, an in-person course, with weekly theoretical lectures and practical workshops, took an unprecedented shift to online learning and teaching in the winter of 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown measures faced by UX education providers in the UK and around the world. As a result, Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard, was integrated into online student learning and teaching practices with vast success, so much so, the technology has now formed part of core in-person teaching and learning. This session will summarise case study three which is part of a four-case study journal paper ‘Curricula Design & Pedagogy for Sketching within HCI & UX Education’ currently under review at Frontiers: Teaching and Learning Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Current and Emerging Practices. The session will introduce the technology, share best practice based on 2021 TB2 and 2022 TB1 and TB2 setup/experiences/practices/learnings followed by hands on demos with clear and engaging examples of how the teacher and students have used the technology as a teaching resource, sketching demo, design thinking templates, and most importantly as a collaborative and portfolio platform in the space of UX design.