The UX of Learning

My path to instructional design wasn’t planned — it revealed itself the day I stepped into a classroom as a substitute teacher and saw that teachers had been replaced by robots! Well, Chromebooks actually. I immediately noticed how deeply technology shaped their learning. Some platforms were intuitive and engaging; others left students confused or frustrated. It was clear that human-computer interaction and education were blending, and the quality of that design directly influenced how well students learned.

As I moved from class to class, I couldn’t stop applying UX thinking to what I was seeing. The classroom felt like a live usability test. Every moment of hesitation, every excited reaction, every workaround students created told me something about the learning experience itself. I realized that effective education isn’t just about the content—it’s about how that content is designed.

That’s when I discovered instructional design. It brought together everything I loved about UX—empathy, structure, accessibility, and problem-solving—while giving it a meaningful purpose: helping people learn.

Substitute teaching showed me the challenges. UX gave me the tools to analyze them. Instructional design became the place where both worlds met and finally made sense.