Collaborative Learning of Usability Experiences (CLUE) is a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) funded industry-based Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program offered through 3 Universities and more than 30 industry participants. Connect with members of our LinkedIn group.
CLUE Farewell
Dear CLUE Community, Students, Faculty, Industry and Government Partners,
What an incredible 6 years it has been since our training program started! I’m reflecting these days on the connections, discussions and incredible opportunities that our students, and our community has had a chance to experience. A wholehearted thank you to all the collaborators, contributors, supervisors, mentors, CLUE Faculty and our CLUE Program Committee members who worked together to make all the following happen.
CLUE began in April 2015, and will conclude in a few days, on March 31, 2021. Our program is finishing because our NSERC CREATE grant funding has concluded. This funding is what enabled CLUE research assistantships to our students, so we could support them during their internship.
We’ve had an excellent allotment of 91 CLUE students, who participated in 68 internships, with over 30 different partners, including organizations like CREA, IBM, Nureva, Service Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada that hosted multiple students. We’ve also had some more recent additions with Atomic Cartoons, Palominosys, and Neurofit VR. A few of our CLUE interns even had the opportunity to work for some of our Program Committee Members, Jean-Sylvain Sormany (Snowed In Studios), Shelley Kelsey (National Research Council), Dominira Saul (DFFRNT, previously with You.i and Akendi).
We also held 58 seminars, 45 workshops, 11 courses and three symposiums. While our amazing group of subject matter experts and departmental heads who shared their knowledge is too long to list, some notable individuals include a series of special events with Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research, as well as our very own CLUE faculty and collaborator Lois Frankel sharing her team’s pedagogical tool development of a Sense-It kit.
Individual students also received reimbursement for a portion of their expenses, supporting their attendance at 32 different conferences, both in person and virtually to present posters and papers on their research. Also, thanks to support from event organizers, a significant portion of CLUE students were able to attend two popular, national community user experience conferences CanUX and UXR over multiple years.
This is a lot of hours of training in various types of UX topics such as approaches and strategies for inclusive research, managing UX projects, as well as product development and design considerations, and professional skills development such as communication, ethical design, and thinking like a professional designer. In terms of research, we learned about forging digital hammers (Thomas Pietrzak), how to work in autonomous cars (Andrew Kun), future fashion in the cloud (Joanna Berzowska), or how to design training interfaces (Ben Lafreniere).
So, what’s next?
YouTube Channel
Our YouTube channel is filled with 68 recordings from events of the last few years, including our most recent symposium, Rock Leung’s seminar on Becoming a UX Professional and Eman El-Fayomi’s short course on Designing with Data. If you want to know more about the CLUE program and the impact of the CLUE internships, you should watch Jin Kang’s presentation from the 2021 symposium.
LinkedIn Group
We created a LinkedIn group so our Collaborative Learning of Usability Experience group could thrive and better connect. This tool is there for you. We invite you to continue the community and discussions; to share relevant events, upcoming conferences you may be interested in, papers you have published, and continue to post UX specific job opportunities.
Before we end, I must give a special thanks to Tamara Torok who has served as CLUE coordinator for over three years now. This program would not function as smoothly without her attention to details and professionalism.
Audrey Girouard
CLUE Symposium 2021
The NSERC CREATE Collaborative Learning of Usability Experiences (CLUE) training program is hosting a final symposium online, with sessions over 3 days, to allow students, industry and government partners to share their experience, knowledge, network, and further their UX knowledge. Join us!
RSVP to each Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Visit CLUE Seminar Series on YouTube
We would like to thank NSERC CREATE for its generous financial support to the CLUE Training Program.
