This exploration started with one question: how do students perceive their quality of education within SIAT?
As an interdisciplinary program, Simon Fraser University's (SFU) curriculum within their School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) intends to cover a breadth of topics across design, human-computer interaction and media studies.
Anecdotally, this variety of topics is intended for students to explore their interests and find their niche within their future industries. However, this may also lead to students feeling uncertain about their expertise and skillset.
This is especially true for students who may be interested in pursuing less UX-focused roles. In an effort to better understand this landscape, we set out to survey fellow undergraduate students within SIAT—particularly looking at foundational visual design skills and confidence.
The following sections outline our findings.
After reaching out to students through Discord, Instagram, email, and put up posters around campus, we collected 77 responses.
Of the 77 responses, we focus on 40 students who have declared a concentration which heavily involves visual design.
While concentrations are normally declared in third year, some second year students are certain that they will pursue a design concentration.
Nevertheless, this sample is still skewed between third and fifth+ year students giving us clearer insight into senior SIAT views on visual design confidence.
From the 40 design students, we asked them to rate their confidence in their visual design skills on a 5 point Likert scale.
Based on their responses, we identified which skills that the students felt either less or more confident on average.
When students claimed to be more confident, they tended to cite more higher-level skills (UX design, UI design, etc.)
This is to be expected as SIAT's upper years tend to focus on building digital products and artifacts. As a discipline, UI design incorporates visual design skills
When students claimed to be less confident, less confident
When students reported lower confidence in more foundational graphic skills (typography, color, layout), it could suggest a lack of confidence in more expressive contexts like art direction and visual identity.
After asking students to rate their confidence, we tried to quantify their visual design competency by looking into several testing instruments.
Designed by German-British psychologist, Hans Eysenck, the Visual Aesthetic Sensity Test (VAST) has now been determined to be a method of testing individual's ability to measure an image's adherence to external visual standards.
To see potential gaps in perceived and actual skill, we asked students to compare 25 images based visual guidelines set by 3 examples. The specific questions were taken from a revised version of the VAST by American psychologists Nils Myszkowski and Martin Storme.
We compared the VAST-R scores to the students' self-reported confidence scores. Here, larger dots represent higher counts of repeated results.
After thorough analysis, we found no obvious correlations between VAST-R test scores, as indicated by the scattering of points around mean VAST-R and reported confidences.
In hopes of finding relatable insights, we tried comparing VAST-R scores against other variables.
For instance, we would imagine that students who spend more time studying would have higher VAST-R scores
After plotting each student, it could be argued that there is some relationship. However, many higher scores were achieved by students who reported spending less time studying.
What we do notice, is that out of the whole sample, the majority tends to only average 1-3 hours of extra visual design study per week.
Noting that student are not necessarily honing their visual design skills outside of coursework, we wondered if this had any effect on their outlook towards the SIAT program.
Based on the students' self-reported habits, we can also see that increased satisfaction with the program tends to result in less extracurricular studies.
With the rise of AI tools, we wanted to see how students were using them in their visual design workflow.
In general, the majority of the 40 design students cited less frequent use of AI tools in their visual design workflow.
In fact, only 7 in 20 students claimed to use AI tools more than a few times a month, with weekly or daily usage for visual design tasks.
This prompts us to wonder what the actual impact of AI tools is on SIAT students' processes.
After asking about their particular use cases for AI in their workflow, generating visual compositions or UI was not listed.
Instead, these AI tools were used at a higher level for generating and refining content.
