How 'User Experience' Took Over the Classroom and the Café

On a recent episode of Students Incorporated, the student-run podcast at the International Community School of Bangkok, a 26-year veteran administrator and two teenage entrepreneurs described their work using the exact same term, without once comparing notes. Mr. Scott, ICS's curriculum, accreditation, and professional development coordinator, called his job designing "the user experience" of a classroom. Minutes later, two students running their own small businesses used the identical phrase to describe a coffee shop's front door and a checkout page. Neither conversation was about software. A vocabulary built for app design has quietly become the shared language for anyone trying to hold another person's attention, whether the product is a lesson or a latte.

A Coordinator Who Talks About "The User"

Mr. Scott's title sounds bureaucratic, but the job is closer to architecture. He has been at ICS since 1996, and since 2009 has run what the school shortens internally to CAP: curriculum, accreditation, and professional development, meaning he sits between teachers, administrators, and the accrediting bodies that let ICS transcripts carry weight with universities. That also means deciding what actually gets taught, because, as he put it, the government curriculum documents ICS references "are pages and pages long," and "there's no school that can do all of that."

The framework he uses to make those cuts is what he called "the industry standard in education," built on three parts planned in this order: aims, then assessments, then activities. Aims come first, meaning what a student needs to know or do by the end of a unit. Assessments come next, the proof that the aim was reached. Only then do teachers design the activities meant to get students ready for that proof. Skip the order, Mr. Scott argued, and a class becomes a series of things that feel fun or busy without ever provably building toward anything. Get the order right, and students should recognize an assessment when it arrives: "this is what we've been doing in class."

That three-part sequence has a name outside ICS's hallways. It's close kin to what researchers Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe formalized in their 1998 book Understanding by Design, commonly shortened to backward design: identify desired results first, decide what counts as evidence students reached them, and only then plan the activities meant to get them there. It's since become one of the most widely adopted planning models in American education, according to curriculum organization ASCD.

Covering is like hiding.

That line, from Mr. Scott, corrects a habit he hears constantly from teachers, including himself: talking about "covering" content. Move through material too fast in the name of covering it, he argued, and covering becomes concealment. The better verb, he said, is uncovering, slowing down enough that students actually see what's underneath rather than watching a syllabus race past them. It's the same reframing user-experience designers make about products: the point was never to ship features, it's to make sure a person on the other end actually understood what they were given.

Two Student Founders, One Instinct

The episode's second half swapped Mr. Scott for a discussion segment: Mr. Jason talking through user experience in business with two of his students, Maciej and Pukow, both of whom run small businesses of their own. Maciej, who described himself as "a small entrepreneur of a very, very small business," opened with a habit borrowed straight from product design: walking through his own retail coffee shop as if he were a first-time customer, watching the door, the shelves, the menu, and the way staff greet him, all the way to the counter. "If you can put yourself in your customer's shoes," he said, "that would be my first advice to anybody thinking about that in business."

Mr. Jason added a number he uses in his own marketing classes: acquiring a new customer costs "five to 25 times more expensive" than keeping one you already have. Prompted to go further, Maciej connected the idea to a common startup mistake: trying to serve every customer at once instead of one clearly defined type. Entrepreneurs, he said, often design a product hoping it reaches "the mass market and the upper middle class and the more wealthy people" all at once, and end up satisfying none of them. "When you try to please everyone," he said, "you end up pleasing nobody." Picking one buyer persona and building every decision around that person's experience, he argued, is what actually lets a business convert browsers into buyers.

Pukow's contribution came from the harder side of the same lesson. He described spending months rebuilding his own website after realizing that the page he'd spent the most time trying to perfect simply wasn't working. Off that admission, Maciej turned teacher for a moment: "Are you familiar with the Pareto's law, Pukow?" Pukow wasn't, so Maciej walked him through it, the 80/20 rule, the idea that a fifth of your effort typically produces most of your results, and that the discipline is finding which fifth that is. It's a small moment, but it mirrors Mr. Scott's classroom philosophy almost exactly: uncovering one useful idea for someone else rather than assuming they already have it.

From there the conversation widened into the industry's own vocabulary: UX, the entire relationship a customer has with a business, versus UI, the narrower question of where a button sits on a screen. It also touched on lean and agile development, the startup practice of shipping a rough "minimum viable product" to real users and improving it from their feedback rather than perfecting something in isolation first.

The Number Behind the Advice

The "five to 25 times" figure Mr. Jason cited is one of the most repeated statistics in marketing, and it has a real, older origin than most people citing it realize. It traces back to Bain & Company consultant Frederick Reichheld, whose 1990 Harvard Business Review article "Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services" showed how small drops in customer defection translate into outsized profit gains: cutting a bank branch system's defection rate by five percentage points produced 85% more profit, Reichheld found, while credit card company MBNA America saw profits jump 125% after halving its own defection rate. Researchers still cite versions of that range decades later, though they caution the real multiplier swings by industry, closer to the low end for a coffee shop, closer to the high end for a business with a long sales cycle.

The instinct both segments share now has its own name in workplaces well beyond ICS's campus. Learning experience design, or LXD, has emerged as a discipline that borrows the research methods of UX design (user research, iterative testing, journey mapping) and points them at instructional material instead of software. Practitioners draw one key distinction from straight UX design, though: a learning designer's version of "working" is measured by whether the learner understood something afterward, not just whether they finished a task without friction.

Same Question, Two Rooms

Strip away the vocabulary, and Mr. Scott's aims-assessments-activities sequence and the students' customer-shoes exercise answer the same question: does the person on the receiving end actually get what they came for, or does the person delivering it just assume they do? Backward design forces a curriculum coordinator to justify every classroom activity against a concrete, provable aim. Walking your own storefront as a stranger forces a founder to notice the dirty shelf or the confusing menu before a paying customer does it for them. Neither habit is new. What's new is that a school administrator and two teenage founders now reach for the same three words to describe it: proof that "user experience," a phrase born in software labs, has become how a generation raised on apps thinks about designing anything meant for another person to use.

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