What the University of Minnesota is proposing with its new program
The University of Minnesota just made a move that caught the attention of anyone following the tech and design job market around the world. The institution’s College of Design announced the launch of Minnesota’s first bachelor’s degree in UX design, with classes starting in the fall 2025 semester. The program is only the second of its kind among the 18 universities in the Big Ten conference, which shows how user experience is earning an increasingly formal place within higher education. And why should this matter if you’re outside Minnesota? Simple: moves like this tend to foreshadow global hiring trends and career development shifts across the tech industry. When a major university decides to turn a field into a full degree program, it’s a clear signal that the market is demanding better-prepared professionals — and that ripple effect reaches opportunities everywhere. 🎯
McLean Donnelly, a UX design professor and the program’s coordinator, points out that the university’s location is a key differentiator. According to him, Minnesota is home to the highest number of Fortune 500 companies per capita in the United States, which gives students unique opportunities to tackle real-world challenges and connect with industry leaders. This already well-established design ecosystem in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region works as a natural lab for anyone learning to create human-centered digital experiences.
The new bachelor’s degree was designed to cover the full spectrum of UX design, from the fundamentals of user research to prototyping, interaction design, and usability evaluation. The College of Design’s goal is to produce professionals who can understand real problems people face and translate those needs into interfaces and digital products that actually make sense in everyday life. Unlike short courses or bootcamps that tend to focus on specific tools, this is a four-year program with academic depth and a direct connection to real-world practice. That means students will go through coursework covering psychology, research methods, visual design, accessibility, and technology — topics that often get left out of shorter, fast-track programs.
Another interesting point is the University of Minnesota’s strategic timing in creating this degree now. The region where the main campus sits has been establishing itself as a relevant hub within the tech industry in the United States, hosting offices of major companies like Target, Best Buy, U.S. Bank, and Medtronic, along with a growing startup community. By offering a bachelor’s degree dedicated exclusively to user experience, the university is responding to real demand coming from both local companies and the global market, which continues searching for qualified UX professionals with a solid educational background and the ability to solve complex design problems.
The market demand for UX professionals
User experience design focuses on how people interact with digital products — websites, apps, smart technologies — combining psychology, research, technology, and design to create human-centered experiences that are easy to use and accessible. And this is no longer a niche field. Donnelly points out that companies across multiple sectors, including tech, healthcare, retail, and finance, are investing heavily in skilled designers to improve their digital interactions. UX-related roles are among the fastest-growing and highest-paying positions in the design and tech world.
The logic is straightforward and makes total sense when you stop to think about it. As Donnelly puts it in very practical terms: behind every website, every app, every digital product you use, there’s someone designing that experience. And when a site doesn’t work properly on your phone, when the navigation is confusing, or the interface doesn’t feel trustworthy, how long do you stick around? Every second of frustration represents lost revenue for companies. That real financial impact is what’s driving the growing investment in UX design teams around the world.
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Part of the motivation for creating a full degree came from the success the College of Design was already seeing with its minor — a supplementary specialization — in UX. Students who went through that smaller program are already employed full-time at companies like U.S. Bank, Best Buy, Target, and Medtronic. Those concrete employment outcomes validated the decision to expand the offering into a four-year bachelor’s degree, giving students a much more robust education and a significant competitive edge on their resumes.
Formalizing a high-demand career path
Before the bachelor’s degree launched, students interested in UX design at the University of Minnesota had to piece together their education in a makeshift way, combining the UX minor with independent studies and elective courses from different departments. Now, with a dedicated degree, they’ll have four full years to develop these skills in a structured, progressive way. As Donnelly highlights, this is a real advantage on a resume — and roughly 50 students have already enrolled in the new program.
Eliana Smelansky’s story illustrates exactly why this degree was so needed. She graduated in 2022 from the University of Minnesota with a marketing specialization from the Carlson School of Management and a minor in interdisciplinary design. Smelansky started her career in a merchandising role at Target after an internship. But she quickly realized she wanted something more creative and decided to complete a six-month UX/UI bootcamp at the university itself. Today, she works as an Experience Designer at Best Buy.
When she heard about the launch of the UX design bachelor’s degree, Smelansky was excited and even shared the news on LinkedIn, saying she would have chosen that program if it had existed when she was a student. She points out that a huge part of her current job involves collaboration, concept brainstorming, and presentations to stakeholders and leadership — skills that an integrated UX degree could have developed from the very start of her education, instead of requiring a longer, more fragmented path to get where she is today.
In her view, having a program that brings all of this together in one package — things like meeting stakeholder expectations, collaborating with different teams, problem-solving, and creating visually compelling designs — is definitely something very attractive for anyone entering the field.
Nick Horst and the dream job in the gaming industry
Another story that shows the transformative power of UX skills is Nick Horst’s. He graduated in 2025 with a computer science degree from the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering. Horst added the UX minor to his main degree, and that decision completely changed his career trajectory. After taking a class with McLean Donnelly, he discovered the intersection of technology and design — exactly the space where his career lives today.
Right after graduation, Horst moved to Los Angeles to work at Respawn Entertainment, a studio owned by Electronic Arts, one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. He always knew he wanted to work in video games, and UX skills turned out to be essential for that. As he puts it, if you’re building games, apps, or any software that requires a user interface, UX is an extremely valuable skill set.
Horst’s team works on Apex Legends, a title with a worldwide reach. He started playing the game back in high school, so landing a job working on it represents, in his words, a full-circle moment. As a technical experience designer at Respawn, any new feature or element that appears on the game’s screen goes through his team’s programming. Horst says that if he were entering college today as a freshman, he would have chosen the UX design bachelor’s degree as his sole major or at least strongly considered it as part of a double major.
Why UX design is becoming a full degree and not just a specialization
For many years, UX design was treated as a specialization within broader programs like computer science, graphic design, or even psychology. Professionals who entered the field typically came from diverse backgrounds and picked up user experience skills on the job, through supplementary courses, or on their own. That reality worked fine while the market was still figuring out what exactly UX represented within the digital product development cycle. However, as the field has matured in recent years, it became clear that the complexity of the challenges requires a more structured and in-depth education — one capable of preparing professionals from the ground up to handle research, strategy, prototyping, and validation of human-centered solutions.
The University of Minnesota’s decision reflects a movement that had already been gaining momentum at other institutions around the world. Universities in Europe and Asia have been offering similar programs for some time, recognizing that UX design has its own body of knowledge, with methodologies, theories, and practices that justify a full degree. In the United States, the fact that this is only the second such bachelor’s degree in the prestigious Big Ten conference shows there’s still a huge gap to fill in American higher education. And that gap in academic training has practical consequences: companies frequently report difficulty finding UX professionals who combine technical skills with strategic thinking and research capabilities — competencies that a dedicated degree can develop far more effectively than fragmented educational paths.
Donnelly sees the bachelor’s degree as something that goes well beyond teaching tools or passing trends. According to him, the program teaches students to look at problems, find solutions, validate hypotheses, create prototypes, present their work professionally, and receive feedback constructively. At its core, it’s a program that teaches structured thinking. And even as technology changes — which it inevitably will — these skills will remain relevant and allow graduates to grow alongside market transformations. In Donnelly’s view, it’s a degree for a lifetime.
The impact for professionals and students beyond Minnesota
It might seem like a degree launched in Minnesota is far removed from the reality of professionals elsewhere, but the truth is that the tech market operates in an increasingly connected and globalized way. When an institution of the University of Minnesota’s caliber formalizes UX design as a bachelor’s degree, it creates a cascading effect that influences curricula at universities in other countries, shapes expectations of recruiters at multinational companies, and redefines what’s expected of a user experience professional in the international market. For anyone working or planning to work in UX, this move is a clear indicator that investing in a more complete and in-depth education can make all the difference when competing for positions — whether at domestic companies or remote opportunities abroad.
The UX design landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, with more graduate programs, bootcamps, and dedicated communities popping up across many regions. However, specific undergraduate degrees in user experience are still rare at most universities, which creates an educational gap that many professionals need to fill on their own. Observing how international institutions structure their programs can be extremely valuable for understanding which skills the market will prioritize in the coming years and where to focus study efforts and career development. Subjects like qualitative and quantitative user research, complex systems design, digital accessibility, and design ethics are examples of areas that are likely to gain even more relevance as the tech industry matures.
Beyond that, the academic formalization of UX design at prestigious universities helps strengthen the perceived value of the field as a whole. This directly benefits professionals who are already working in the market, because it contributes to companies understanding the importance of investing in user experience teams and providing the right conditions for those teams to do quality work. It also paves the way for more academic research, publications, and methodological advances that professionals anywhere in the world can leverage.
A clear signal for the future of the field
What makes this news especially significant isn’t just the program itself, but what it represents within a broader context. The University of Minnesota isn’t creating this bachelor’s degree by accident. The program was born from concrete demand — students who were already seeking this education on their own, companies that were hiring UX minor graduates for full-time positions, and a market that keeps growing. The roughly 50 students who enrolled before the program even officially started are proof that there’s an eager audience for this kind of structured education.
The stories of professionals like Eliana Smelansky and Nick Horst reinforce a fundamental point: UX design skills aren’t just complementary — they’re increasingly central for anyone wanting to build a solid career in the tech industry. Whether working in retail, finance, healthcare, or digital entertainment, the ability to design experiences that truly work for people is a differentiator that the market values and rewards well.
At the end of the day, the launch of this bachelor’s degree by the University of Minnesota is more than news about a new program — it’s a reflection of how UX design has established itself as a fundamental discipline within the tech industry and how career development opportunities in this field continue to expand consistently. For anyone thinking about entering the field or deepening their knowledge, the message is clear: user experience has definitively moved from being a nice-to-have to occupying the center of the conversation about digital products. 🚀
