ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic forced educators and students to transition to online instruction. This change brought the importance of user interfaces into stark relief for engineering lab classes, compelling educators to consider how the design of online courses and virtual laboratory experiences either served or worked against student learning. In summer 2020, we began educational and user experience (UX) research with the online laboratory experiences in an electrical engineering lab classroom at the University of Georgia's College of Engineering. The NSF-funded project work draws on ready-to-use remote labs for electronics applied to several courses. It seeks to explore the faculty and student perspective on online experimentation in engineering curricula. However, the UX thrust of the project rounds out a holistic view of the online learning ecosystem and might specifically uncover barriers or factors of success related to the implementation of online labs. This project highlighted the importance of UX design in delivering science curriculum via virtual laboratory exercises with the specific conclusion that deficits in perspicuity in the UX create an obstacle to learning for engineering students. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.