A Symbiotic Relationship: Combining User Experience Methods and Systems Theory to Understand Engineering Doctoral Students’ Professional Identity Development

Studies about doctoral students' professional identity development as scholars and researchers remain scarce within engineering education literature, and current frameworks for tracing identity development require a more effective longitudinal design to capture development over time. As we apply user experience (UX) methods to document students' identity development, we reflect on the affordances and constraints of qualitative user experience methods as a complementary approach to engineering identity research and demonstrate a way of building bridges across disciplines to innovate research methods and scholarly agendas that benefit all partners.