User experience design: Contrasting academic with practice

User experience (UX) is an area of both research and software development, which deals the creation of human-friendly user interfaces. It is closely related to human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability. Teaching UX is often a difficult challenge for many educators. UX design is an intercultural, interdisciplinary, cross-field experience and requires extensive knowledge in multiple fields and the ability to awake creativity in our students. To force IT students used to program every day to talk with the customer and speak the user's language is often hard to achieve. This paper describes my experience from designing and teaching a UX related subject. When creating the content of the subject “User Interfaces of Software Systems”, available research and teaching literature was used. In this paper, I contrast the subject with the knowledge from practice. Several useful techniques to support student motivation and engagement are also provided.