Teaching the Executive group of the University of Barcelona’s User Experience and Digital Design programme: design fundamentals, dark patterns, conversion rate optimization and web technology applied with artificial intelligence.
University of Barcelona · User Experience and Digital Design · Executive group
With the Executive group of User Experience and Digital Design at the University of Barcelona.
Hierarchy, layout, typography and usability: the principles behind every interface.
Raising conversion by removing friction, and spotting the tricks that raise it by misleading people.
The web technology that brings a design to life, and how artificial intelligence speeds up building it.
The University of Barcelona’s User Experience and Digital Design programme also runs an Executive group, and I teach it too. The approach is the same one I bring to every classroom: real examples from more than twenty years in eCommerce and digital business, and a constant link between design theory and what actually happens inside a company.
We started with design fundamentals: hierarchy, layout, typography and usability, the principles that decide whether someone understands a screen in seconds or gives up on it.
Dark patterns and conversion rate optimization came next, as two sides of the same question. We looked at how research, hypotheses and testing raise conversion honestly, and at the patterns (fake urgency, hidden costs, confirmshaming) that raise it by working against the user.
We closed with web technology applied with artificial intelligence: how HTML, CSS and the browser turn design decisions into working pages, and how AI tools now help generate layouts, code and variations to test in a fraction of the time.
“Conversion that depends on confusing people is not conversion. It is a debt the brand pays later.”
Victor de la Fuente
Every point of conversion in an online store is a design decision: a product page, a filter, a checkout step. More than twenty years in eCommerce taught me that the people who understand design and the web make better calls about what to build, and that AI amplifies whatever judgment is already there.
In eCommerce and digital business, brought into the UX and digital design classroom.
A countdown that resets, a pre-ticked box, a cancel button hidden three screens deep: dark patterns often lift a metric in the next report. They also bring returns, complaints and cancellations, and they erode the trust a store needs for the second purchase.
AI makes this choice faster, not easier. It can generate persuasive variations in minutes, manipulative ones included. Deciding which of them a brand should ever ship is a design and business judgment, and that is what I try to build in every class.
More from Victor de la Fuente: Teaching & Speaking
Design fundamentals decide whether a page is understood before anyone reads it. Conversion rate optimization works best when it removes friction; dark patterns only add hidden pressure.
Web technology turns design into something people can use, and AI now speeds up every step of building it. Deciding what deserves to ship remains a human job.
Learn more about dark patterns on Wikipedia.
