Student-Centered Design Starts with Reducing FOUL

The origins of FUD and the introduction of FOUL: Frustration, Overwhelm, Uncertainty, and Loneliness

Jan 07, 2025

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I’m writing because education wasn't designed around students, but we can improve the learner experience through design. I share stories, tips, and work in progress weekly.

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The Origins of “FUD”

Google the origin of “FUD” and you’ll find it has some….suspicious roots. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, or FUD, is “a disinformation strategy that uses negative, false, or dubious information to influence perception. It's often used in marketing, sales, public relations, politics, cults, and propaganda.”

The terms use since evolved, I first encountered it when working for a Fortune 500 tech company. Teams used FUD to describe what inhibits people from feeling confident when they file their taxes. The goal was to “reduce FUD” in the product and instead create experiences that built confidence and clarity. Most powerful in this language choice is its' focus on emotions that caused friction to completing the task. Rather than focus on the process or the user interface, the emotion was universal. We’ve all felt fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and it encouraged the important work to reduce these emotions in whatever small way we could.

Creating a common language

In recent consulting work, I was grappling with how to create a common design language at the institution. During my discovery work for a newly formed Innovation Lab at an online, workforce-driven community college, a few insights drove my work:

I found design and innovation weren't new, but:

often weren't used because of lack of awareness or skill
often missed important steps, especially discovery of the student experience
there was a disposition for action over the identification of the core problem

This led me to develop a unique ‘brand’ of design innovation for the institution. To build ownership, the model created structure, methods, mindsets, and tools to organize around. The language reflected institutional values unique to the context and goals the college wanted to pursue for student-centered design, innovation, and equity.

In developing this approach, I reflected on my time at Intuit and the use of shorthands. FUD created common language- it developed a shorthand to prioritize addressing parts of the product that resulted in these emotions. The term created a unifying goal for people to collaborate around, regardless of their design knowledge.

Sometimes early in the design process it can be difficult to bring in new stakeholders because the problem isn’t well understood. "Problem finding" requires a sense of curiosity (and bandwidth and motivation) to take the time to invest in learning about the challenges that someone is facing to ‘fall in love with the problem’ before teams truly rally around solving it. It's only from this foundation that that we can effectively explore possibilities and test them.

An introduction to FOUL

FOUL: Frustration, Overwhelm, Uncertainty, and Loneliness

From this insight, I slowly surfaced a framework inspired by FUD, specifically adapted for the emotions that students encounter in their higher education experiences, FOUL: Frustration, Overwhelm, Uncertainty, and Loneliness.

So far, as I’ve tested and circulated this framework to colleagues and leaders at the college it’s resonated. I hope it might help spark important conversations in your organization as well. Where frustration, overwhelm, uncertainty, and loneliness exist, there are experiences to organize against, understand, and redesign.

A few caveats

There are other emotions to be overcome in the human experience, and many will debate the choice of word, definition, and scope of each of these terms. The truth is, I didn’t land on them because they are all-encompassing or perfect, but because they are challenges that can be identified and overcome with deliberate effort. Through many design projects and conversations with students, FOUL is especially common in the student experience and reflects efforts that many institutions are pursuing (perhaps without realizing it). Some might say "we want students to experience x (negative) emotion"-- and that's indeed a choice-- but it should be a conscious one. Non-trivially, they also simplify into an easy-to-remember acronym in FOUL, a term with visceral reaction. FOUL, who doesn’t want to avoid/reduce that?

Early definitions and guidance for investigating and designing against FOUL

If you’re early in the design process or working to build a more student-centered culture, I challenge you to organize around negative learner emotions you’re working to reduce. This approach creates a common goal to align against in ‘creating better experiences for everyone,’ which helps to reduce the common barriers to early investment when organizing stakeholders in the early phases of the design process. It’s not a perfect solution, but it will help create a common language to surface the kinds of projects you should investigate further or pursue. Any effort to reduce frustration, overwhelm, uncertainty, or loneliness is a valuable one. What’s more, it targets your solution to the learner experiencing that negative emotions, personalizes it, and makes sure you’re focusing on the needs behind their challenge.

Reflecting on your work, does this language help you identify examples of FOUL in your organization? How will you use this framework? Reach out and let me know!

Learning, Designed