Being in the users’ shoes: Anticipating experience while designing online courses Chrysi Rapanta and Lorenzo Cantoni Chrysi Rapanta is an assistant professor at Zayed University, Dubai. She holds a PhD in Communication from Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland. Her dissertation focused on the interaction processes taking places in an e-learning design team during their meetings. Her research interests include computer-supported col- laborative learning, argumentation, design and interaction analysis. Lorenzo Cantoni graduated in Philosophy and holds a PhD in Education and Linguistics. He is professor at Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland) and Dean of the Faculty of Communication. He is scientific director of the laboratories webatelier.net, NewMinE Lab: New Media in Education Lab and eLab: eLearning Lab. His research interests are where communication, education and new media overlap. Address for correspondence: Dr Chrysi Rapanta, College of Business, Zayed University, P.O. Box 19282, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Email: chrysi.rapanta@zu.ac.ae Abstract While user-centred design and user experience are given much attention in the e-learning design field, no research has been found on how users are actually represented in the discussions during the design of online courses. In this paper we identify how and when end-users’ experience—be they students or tutors—emerges in designers’ discus- sions during their meetings in well-established open universities. More precisely, we observed 15 design meetings of two design teams during the development of specific online courses. Designers’ discourse was analysed on the basis of six dimensions regard- ing relevant actors, contents and strategies (purposes) of user experience anticipation. Results show the emergence of a solution-oriented anticipatory discourse in form of scenarios regarding how learners and tutors will react to the course and the proposed activities. Moreover, this discourse is related to an emergent type of users-based expertise, translated as the capacity of some designers to empathise with the end-users more than other designers do. The participation of designers with this type of expertise in e-learning design teams emerges as relevant for the decisions related to the course activities, inter- face or overall experience. Further research is invited towards this direction. Further discussion on this article can be found in “Being in the users’ shoes: Is there maybe another way?” (DOI: 10.1111/bjet.12104). Designers of online courses must obviously make decisions based on their understanding of the needs, expectations and behaviours of students (Blythe, 2001). It is not that specifications should be ignored, but their content and meaning should be reinterpreted in the context of a socially constructed language game (Ehn, 1992). This study shows that multidisciplinary design team meetings provide a context in which user experience is anticipated, reconstructed and evaluated in meaningful ways. Educators have always tried to find ways to understand what learners “do and suffer” and how they “act and are acted upon” (Dewey, 1925), also known as instructional feedback. In traditional teaching and learning, such feedback can be obtained at all stages of a course’s production and delivery: beforehand, eg, by surveying on students’ preferences; during delivery, eg, by directly ask- ing students regarding their understanding of the contents; or afterwards, eg, through students’ evaluation of the course or the teaching methods. At all these stages, feedback can be collected by British Journal of Educational Technology (2013) doi:10.1111/bjet.12102 © 2013 British Educational Research Association