One thing that’s tricky for designers is that we often think of ourselves as typical users. We use an iPhone or a toothbrush or a vacuum cleaner, so we think we’re typical users.

We’re not.

In order to understand users, you have to use methods that help you gain access to their experience and ideas. Those are methods like interviewing and ethnographic research.

Reality vs. Assumption in Product Design

It’s really interesting to see the difference between what people say and what they do. I always joke with students that if you ask somebody how many times a day they go to the bathroom, they might say four.

If you actually sit there during the day and count up the number of times they go to the bathroom, you may find that they go many more times or many fewer times than they thought.

We are not always great witnesses to our own behavior, habits and patterns.

Ethnographic Research in Product Development

Ethnographic research is so important on many, many levels. It’s important not only for the conversations, where you can start to understand how people think about a certain product or how they use it but also for the keen observation of what people really do.

You need to be there patiently observing the ways in which people use things because how they use things and how they talk about using things are two very, very different things.

If you just accept people at their word, you often miss out on the fact that they don’t always have a good idea of what they’re doing when they use something.

For instance, you may ask people, “How do you sit when you’re working at the computer?” They’ll show you, and they’ll sit upright to type, and they’ll say, “This is how I sit.”

But if you watch them during the day, you’ll notice they lean over, and they’re hunched over all day long. Their posture is terrible.

An important part of product design education is teaching you that what people do and what people say they do are two radically different things.

Ethnographic research is important in product development, not only for the conversations that you’ll have with people about their experiences but your observations.

You can’t take people at their word, not because they’re lying, but because all of us make generalizations about our behavior that are often not based on fact. Patient observation is vital to discover what’s really happening.

Video Research in Product Design

Online product design education and any product development classes will drive home to you that ethnographic videography is an important part of product design. Video can help in situations where it’s otherwise hard to observe and take detailed notes about what you see.

Being able to take a video of someone in the act of doing something preserves what happens so you can analyze it later. It also allows you to slow down and speed up. You can rewind, play it in slow-motion or speed past things.

The ability to play something back multiple times at various speeds can reveal things you might otherwise miss.

Observation, conversation and video are tools that will help you to understand the user much more effectively than pretending that you, as the designer, are the typical user. Generalizing your own experience almost never works to provide real user information.

“If we were to describe it in a way that makes it very easy for you to understand in a physical plane, UX will be the foundation of a house,” says Tiago Valente.

He contrasts it with UI, or user interface, which refers to the complement, look, feel, and interactivity with the product you’re designing — the visual components of your experience and how those visual components are going to make the user’s journey as intuitive as possible.

Continuing the analogy of a house, Valente explains, “The difference between UX and UI is that UI refers to the wallpaper, the furniture, and all those elements that make this environment more pleasant and overall more intuitive to navigate — buttons, iconography, colors, and all aesthetics that involve the interface or that adorn the interface. But we’re not always talking about adorning or embellishing the interface or making it aesthetically pleasing. We’re talking about usability. We’re talking about accessibility.”

Daniel Holtzman relates UI design to a different type of structure, saying, “Many times in public buildings, when you approach a door there will be, instead of a handle, simply a metal plate. Almost without thinking, we know that that means that’s a door that we push in. Similarly, when we see handles that are vertical, we tend to think of those as handles that we pull. Handles that are horizontal, we think of those as handles that we push.

“As we’ve transitioned from physical to digital interfaces,” Holtzman notes, “we’ve also created a bunch of conventions. We use things like iconography. And that can be quite tricky when you actually are designing, to get the icon that feels right and looks right.” For some of them, the meaning is undeniable. “If you see something that looks like a video camera, you’re going to assume that that means video,” he says. “If you see that next to something that looks like an oval with a little stand on it, you might easily interpret that to mean sound. So now you have video and sound next to each other.

“UI is really about creating these affordances that let the users know, through subtle cues, what it is that they can do or what it is that they should be doing to move forward with the flow at hand, with the task at hand, that they want to accomplish. So it’s really about letting people do the things that they want to do in the simplest, most straightforward way possible,” Holtzman concludes.

These concepts are important ones to keep in mind as you pursue your online UX design education and strive to deliver the best possible user experience.

“So when I’m sketching and moving out of brainstorm into a physical model or drawings, like the best advice I can give is do what comes natural,” says Steph Mantis. You don’t have to learn a technical drawings in order to start designing. You can grab an empty cereal box, a glue gun, and some straws, and make something that will get your mind going, get your hands going. You’ll pull up and this tacit knowledge that comes from making.”

My models are mostly made out of cardboard and tape. I worked on a very high-end glass and paint project, as well as pan-blown glass and custom milled wood. Cardboard tape was used in the model. The entire item was made entirely of cardboard and tape. Don’t be a snob, okay? Don’t be too particular while transitioning from brainstorming to drawing. At this point, it doesn’t important if it looks like what you wanted. We are attempting to transport you from point A to point B to point C; we do not transport you from point A to point Z. You miss the entire alphabet if you travel from A to Z. You’ll never come across anything that may have resulted from your exploration.

So, you must just get started and overcome your fear of failure. Getting out the door, like anything else, is the most difficult part. And getting a product out the door is becoming more tactile. If you don’t produce anything, you don’t have a product. The rendering, or drawing, has no interaction with people’s lives. So overcome your fear, don’t be concerned with perfection, and get something out of your thoughts and into your hands.

And it doesn’t matter how old you are. You may use ready-mades or yesterday’s garbage; in fact, I believe utilizing trash is an exceptional method of Product Design and Product Development since you’re not going to be precious with it in the first place.

“I always start formulating my ideas, by identifying whatever is fixed in the equation. Whether it’s architecture, or technology, or production method, or sometimes its budgets. But whatever is absolutely fixed, I identify what those are first and they become those would be the guardrails for me. In terms of how to structure a project, so that it’s a suitable scale.” Kate Hixon

And, rather than a blank sheet of paper, which may be scary, I typically find the most inspiration inside the constraints of a brief. Whatever I do, I start producing small little sketches. Out of three in three dimensions, I begin bending cardboard and discovering stuff about my desk. Even if it’s a graphic design challenge, I usually start with three-dimensional drawing these skills can be acquired through Product Design Education via Online Product Design Education.

If you’re pursuing an online UX design education, it’s important to understand the different terminology. You’ll hear the terms UI, UX, UI design, and CX thrown around a lot. There are really two types of user flows. We’ll take a zoomed-out perspective for the first one, which is most aligned with CX, or customer experience design, where you look at a broader context: from initial consideration (or even before the user considers using or purchasing a product) all the way to post-usage, including users referring people to a product. We want to understand all the interactions that are taking place within that space.

Zooming in a bit more is where our user experience design, or UX design, lives. This really focuses more on the usage of individual products. When are people engaging with products? At what time during the day? How are people using them? Are other people using the products with them? What does that look like?

A lot of what we can gain from user experience research is that narrative of how people are using products throughout the day. We can understand this through a process known as journey mapping. Journey mapping is basically what it sounds like, a map of the interactions a person has with your products: how they engage with them on a daily basis, what actions they’re taking throughout an app, and how that impacts other actions that they may take or impacts future behaviors.

That’s basically the difference between a CX and UX.

In product development, sketching is not merely drawing. The sketching phase that some people think of when discussing product design is the most creative part of the process. You’re taking intangible ideas that you discovered in your mind and trying to manifest them somehow into something that’s tangible.

The Importance of Sketching

It’s great when you have an idea while resting, but then, when you try to sketch it or produce it in real life, you might realize that it really can’t work. It’s like a chair that has only one leg and can’t stand up on its own or anything else that just doesn’t work as expected in reality. You only start to see product design problems when you sketch ideas.

Online Product Design Education

You also start to reveal your ideas, which means that you can share them with other people. Another one of the powerful tools of industrial design is that you start to share ideas in ways that help other people to see them and work on them too. With a product design education, you receive opportunities to share your ideas with mentors and peers who can help you to better realize them.

“User flow diagrams are when you start getting to the meat of how somebody is going to flow through your experience and what decisions they need to be making at every single step,” Says Agnes Pyrchla concerning UX design. “Whereas a journey map is a bit more contextual about entry and exit points of what someone is going through, their context, where they have pain in general, and what makes them happy. A user flow diagram is trying to solve that pain and communicate, ‘At this point, you’re here, you’re doing this, you have a decision point.’ You can move in either of these ways. It’s a chart that helps understand the movement from touchpoint to touchpoint, decision nodes across all of those touchpoints, and how that continues.” These are methods that are well-taught in online UX design education.

It’s really helpful because it starts to create a visual artifact so that product managers, engineers, and anyone else who’s part of the team can understand how this thing is going to work, especially when you’re going to be working with engineers who then need to make each of those steps happen and will have valuable questions for the intention and the actual feasibility of implementing that withing UI design.

The usability diagram is a great thing to do before getting into creating actual mocks for how things will look because it allows people to ask questions about the overall bones of the experience before getting into exactly how it’s going to look and feel. Think about it as an itinerary as if taking a trip somewhere. That’s almost a user diagram flow in the everyday life when starting here.

You’re going to go here. From there, you need to decide where to eat, and you have a few different options. Then, you go back to something. And what you’re trying to do is communicate to the rest of your group what you’re trying to accomplish and the whole of the experience. From there, you can add more and more detail.

“To be a UX designer, you need to have multidisciplinary thinking. And that means not only the specifics to UX in multidisciplinary thinking that we will review in a bit but also perhaps some other talents and gifts that you already have,” Tiago Valente says.

Cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology are more specific ones you will learn in your UX design practice. These will assist you in understanding human behaviors and the relationship between humans and their context—their social, cultural, political, and economic context.

“The role of the designer on product teams is also really maturing where, in the very beginning of this field, the designer was just expected to take requirements and create visual artifacts based on that. But now designers are really expected to be facilitators and thought partners to engineers and product managers,” Agnes Pyrchla states.

As a result, the field’s image is maturing. That is very exciting because it is simply a more fruitful way of sharing ideas.
One intriguing thing that came out was a Figma plug-in based on GPT-3, an artificial intelligence UX and UI model called Designer, which I believe scared people for a little while. Because you could say and write in “I want an interface that shows photos and has a like button,” and list out the features that you wanted. It would also create a templated wireframe and a mockup for you.

And I believe this demonstrates that, at this point, creating a template out of components is not the actual work of a designer. It all comes down to asking good questions and gathering relevant information. Knowing when to move on, the appropriate scope for the feature at hand, the use case you’re attempting to create, and how to iterate. You can get to learn these skills through online UX design education.

All of the softer skills associated with UX and UI design, I believe, will become more important as technology advances and some of the more rote aspects of the job can potentially be outsourced.

In your online product design education, “You have to know the context within which the ultimate design solution is going to exist, and you have to put that in the context of what the goals are for your client,” Kate Hixon advises. “One of the essential things is to remember that the design is not personal expression; it is problem solving for someone else. The way you come up with the most relevant solutions is to know what needs are being met, both for your client and for the end users.”

John-Michael Ekeblad explains, “Opportunities cannot surface everywhere. It’s up to you to be very receptive for what you see going on in the market and in people’s lives. It’s not like there’s a bank of opportunities to suddenly say, ‘Hey, here you have it.’ It’s really about you starting to do a lot of footwork, doing a lot of your own research, and listening to your intuition. Ask yourself, ‘What does my heart tell me when I see it? What does my brain tell me when I see it?'”

This is not necessarily a bad thing because such research is one part of product design education, Ekeblad says. He suggests asking yourself questions like, “Where do I find opportunities?” and “Where do I find and identify a gap in the market?” He suggests going to the bigger companies, just as a consumer in their stores or on their websites, and seeing what products seem to be missing. When you find one, ask yourself if it could be an opportunity for you to introduce something new in product design.

“It really is about you scanning, revising, and editing your material,” Ekeblad notes. “Start all over again, and do it 10 times forward because you would come up with the answer, and you will be the one who comes up with this new idea. Even though these more prominent companies do million-dollar research projects, they usually have a particular focus in mind. They are looking for a specific answer while you really aren’t.” He points out that doing independent research like this presents a great opportunity to discover by bringing your new, untrained eyes to explore the world around you. He concludes, “That’s how, at some point, you will discover that hidden gem, this hidden undiscovered culture that you can actually do something fabulous with.”

Learning a complex skill like product design can be painful because we’re flexing new muscles. We’re growing them, whether mental or whether in our eye-hand coordination. Taking shortcuts may risk the nourishment and development of your ideas. There is something that cannot be replaced from the incremental growth of an idea, pulling it apart, doubting it, not falling in love with your own drawing. When you become enamored with your own drawings, then your product development designs become about your own drawings, and they lose the real goal, which is beyond yourself and your individual aesthetic appreciation.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love drawing. As you might learn in any product design education, you should draw at least 20 sketches a day, rain or shine. These should be of anything, using any material. Your drawings can be based on simple subjects, such as your own hand. They might be of the book that you’re holding or the person sitting across from you on the subway. Just draw. Keep your sketchbook with you wherever you are to be able to take notes, to draw, to sketch. And you should experiment with rendering techniques using different colored pencils, water-soluble colored pencils, gouache, or digital software. All are valuable tools. You should experiment with all of them. You might adopt strategies offered in an online product design education class.

But when you rush to finish and try to create that facsimile too quickly, you are cheating yourself from the real subtlety and nuance of what the product can and should become. And the chances are you’re actually creating shortcuts that are eliminating the creative flow; they’re shortening the field, so to speak, reducing some of the complexities that you should engage with in testing your idea in the broader world. Ultimately, the question you should be asking is not just what it looks like and how you can sell somebody on it, but why are you doing it in the first place? Why are you making another artifact in this particular design and material?

“It’s important to remember there are a lot of tools you could use for these as part of your project management.” Says Alicia Tam Wei, “One popular tool is a Gantt chart. There are a few different ways and sorts of structures for this. Ultimately, it’s about trying to figure out how to order the sequence of what needs to happen first, second, then last so that you get something on time.”

With her knowledge in product design and product development, Alicia goes on to explain that it’s important to think about these things because if you don’t have a deadline, what happens is what she likes to call a “feature creep.” That means when you keep on saying, “You know what? You know what would be good with dinner? Let’s make some butter rolls, too.” Or, “I’ll just put some mashed potatoes in there, too. Oh, and some green beans, too.” Then dinner is going to be cold, and people are going to be hungry. So that doesn’t work.

As taught in product design education, or even online product design education, it’s important to think about when you’ve done enough, and when is it good enough to where you can hit those marks of deadlines so that dinner is served on time?