I like to start this discussion with a question: How do you keep stakeholders happy?

Part of your job as a designer is to understand the needs and wants of stakeholders early in the product development process. We usually learn what their requirements are through a combination of interviews and various experiments. Sometimes, you find out that what they tell you during the investigation stage might not actually be what they need to make them happy. As a result, it’s important to maintain contact with stakeholders and check in with them regularly throughout the process.

Determining Stakeholder Needs and Wants

Let’s discuss the dinner analogy to break down stakeholder requirements: Let’s say you’re in a family of four people that includes yourself, a partner and two kids. You must pick something for dinner that meets everyone’s requirements. Yet, one of your children has an allergy, which means that you can’t use, let’s say, peanuts in whatever you’re cooking. Your other kid really loves mac and cheese and is going through a phase in which they want it and nothing else. That said, you can usually convince them to eat pizza if there are no other options. And, then, you must please your partner and yourself. The adults are a little bit more easygoing, but maybe one of you is trying to eat a heart-healthy diet.

You have all of these pieces in your requirement box. You now must come up with something to make for dinner. You start by thinking about what the different stakeholders are in this scenario:

– Will the kid with the peanut allergy eat a pizza. The answer? Yes.
– Will the kid who loves mac and cheese eat a pizza? Yes.
– Will the adults eat a pizza? Yes.

Okay. Pizza might be the winner. But before you can move forward by going through the trouble of making the dough and putting it all together and then putting the pizza in the oven, you check in with the stakeholders and say, “Hey, are you on board with pizza? Yes? No?” and use their additional input to guide you.

Online Product Design Education

The happiness of stakeholders isn’t easy to determine by just reviewing data specific to certain types of personas in a target market based on demographics researched by previous designers and marketers. You need up-to-date information. As part of your product design education, you learn how to approach stakeholders and directly receive all of the details you need to determine their needs and wants through the product design process.

“I think 3D modeling is a great tool,” says product development expert Nifemi Ogunro. “It’s great for when you’re trying to communicate an idea. It’s great when you’re trying to get precision.” This is because you can see exactly what 2 inches is going to look like or what a dowel is going to look like through a full form.

In school, you are taught to learn the inner components of 3D modeling programs. This is applicable if you are going into engineering or doing more electronics-related work. Nifemi Ogunro likes to tell people not to worry so much about not understanding specific programs and their nuances.

This is because when you are working, whether for yourself or with a company, your employer will potentially give you the option of what programs to use. You may also get to choose for yourself. Nifemi Ogunro found that she personally liked SolidWorks the most out of all the programs that she learned. “It’s very expensive,” she explains.

Right now, Nifemi Ogunro uses Fusion 360, which is a free alternative, perfect for online product design education. “There’s so much overlap with the programs,” she shares. But features such as simple extrusions or being able to learn how to cut different holes to show different parts are ones she thinks are really valuable for product design.

What impacts one impacts us all when it comes to product design. Or as Martin Luther King said, “What affects one affects all of us.” Consciously or not, we’re often considering our shared experiences and evaluating the designer of product development. We think about who is on the design team and who is authoring these products that are making their way to market. Sometimes, we realize that essential products like medical devices, educational tools, technological programs, and the cars that we drive are not crafted by a team that is as diverse as it should be.

Let’s take America, for instance. Our nation is a very diverse country. It is referred to as “a melting pot” or “a salad.” A more contemporary term might be “a hot pot.” We have people coming to this country from different cultures, different races, different ethnicities, different nationalities, different religions, and different genders. Instead of insisting on a generic, one-size-fits-all product design, we should celebrate our differences and incorporate them into our design work.

When we think about how a product that is used by people from such diverse backgrounds we ask “how can it possibly be perfect for every individual? How can one product be satisfactory to someone who is very tall, someone who’s very short, to someone who is sighted, or someone who was born deaf?” To a person with neurological challenges, a common product design might be perceived very differently than by someone who’s considered to be highly functional in a conventional sense.

These variations and the way people live as well as their individual experiences suggest that product design education is truly intersectional and is influenced by many factors. A designer can make design decisions in a studio in the Midwest or in Philadelphia where I live, but they don’t know anything about those who live in South Texas and grew up on a ranch. How do they have meaningful conversations about a product? They don’t. We make a lot of assumptions about public perception of our goods and services.

With ethnographic research, we asked a few people some questions and gathered enough insights to enlighten our understanding. With relevant feedback, I can go and work on my idea. And what happens is that there’s a disconnect between the products that are made and the people who they serve. We end up with products that don’t work as well as they should. Building inclusivity into our design approach is the first step toward meeting diverse consumer needs. Online product design education can become the next step for those who want to enter this challenging but rewarding field.

Let’s talk a bit about the history and background of user experience design, or UX. Concern about UX started quite early in history, even back thousands of years. Let’s place ourselves in 4,000 B.C. in China talking about Feng Shui.

Feng Shui is a philosophy that explores the relationship between the elements, the energy known as chi, and how that circulates through space. Feng means wind, while Shui means water.

In Feng Shui, it’s all about how we position elements in the space, like how an interior designer would place furniture or decorations in a room.

The flow and the journey of the user as the person that inhabits that space is efficient when you follow the principles of Feng Shui. Using the space is pleasant and enjoyable. This is a wonderful first milestone that always fascinates me about UX principles. This history shows that UX has been always with us.

Let’s continue on this exciting journey through history. In the year 500 B.C., the ancient Greeks started playing around with this concept of UX. The way they did it was by designing their own tools and workplaces.

They followed principles of ergonomics, or what we know as ergonomics, in order to develop and design their tools and workplaces. They followed those principles to maximize efficiency and to promote well-being in the humans that were working in those professions or using those tools.

That was basically the beginning of the relationship between the human being and those elements.

We know all this because there’s a text from Hippocrates that describes how a surgeon should be working and how to set up what we know today as a surgery or surgeon theater. The text talks about things like how the tools should be displayed, where the light should be coming from, and if the surgeon is sitting or standing.

All the information in Hippocrates’ text talks about how to create an efficient experience, not just for the surgeon, but also for the patient.

Today, as we’ve moved to using digital products, user interface, or UI, has become a new part of design history. UI design and online UX design education have to be concerned with how a user interfaces with something digital in the same way that Hippocrates was concerned with how a surgeon could best use surgical tools.

Isn’t it fascinating?

The process by which we, ShopYourFit, went from product/market fit to revenue is very interesting because it includes a mix of more product/market fit, more experimentation, and more products we’re building. We find out even different problems that customers have.
That’s how we got into revenue. When we built ShopYourFit, we quickly understood that we were going to have different customers coming to the website. They’re going to a personalization process that we created using artificial intelligence, and using later, TensorFlow and augmented reality.
I explained how the personalization process works. Customers visit the website and manually input their height and weight. Then, they choose their style. It’s very subjective the way that customers dress. It’s not necessarily about the large, medium, or small sizes that matter. Customers may want clothing that is tighter or clothing that is looser.
Different styles are more subjective, so what we did is build a simple board where the customer selects certain pictures. Using the selections, we can gain an understanding of a customer’s behavior and how the customer wants to wear certain styles of clothing.
We ask customers to take pictures of the front and side, so we can construct a precise body type. We have the body type, we have the style, and we have the customer’s height and weight. Using all the information provided by the customer, we can populate a website for customers that is customized to what they’re looking for.

Visual design should really follow functionality. UX and UI are kind of a complement to each other. You need to make sure that the program performs well but also looks good. The UX design and UI design elements should go hand in hand.

When designing, make sure that you don’t only have the UI part but also that the user experience is embedded in it. Also try to optimize that for consistency. If you use certain UI elements, make sure they look the same throughout your website and everything that you put in your interface and that they actually makes sense and have a reason to be there.

Things like simplicity and color, which really identify certain functionality, are like accents that you can put in your interface. For example, I really love the Gestalt principles. I try to always have the designers that I work with present not only how things look but also how they work. They need to make sure that everything they put in the interface makes sense and has a reason to be there. Everything must also be tested with users so you can make sure the functionality is right.

UI, or user interface, refers to the complement, the look and feel, and the interactivity with the product that you are designing. In other words, UI design refers to the visual components of your experience and how those visual components are going to make your journey or the user’s journey as intuitive as possible.

In the same way, we can describe UX as the foundation, structure and frame of a house. The difference between UX design and UI design 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. This ranges from the buttons, iconography, colors and all aesthetics that are involved in the interface or that adorn the interface.

One of the big things to keep in mind while pursuing online UX design education is that no matter how “usable” you think what you’ve designed is, if it doesn’t look good, people are not going to want to use it at all. It’s super important to keep in mind when actually building something.

I like to say that UX without UI is just not really a great product. You see it all the time, too. You see some products and programs that have been around for years, but they just look so outdated that no one wants to use them anymore. There are hot, fresh, new products out that just look a lot slicker, and people are gravitating towards them. Never forget that UI is always going to be very valuable to your UX.

My biggest advice when designing UX or UI is to not get too into the weeds. It really just comes down to this: don’t overthink things. Don’t get too caught up on the technical details of UX design or UI design. It’s something that not everyone can be taught.

What you do want to do is leave a lasting impression. You want to create something helpful or enjoyable for people using it. It’s about just having what I call “The vibe.”

The vibe is super important. Having the vibe drive what you’re designing means not getting caught up in numbers or technical details. In the end, the people using it don’t care about any of that. They really think about how they feel after using what you’ve designed. You want to make sure that what you’ve designed is leaving a really great impression on them.

Vibe can’t be measured. It’s one of the things that makes designers irreplaceable. A lot of people think that at some point all these vibes are going to be replaced by robots. However, when you’re designing something for people, the vibe is what people remember.

You really can’t measure it, but it is something that comes from a feeling. It has to come from passion and inspiration. It’s something that you just notice when you look at something. You just feel that it has a certain sort of personality to it. I think that’s going to have a lasting impression on the world, and it’s going to be what makes designers irreplaceable.

Active listening is truly the most important ability that professionals need to have when interviewing someone in UX design. When I say active listening, there are a few characteristics that must be involved in UI design.

The first thing an interviewer should do is to be very present with the other person in UI. Many times when someone else talks, we tend to think about our own thoughts, how we can relate to the story that person is telling as well as any similarities our own lives may have to the person telling the story. So, active listening is really putting oneself outside of that tendency and being truly there in the moment with that person, with no agenda other than really hearing their story.

The first thing that I would recommend is be present with the UX employee. Put away all your to-do list for the day or the week aside. Put all your own personal agenda aside. Just really be there listening the person.

The second thing that is an important component of actively listening is observing body language. A person says so much more in one’s non-verbal language than in their verbal language. One would observe body language in order to see when the person is opening up, when they’re closing, when their voice becomes lower or higher, or when they’re talking really quickly or really slowly.

All these things indicate if the person is talking about something that excites them, about something that they’re ashamed of, or about something that is vulnerable to them. Body language is a great indicator of such emotions, and actively listening involves observing this nonverbal expression.

The last component of active listening is to look for stories. We constantly, as design researchers, want to look for stories because they depict the values of that human being. They hold the motivations for whomever you’re talking to. Once we understand a person’s motivation, we can create a solution that is really powerful. So, the components of active listening include being present, observing body language, and looking for stories.

“Let’s talk about soft skills and hard skills. You may probably own some of them already, but you just didn’t know. It is important to look back at your personal experiences and your professional experiences,” explains Tiago Valente. “I am sure that if you look back and you reflect on your journey, on your personal and professional journey, you will find out not only the skills that I’m about to mention, but many others that can inform your practice in UX and UI, [or UX design and UI design.] Those are your superpowers. And like I said, I’m sure you already own most of them.”

“When you talk about product design, at least from a product design perspective,” Daphne Lin adds, “you have to be comfortable learning all these new hard skills. Yes, you have to know user experience design. You have to know interaction design, interface design, etc.”

But research is something that you should be interested in diving into. Visual design, or creating visual design systems, should be something you’re interested in. All those things will definitely make you a better designer.

“When I say hard, they’re not that hard. You will learn them. And that’s why we’re here,” says Valente. “The first skill within this category is user research. User research involves creating surveys, interviewing people, handling focus groups, and market research. All that user research — it’s very important.”

And, it’s a crucial part of this process because it is what will give you actual valuable data, data to create user personas. Later on, these user personas will give you an even more detailed information that summarizes your findings throughout your user research.