How do we move through 3D ideation, especially today, with so many digital tools available? I find in my classroom quite often (in fact, it happened today), when people hear the words “3D sketching”, they think it means in the computer. It’s not so in my classes or in my studio. Because what I want to do is to free up the sketching as quickly as possible and make it as free as possible.

Starting Product Development Off Screen

By working with cardboard and non-precious materials, you can sketch quite quickly. In the physical realm, on the desktop, as opposed to on the screen, you happen upon happy accidents all the time. You see relationships very differently. I believe it maps in the brain differently from looking at a screen.

Product Design Should Be Done Quickly But Not Preciously

Even if you’re looking at a three-dimensional object on the screen, you’re still having a 2D experience. It’s the richest when you start by working with simple materials, and quickly but not preciously, to frame out the basic structure of the design.

Online Product Design Education Still Necessary for Presentations

If you’re comfortable in the computer and you want to go back in, by all means, go back in. Ultimately, in this day and age, we need to do so for presentation and production methods. But during the ideation phase, if we only remain on the screen, I don’t think we involve our full artistic self.

Thinking about inspiration is interesting because, in truth, inspiration is everywhere. Inspiration isn’t a cookie-cutter concept, where you can simply define it as one thing and be done with it. It’s really about being open-minded and being receptive to things that are coming your way. You might have this idea of a design or product, and then, you see chewing gum while you’re walking down the street, and suddenly, inspiration hits you, just like that. Maybe the shape of the chewing gum becomes a doorknob, or at the grocery store, you see a strange looking red carrot, and that suddenly becomes the base of a lamp.

This is to say that inspiration and influence can show up everywhere. It’s about you being open to it and not filtering as many things out because, as you walk around in your life, you’ll realize that even the most highly ridiculous idea can actually trigger a really positive reaction. It’s not like you can simply count to three, and suddenly, you’ll have the key and code for unlocking inspiration. It’s really about being open-minded and being brave enough to take ideas that you see and process them, using your mind to turn them into new thinking and new ideas.

This can come from a wide range of things whether it be colors, shapes, sounds, or details; it’s endless. You just have to start walking. Start allowing yourself to see and to be receptive. The great thing about inspiration is that it truly comes from everywhere, and as you walk through life, you’re going to realize that. Inspiration for me was completely different at age 20 than it is today.

Today, I find inspiration in sound; I translate sounds that I hear into shapes. I find inspiration in food; I taste something, and the flavor suddenly becomes something new. I ask myself if color has a shape or if different colors like green and blue have a different vocabulary. Ultimately, you have to figure out what inspires you because inspiration is just as personal as people think it is. Again, you have to be very open. There’s no right or wrong; there’s only moving forward. Just allow yourself to be surprised.

To learn more about finding inspiration and harnessing creativity, as well as product design and product development, think about starting on a path with product design education. If you’re interested in learning about these things from the comfort of your own home, online product design education might be perfect for you.

Exploration in product design and product development depends on the project or the product. Exploration is a part of the process that goes beyond what you learn to do in online product design education while sitting at a desk. You get to break away from that and explore.

For example, if you’re designing a telescope, you go look at all kinds of different telescopes. You look at big ones, and you look at little ones, and you also look at stuff that’s shaped like a tube. You look at things people put up to their eyes and how the image gets from space to you, to your brain.

You try to literally think outside of the box. You’re way out, and you don’t have to presuppose what you’re going to figure out. It’s really the most fun part of the project because you’re just looking around and finding anything you want.

Or you go to the store, and you look at things in that category. Or if it’s a medical product, you go visit the hospital and see how all the other things in the operating room are being used.

It’s one of the most fun parts of the project and something that product design education has a harder time explaining than most technical concepts because, at this stage, everything is open. You can Google anything, and it’s part of the project. So, this is a fun kind of thing.

Ethnographic research is becoming a key part of our toolbox as designers. This type of research is not necessarily needed for every product development project, but it can be extremely valuable to make sure that you’re still responding to the needs of your market.

The idea of ethnographic research is that you’re going to really dive into a user group or type of user. You’re diving into their lives and the way they actually use your product and incorporate it into their day-to-day activities. You not only engage them and talk to them, but you also really observe the way they live and use your product.

This type of research is very different from a quantitative type of research where you simply ask people questions and analyze their responses. This used to be the main type of research you’d learn about in product design education. The people’s responses would be turned into graphs and heat maps, and you’d learn how to study those.

In today’s online product design education, the focus is going to be on ethnographic research, which is qualitative instead of quantitative. It’s usually done with a very small sample. A group of six to 12 people is a good size. You don’t need to deal with hundreds of people.

The difficult part, when you do ethnographic research, is not the research itself. It’s easy to engage people, extract some information and observe how they use your product and how they live.

The difficult part is to take that observation and turn it into an insight about your product design. That’s where it gets very challenging. We spend a lot of time actually training our team to make that passage from observation to insight.

There’s a lot of secret sauce that takes place during that passage.

Our next module in online UX design education is project planning. Project planning is essential to a successful user research stage in the UX design or UI design process. In this module, we will explore how important it is to understand context. Political, social, cultural, and economic factors really have a huge weight in the way that you’re planning your use of research. You will understand how to identify the best format and how to conduct these surveys, interviews or focus groups following ethical guidelines.

Once we have concluded the user research stage, we will have gathered data. This data will be filtered in a way that will allow us to create specific psychographics and demographics, which we call personas. The reason why we call them personas, even though these are fictitious human beings, is that they are based on real data that we obtained through our user research stage.

Calling them personas is to humanize them. By humanizing them, it allows the designer of UX or UI, you in this case, to develop a higher level of empathy with this persona, this fictitious human being character. You will be able to put yourself in their shoes in a much easier manner and be more empathetic and understanding of their needs and how to connect with them. Connection: it’s very important in this process.

At its core, user experience research, design and writing is really user-centered UI design. It comes down to making sure that we’re able to connect and empathize with our users. It’s not just asking surface level questions to understand what features we can build. It’s understanding on a much deeper level the broader context of users and their environments.

How can we build for people? How can we empathize with them? Empathy is something that’s really hard to accomplish. It’s something that a lot of UX and UI professionals like to tout, like to speak about, but it’s something that requires a lot of practice.

Empathy endurance is a really important thing that anyone in UX design should strive to build into their career. It’s more the idea that we can connect with users by going to their environments and meeting them where they are. It’s still really important that after we connect with those users and have those conversations, we have the empathy endurance.

A key piece of online UX design education is learning the ability to bring those conversations and connections back to the product that we’re building. Users need their voices heard by being directly reflected into the products. At its core, it’s empathy. It’s user-centered design, and it’s people. That’s the really beautiful part about UX, whether it’s quantitative research or qualitative research. At its core it’s about people. That’s what makes it so exciting to be part of the UX design process.

When I’m teaching students, I often treat them like they’re just starting out a project. Later on, once they think they’re further along, I have them complete 30 drawings. I don’t have them complete one or two. They’re not doing five or 10. They’re producing 30 unique sketches.

How do you push yourself to really think past your initial ideas, understandings and assumptions and go beyond and then keep going beyond?

When you start out, whether for an assignment in a product design class or your early career, it’s really hard. You have just a couple of ideas, and you can’t imagine how you can come up with 30 to complete the exercise. But, if you keep pushing, let yourself go and imagine and put some of the thinking and self-editing aside, you find yourself producing some of your richest work. Even your most far-fetched ideas can have real legs and potential.

It’s important to put all of those ideas down on clean paper. Each sketch must be a finished drawing with a title and your name on it too. We actually put all of the sketches up on the wall, and then we walk through those ideas. You need to really understand that sometimes there are groupings and themes within them. There are similarities. There are wild ideas that sometimes generate the best discussions, and students at first push back.

Origin of the Exercise

This design exercise was actually something that a teacher had me do when I was in school. It was one of the few times in graduate school that I stayed up all night worrying. I then realized how liberating it was to create so many sketches and all of the potential that really lives in this exercise. I also recognized how important it was to not require this exercise just once but, instead, a couple of times throughout a project.

Online Product Design Education

You must make sure that you’re always continuing to push forward. I don’t only mean by producing 30 drawings. It can be in other ways. As you will learn in all of your product design education classes, you can improve your chances of having a successful career in the product development field by making sure that you’re always pushing yourself forward and beyond what you first think, the idea you first land on and your first understanding of anything.

One important thing to consider when you’re planning and preparing for your usability study in online UX design education is how to avoid bias. This is important whether you’re testing a prototype, testing the competition, or even just having a conversation with your users to discover more about their needs how to incorporate that into your UX design or UI design.

You really have to be careful not to introduce your own biases into the conversation. Biases are very broad topics, and there’s a lot of information to learn about them and how to control for them. The easiest way to do that is by working with a diverse team with diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences.

The importance of user testing is that when you are designing, you often come with biases, and those can make their way into your work. When you’re designing for a group of people who are not necessarily you, in your demographic, or even related to things you have an interest in, you’re going to come into it with assumptions that might not be true at all. That means that it’s important to ensure you test the way real uses would actually use what you’re designing.

Getting that sort of data is going to help you to make more educated decisions in your UI and UX, especially when you’re working with a team, each individual has their own assumptions, and you really need something to drive the direction of the design.

One of the most valuable parts of online UX design education is the look back at the most innovative UX developments in history.

Moving on to the ’70s and Xerox, Apple, and the PC. This is the era of personal computers. Suddenly, psychology and engineering are merged together, and that evolves into the first graphical user interfaces and the mouse, which was invented by Xerox. Apple, in 1984, develops the Macintosh — the first ever mass-market PC that involved a graphical user interface, a mouse, and a built-in screen.

Now, we arrive to the big, big, big deal of UX design. That is Donald Norman. In the ’90s, Donald Norman was the first ever person to implement the word UX in his job title. He was hired by Apple as a UX architect engineer. He was a cognitive scientist who wanted to evolve what designers had understood up until to that moment as UX. He wanted to evolve that and to expand that into the realm of the physical, including UI and UI design, industrial design, the graphical user interface, the physical interaction, even the packaging.

So, thank you Mr. Norman because, thanks to you, the world now is a better place.

“I remember in 2012, just not being able to use any emojis that were my skin tone. And that’s something that was just the norm. And so I think a really big thing within the design field itself, is something that I call the white default, which is essentially, the norm is viewed as white,” says Jacquelyn Iyamah.

So, you end up with these products like emojis, Band-Aids, self-driving cars, soap dispensers that just don’t speak to communities of color. They specifically don’t speak to folks who have dark skin. Online UX Design Education must be able to be mindful of that as well as be able to, within the design thinking process, continuously question ourselves and our biases. These issues are something that’s really critical to ensure that we’re not designing products that continuously harm.

“The kind of conversation or the kind of arguments against bias that takes place is often a matter of representation. So let me give you a little historical point here. Technologies that we come to use, if and when they’re created within a capitalistic society, then the way those technologies are pursued is usually to cater to the needs of the corporations that are creating it,” says Amir Baradaran.

Kodak is a good example of that, whereby for people of color, you had a hard time being able to actually have good photos because it was never created for BIPOC. Because it was adjusted only to fair skin, who then had better purchasing capabilities, it never even cared to allow for having devices that actually would better capture the reality of our skin colors.

So, for example, when the camera has a hard time recognizing people of color or being able to distinguish between males and females in darker-skinned bodies and faces, obviously, we have an issue. That should be regulated. We should look for a better representation of data, based on which then machines can learn.