Author: Yellowbrick

Scott Henderson is an industrial designer, so therefore he creates primarily three-dimensional objects. “I find that it is critical to work in 3D. So even before all of this CAD stuff was available, I would carve foam. They used to call me the foam king because I would walk around like a snowman just covered in dust from literally carving forms out of foam to get these forms exactly right,” says Henderson. He’s a good person to learn from as you continue your online product design education.

That training of carving these things by hand has tuned his brain to be able to think three-dimensionally. “I don’t need to really do that foaming process anymore; I can go into the 3D virtual CAD model and do the same thing without losing any quality or compromise of any kind. Also because I fine-tuned my CAD skills so that I’m sort of like a Jedi master of CAD.”

But the reason he did that was because he sees the value, and the value is there. You cannot compromise the form for any lack of a skill that you might not have, because it can compromise the success of the design. And that’s the last thing you want, so remember that as part of your product design education.

Toward the end of the product development ideation workshop sprint, after we’ve completed our divergent and convergent brainstorming, we’ll end up with a good list of concepts that we think are going to be promising. Since we still have a handful of ideas under investigation, we then go through a prioritization exercise in which we use conceptual filters to narrow our list. We use filters related to desirability for the user, feasibility from a technological perspective, especially in product design cases when we need to actually make or manufacture a thing and viability from a business point of view. When you think about all of the concepts that came from our sprinting ideation exercises and you filter them through these three main areas, usually one or two concepts pop out that we then bring to the sketching stage.

Sketching After the Sprint

At first, we do very rough sketching in digital applications. We basically fill in templates that look like interfaces or screens or fill a series of wireframes that allow us to tell a story, such as how a person needs to achieve a specific goal. We might tell their story by saying: “He starts here. He clicks here. He transitions to the next thing and the thing after it and so on.” It’s really important to show how it’s going to work over a series of interactions.

You probably see a lot of wireframing going on in the sketching stage. Sometimes, before we even start sketching the actual product, we go through a process of creating a concept poster or something similar to make certain that we thought of everything. We ask ourselves:

– What’s the name of your product?
– Who is it targeting?
– What’s the key, cool differentiating message?
– What does the product do?

We go into the sketching stage and then emphasize creativity with this one foundational document about what this thing actually looks like and how it works.

Online Product Design Education

During your product design education courses, you will learn a lot more about these and other processes that product designers often rely upon during ideation workshops to aid them in fulfilling the needs and desires of their clients and consumers. Every course is designed to help you move steadily one step closer to your dream of becoming a successful producer designer.

Product design and product development begin in stages. Some of these projects begin as ideas outside of a company, but a lot of them are initiated internally. Innovation inside the company starts with an idea that is further developed by research, which is conducted on a regular basis to create a type of road map toward design and development.

“Part of that research,” says Jean-Jacques L’Henaff, “involves ethnographic research and just talking to random people on the street and in the community. This is different from a focus group, which selects a set group of people to engage in a question and answer sort of research project.”

“It also doesn’t try to steer people in the direction of answering direct questions about things they like or want or even need,” L’Henaff continues. “Instead, ethnographic research of this sort engages them in a discussion and then observes the person’s reactions to gauge unmet needs. We are looking for points of friction and coping mechanisms too. That is because people don’t even realize most of the time that when there is a point of friction, they find a coping mechanism to get around it. That is why it is so important to observe people and decipher what people are telling you in order to understand where the true issue is.”

Product design education, and particularly online product design education, uses these approaches a lot. Once you get what the true issue at hand is, you can take all this data and all of this quantitative information and turn it into valuable insight. Then, you decide if this valuable insight is worth focusing on and whether or not it’s worth turning into a project. Maybe it isn’t a separate project unto itself, but it becomes part of a project that’s already in the works. That’s a pretty common practice too.

When we talk about the art of persuasion or the art of rhetoric in product design, we’re talking about everything we do to convince people to desire what we’re doing with product development and then pay for or compensate us by investing in our ideas or buying and using our products.

Showing the Value

You want to attract members of your target market by making your designs as close to reality as possible. When we are learning those design skills, we want to jump to the end and get there as quickly as possible. We want to know how to make a beautifully perfect drawing of a design or an engaging physical early prototype design, or even a finished prototype.

We think that this is all that we actually bring to potential investors and buyers. It is very tempting to feel this way. And, of course, your rendering skills, whether three or two-dimensional and digitally, are part of the skillsets you need to persuade people in that portion of design development.

Product Design Education

Yet, the art of persuasion involves so much more than your rendered designs. With a formal online product design education, you can learn the many techniques needed to persuade others that your ideas, no matter their early or finished forms, are worth their time and money.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the audience and what the word “audience” means in terms of products that you design for any given project. As we were talking about before, it’s important to think about who’s currently using a particular product or who you’re designing that particular product for when you research different user groups.

The audience is really who you’re designing it for, right? The audience is going to be using it after it leaves your hands and goes into the world.

Why Audience Interest Matters

It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of that audience from a human-centered design perspective, but you also need to think about demand, marketing and sales: Are there enough people really interesting in or using this type of product? Is there enough demand for it in the current market? Do current trends imply any type of future interest?

“As a designer, you are part artist, but you also have to have a little bit of a business hat on in terms of, is it worth your time, and effort, and energy, and investment of yourself to launch a product?” explains Alicia Tam Wei. “Is there demand? Are people going to like it?”

You receive the answers to these questions by doing some testing and getting feedback from people. You might ask: Is a consumer actually going to like this? Are people going to use it? Are they willing to pay any or enough money for it? How much are they willing to pay for it? Is there an audience for this project?

The Minimum Viable Audience

There’s again one question you should always ask: “Is it worth my time?” Is it really worth the investment of my time, effort and energy, as well as my financial investments?

And, so, that’s where the minimum viable audience really comes into play. Is there enough of an audience? Is there enough of a demand for what you want to make?

Online Product Design Education

The greatest product design in the world won’t matter if it fails to draw the interest of more than a handful of people after you complete product development. As you continue your product design education, you will learn how to determine the right demographics for a target audience for any design and the right size for a viable audience.

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.