An online UX design education course teaches students how to shape the digital world for users. Talented designers know that user experience can make or break a program or platform.

Creating an Immersive Experience

What is user experience? In terms of software, it is the entirety of what an application feels like for the end-user. UX involves the story that is being put forward and everything that adds to the complete experience. It could be the way the sound is created, the way the choreography of this space is designed, as well as less obvious backend UI design decisions.

“Ultimately, what’s the story that’s being told? How does the user feel towards that?” asks Amir Bardaran. The designers give full recognition to the feelings that the end-user will have as they process and absorb the experience itself.

UX design professionals have a wider range than traditional 2D or 3D immersive platforms. New technologies like augmented reality and virtual reality provide environments that could incorporate a lot more than just a visual component. UX would include the feel, sound effects and atmospheric sounds. Possibly, you could even have a sense of smell added to that environment through the haptics.

So, what are the ways in which people can feel, touch and experience the pressure of things that are around them? That is ultimately what is meant by user experience. It is the overall engagement with the choreography of this space in the entirety of its composition.

Developing a Natural Experience in the Digital World

The book, “The Design of Everyday Things,” by Don Norman, is one of the first to use the phrase, “user experience.” In the book, Norman breaks down all kinds of things that people take for granted. He considers objects as simple as light switches and the history of their design.

“What are these conventions that we’ve now just come to realize are part of our lives? They feel intuitive to us. And what happens when you break some of those conventions and make it actually very difficult for people to use?” asks Daniel Holtzman.

A lot of what designers handle are UI and UX issues. They thoughtfully consider how to make things simple and clear, how to create analogies from the physical world to the digital world. The goal is to create connections between what people are seeing, what they are doing and what their desired outcome will be. These considerations make up the ultimate user experience.

Focusing UI Design on End Users

User experience was developed as a practice to create tools that centered around people. “Without user experience, we would just be creating tools for ourselves instead of for other people. In general, I think it has given companies a competitive edge because the more you care about the people who use your products, the more successful your products are going to be,” says Daphne Lin.

Understanding your target audience, or who you’re attempting to reach, is critical when developing a website. We discuss user experience, site design, and other interesting topics. But what it really boils down to is making your website look and feel appropriate for your intended audience.

For instance, I’m a 47-year-old man. What are the chances that if I go to a website and that has a floral-driven design with a bunch of kids playing with toys, I’ll actually browse around and attempt to figure out, “Do they have something I want to buy?”

It would help if you also kept in mind that e-commerce is not the same as walking to the grocery store down the street.

You get in a car, and it takes you 20 minutes to find a parking spot. You stroll in with a shopping cart, walk through the store, and they don’t have what you’re looking for. You’ve put forth a lot of effort to get here. You’ll almost certainly continue to look around.

That isn’t the case with e-commerce. That isn’t the case with a website. If it doesn’t feel right, I walk away after clicking the X. Remember that a certain level of awareness is required to reach your website, although it’s minimal. I may have found your website using a Google search. It’s possible that I stumbled onto your website by accident. I could have arrived at your website after seeing a cool photo on Instagram that I liked.

I have three or four seconds after landing on your page to make a subconscious decision. I’m leaving if it doesn’t feel good, smell right, or look right. That’s all there is to it.

What’s the metric for judging whether the photos, videos, or other elements on the landing page are effective?

You’re usually in good shape if a customer stays on your site for about 30 seconds. That indicates they discovered something and connected to it. They’re open to taking a look and possibly reading a few things. Then, if you get to the one-minute mark, you’ve most likely captured them on your website. They’ve developed an interest in a possible product. You’ve piqued their interest.

However, there is a breaking point. If potential customers are on there for too long, you can find yourself slipping into other categories. What I mean is that by the minute mark, you want someone to click the second time.

There are so many instances of UX and UI we can find in real life. Once you start your online UX design education, you’ll see UX design and UI design all over the place. One great example of UX design is a museum.

When you enter a museum, there are so many touchpoints. There are so many interfaces. Even UX comes in the form of those little QRs that you see next to the artworks. When you direct your phone camera to those, it doesn’t just bring you information, it acts as a portal to extending the information and to expanding the experience. That is a wonderful example of when these two worlds are merged together.

Museums are multisensory experiences. We walk through them. We circulate. There’s a path that is created for us to follow. There’s a way that we interact with the artworks, and even more important is the emotional component.

User experience relates to an efficient, seamless, intuitive navigation or journey, whereas experience design is about the emotional component as well. It’s about how you feel when you interact with this space. What is it that comes to your mind? What are your feelings, your emotions, that are triggered in these journeys through the physical space, even more so when they are connected and they are merged?

That’s when we have hybrid spaces, or what we could call “phigital” spaces.

“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?

User flow, also known as the user journey, is a really good tool to allocate pain points. It helps you to understand the typical actions of different demographics of users when they interact with an app or website.

You don’t look at the desired state. You look at the current one. The user flow helps the user organically move from their first step to their last one to complete a task via a user interface (UI).

For this UX design journey, you can really see where a user is having challenges. You can see where they are frustrated or possibly feel like they’re being told to do something that they’re not comfortable doing. The user flow maps for us the UX UI design interventions we need to use to create a solution for them, which means that the user flow is really a map to understand what we need to change and where exactly we need to change it.

Online UX Design Education

As you can see, you can understand problems with your UX designs during your design education studies and career years via simple tools like user flow. In this case, you simply trace the path of a user’s interactions with an app or website UI to find pain points.

One of the first things you’ll learn to do in good UX design is quantitative research. In quantitative research, you ask people questions that lead you to a very specific set of answers. Hopefully, you get the answers you were looking for.

Through these answers, you might discover whether a feature on your website works the way you were expecting or whether it would be good to include that feature if the site is visited by 10,000 people or 1 million people.

The power of quantitative research in UX and UI design comes in when you get answers to questions like those.

Imagine you don’t want to invest the time into doing quantitative research with hundreds of users so you’re working with a much smaller sample size. In this case, qualitative research is a more appropriate strategy. Personal interviews can still be done with one person, or you can hold group interviews with five or 10 people.

Good online UX design education will teach you that it’s important to have a specific goal for these interviews and to start with that goal. You can do this whether you’re building a physical product or something digital like an app or a website. Let’s use digital products as an example.

Your goal might be to figure out whether you need some kind of a feed feature on a website or app you’re building and, if so, what that feed should be about? Would it be something that is more like storytelling or would it be something more like a news feed?

In a case like that, you’d want to find the appropriate users that you’re targeting with your app or the website that you’re building. You would talk to them and ask them open-ended questions instead of specific questions about the UI of your site or app.

What do they generally do during the day? When they go on a social website, how do they browse? When they go on a news website, how do they browse?

Using those interviews and the transcripts that you gather from them, you would start to code the interviews to figure out the patterns between all of these users. If those patterns lead you to something that overlaps between all of the interviews, that’s a specific result you’ll probably want to implement on your app or website.

In product development, you go through what we call the human-centered design process that involves you really trying to understand as much as possible about who is going to be able to use the product or idea. You have to do what we call ethnography and really try to recall and understand the insights, backgrounds, pain points and motivations of consumers in general and the members of a specific target market. You need to learn from their demographic framework, which means you need to study their class, race, gender, sexuality, employment status, level of education, geographic location and academic, work and social networks. We call these people, the ones who interact with our products and ideas, stakeholders.

Recognizing Every Stakeholder

If you are designing a product for a child, for instance, they are a stakeholder. Yet, the child’s parent who buys their toys, objects, articles of clothing and other items product designers create is also a stakeholder that you must consider during the design process. By extension, anyone else who might buy the product for the child, such as grandparents or friends, are also stakeholders, right? You need to ask yourself: Who else is influencing the person or group of people who you are designing for and what type of value do they find in it?

Recognizing Physical Elements

When we focus on humans during the human-centered product design process, we are trying to understand how people and people around them think and value things. We are also trying to understand them as physical human beings too. Oftentimes, when we are creating objects of design on the industrial design scale, we must focus on what we call “human factors.” We are trying to understand particularities about someone’s physiology, such as the strength of their body, the size of their hands, the level of their vision or the size of their head, to make certain that we understand how a product might interact with them physically.

Online Product Design Education

Human social and physical factors influence designs and economics. We need to think about how stakeholders want a product to function and the types of problems that a product can solve for them. Keep in mind that these are just a few examples of human-centered product design. During your product design education, you will learn a lot more about this process and how you can use it to turn ideas into tangible items that people need and want to bring into their lives.

Product design deadlines can sneak up on you faster than you might think possible, which means that you have to make certain that you’re working at a steady pace. How do you stay on track? How do you give yourself a little bit of leash, so to speak, to discover things that are unexpected?

There are many stories from the history of research and development days when scientists would experiment with X material for a purpose and discover, with the purpose or goal just in sight, something else potentially as important along the way. This type of scenario is challenging because the product design process requires that we design time as much as we design material. On any given day, how we design our day and how much we stick to that design matters.

Deadlines as Motivational Tools in Product Design

There are many strategies that I use to design how I use time. I don’t always listen to myself, but I try to do the best that I can when I’m working on a project. You need to recognize that someone may expect a very quick turnaround and that a deadline is not your enemy but your friend. Deadlines may come from a client that is expecting, for production reasons, a deliverable at a certain point in a certain process or sequence. You may also receive an artificial deadline for competition reasons. Deadlines aren’t to be cursed as unreasonable or horrible things. You really need to appreciate and embrace them because they can help motivate you to take an incremental amount of time and subdivide it into activities.

What Does Dishonesty Mean in Time Management?

You ask yourself how you can design your time, your timeline, and how you can get from “here” to “there” in the time that you have available from now until the deadline. A deadline gives you both time and spatial activity reference. It also keeps you somewhat honest. When you’re dishonest about time with yourself, such as if you take on too many projects at once or take too much time having fun while brainstorming and fail to leave yourself enough time for iterative testing, you can expect negative feedback from clients. Your inability to manage time changes your design and product development. It all comes out in the wash too. The more you’re dishonest and fail to manage time, the more you experiment and fail with a particular sequence. When you get better at being honest with yourself on what you actually have time to do, you can expect more positive client feedback.

Online Product Design Education

As shown, you can shortchange yourself on any number of product design projects in various ways. To prevent adverse outcomes, such as a reduction in project opportunities or potential permanent damage to your reputation, it’s important to learn as much as possible now about time management skills and tools while pursuing your product design education.

Here’s the thing, your homepage is not your homepage. Google is. That’s where people start searching for their products. So even if a potential customer types in your brand name and sweater and they end up on your site, customers won’t stay on your site if they don’t see what they’re looking for. They’ll go back to Google and look at your competitors’ pages. It’s vital to understand this. There is a real need then to correlate what’s happening on the search engine with your website. This is the key to success.

The first thing people who are trying to do this should do is think about the copy on their website. That’s the first step. If you are not writing good copy that considers SEO and how people are searching for goods, no one will ever find you. And if they don’t see you, you’re not part of the competition. Next, you should also think about your website videos and images. You’d be surprised how many people shop by Google image search. And if your images are not showing up, you’re once again not part of the competition.

Conversely, you should also consider how much you will need to pay to show up in the top page results. Because if you’re not on that first page, you’re not part of the competition. This can become very costly, but it’s part of the rules of the game. So, you need to know all about SEM, SEO, and SMM. It can be challenging to keep up with the different acronyms relevant to creating a successful website. Still, these are tech words that you need to understand as a retailer if you want to compete with other brands.

When it comes to SEO for ecommerce, one of the main things we focus on each day is keywords. SEO revolves around keywords. Keywords can be anything from a single word to a phrase or a full sentence that a user types into Google to search for something. We utilize various paid and free tools that we use to analyze these keywords. These tools allow us to identify which keywords are most valuable for our specific needs.

The keyword search volume is an important criteria that we use to determine a keyword’s value for an ecommerce brand. Keyword search volume measures the average number of searches that people make using this specific keyword in Google search. Keywords can be broken down into the more general head keywords and the more specific long-tail keywords. Keywords often follow a pattern. The more general a keyword is, the more search volume it is likely to have. Higher search volumes expand our pool of potential ecommerce store visitors.

At the same time, these more general keywords are also more vague than the specific long-tail keywords. Vague keywords makes it harder for Google to understand the specific search intent of those users. If you’re using it in your own SEO strategy, you need to have content that covers a broader topic. This type of content needs to cover everything that users might be interested in.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are far more specific. People search for them less often. However, users that use long-tail keywords often convert better if you target the keyword correctly. Simply because they are looking specifically for what you have to offer in your ecommerce store.

We need to take each user’s thinking process into consideration when planning content. If we know exactly what users are looking for, we should focus on long-tail keywords. If we have a variety of different products in your ecommerce store, services, or a broad topic that we’re trying to cover, focusing on generic keywords is a better way to go.