For the best user interface (UI) design, you have to think carefully about the features of the product you want to make.

Let’s take something in the physical world as an example. We have public accessibility codes designed to help disabled people navigate their way through a city. What does that mean as far as user experience goes? What does good UX design look like in this case?

The design includes the things we have that meet the goal of those accessibility codes. We have things like ramps, walkways, and spaces on the sides of a metro station specifically for disabled people to use.

We don’t have that kind of accessibility code in the digital world. More accurately, we do have it, but it’s not enforced in UI design like the real-world code is enforced by the government.

What ends up happening if you don’t follow the accessibility code is that you end up not including a large section of society who would also be benefiting from and enjoying the kind of products that you’re making. This is a common UX flaw.

How do you take care of this issue as a business? How do you correct it as an organization that caters to a large section of millions of people? What are the concerns that you need to have so that your product is not just usable by a few people?

Something that online UX design education stresses is that whether you’re making a real-world product or something digital, it needs to reach all sections of society and be accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

You have to take care to make sure you’re not restricting any particular set of people from using it.

When we’re building products and solutions that cater to the needs of a broad spectrum of users, we need to bring the engineering team on board as soon as possible. The expertise and knowledge they have about how to build products that are accessible is key to planning and creating those products.

Their insight can help us enrich our prototypes and design solutions. Production is also easier once the engineers start working on the implementation of our solution. They appreciate and understand why accessibility is so important. They’ll build the product from the ground up with that in mind and include accessibility at its core.

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.

Information hierarchies in UX UI design guarantee that users see all content organized in an ascending or descending order of importance in regards to the onscreen layout. Information hierarchies are one of the essential components of the visualization of content experiences in UI design required by visual designers and also writers.

I actually love this part. I’m dyslexic. When I read something, I need to be able to really quickly understand what I’m reading because it’s difficult for me if I get tripped up in too many words or the text doesn’t get the point in a relatively short amount of time.

Bites of Information

People don’t swallow their food whole. They take bites. The same is true of content. When people are looking at screen surfaces, you can only feed so much information to them. If they get to a point where they want more, you can let them add more to their plates by diving deeper and getting into more content.

In today’s world, you really need to create a well-edited, deeply considered content strategy so users actually walk away with knowledge or learn or understand something important. For example, they might walk away with a better understanding of something they need to do, such as filling in paperwork for a medical appointment or something related to education.

Online UX Design Education

With all UI content scenarios, you need to be really thoughtful with the written word. It’s essential for UX design. During your studies, you will see both good and bad examples of information hierarchies. You will also receive steps to craft fantastic content strategies that are well thought out and that work at attracting and holding user interest while making content easier for users to consume.

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.

When you need to perform research for product design and product development, how do you go about it? What are things like ethnographic research, and what does it all mean?

What that fundamentally means is putting yourself in the shoes of somebody else. So, I think many of us often are inspired by our own experience and what we’ve learned from our product design education, but we can also be inspired by other people’s experiences.

This is true even when we watch a movie. Why do we watch movies? We watch movies because they tell stories about other people’s experiences or other characters’ lives, right? So, imagine trying to put yourself in the shoes of somebody else. And we do that through talking to people, through interviews, through surveys, and through designing experiments.

Let’s say you give somebody six different cards with six different words on them, and you ask them to prioritize, or you ask them to put them in order of what they think is important. Then that helps you understand what that person thinks is important.

It’s really important for us to understand not just our own experiences but the experiences of others. Ethnographic research and other research methods that look into users’ needs can help us do that. What we learn about in online product design education can help us understand how to use those types of research to create products people need and want to use.

Because it’s important, again, to design not just for ourselves, but to design for other people.

At larger companies, it’s harder to push the boundaries of UX design and UI design. It takes a lot more justification to create something new because so much has already been invented.

A big way to do that is to really just make sure to audit all of the UX and UI design patterns within the company to see if there is something that you can reuse. If there isn’t, you can look at a variety of other companies that are doing something similar. Look across different industries and find best practices and introduce them in a way that shows that you’ve already looked at these other existing patterns, and they just don’t fit.

For example, I worked on an e-commerce project in augmented reality, and there just wasn’t enough existing patterns of behavior in a large retail company like Williams-Sonoma. Then I started looking across at Pokémon to see what was out there: in the app store, in the market, etc. That really helped to inform some of these new decisions and new technologies that we are creating.

So, really just expanding your horizons, oftentimes, and introducing that to the company in a way that is about collaboration and bringing on new technologies—I think that’s a big part of it.

There’s visual design in the corporate world, so you’re probably entering a space where there is branding and a design system has already been created. So your job would be to understand that system, whether it’s UI or UX design, and make sure you’re aligned with it. This might be a little bit different from creating a visual design system from scratch.

If you were thinking about creating a visual design system from scratch, then you still would want to consider the brand and how it wants to be perceived. For example, if you know there are three adjectives that the brand wants to express, you might choose different colors. You might choose different typography. You might lay out your page in a different way if your company wanted to be playful.

If your company wanted to be more professional, then you might also pick a different grid structure. You might pick typography that leans a little bit more toward sans serif. All those visual choices are going to express your company’s brand in a certain way.

But then, there are also visual design choices that should follow more universal principles. This is more of a personal taste, but I do always want to make sure that when I see a well-designed page, I know what the primary actions on that page are. And it should be the most highly contrasted item on that page because all my attention will be drawn to this particular button, for example.

There are some basics to UX or UI design that you should adhere to and some personal principles that you’ll develop over time, but that’s how I would explain it.

I think one of the things to think about when we’re designing cultural spaces such as museums is that they’re competing with other types of entertainment or places to go. And museums can’t just be “go up and look at art.” And the Museum of the Dog has got a wonderful body of work, and it’s a subject matter that nobody cannot like. But we needed to create more meaning and depth. And what was essential to that is, how do we do it in a joyful way? And how do we do it in an information-based way, as well as the mobile UI component-discovery through your phone?

So, there were several UX design elements that we did in the museum that were appropriate and placed at the right place at the right time. You could still enjoy the visceral effect and experience of beautiful, cool arts with a great UI design narrative. But you could also go up to a kiosk and have your face scanned and get matched to a breed. And it was those moments of fun that became where you become more engaged with the brand of the Museum of the Dog and AKC. You learned about not just the shape of the dog that you matched, but the temperament of the dog, its personality, and all the UX elements that you could enjoy alongside the fact that you just got matched to a breed.

Sometimes, it’s more of a minimal interaction to something more in depth. For example, we created these interactive tables-essentially like going up to a dinner table-where four people could stand at a time and look at different breeds. They learn about different breeds and get into a deep understanding of the 365 breeds that the AKC currently has and capture that information to take home. So there’s an education component that’s really important. The history of the breed, where it came from, its personality, and how it behaves. Is there art in the collection that actually features that breed? So we’re connecting it back to the arts. All of this becomes all connected as a component. Learning and education have always been very important to the AKC, so we needed to bring it in a smart and compelling way.

And then finally, we worked at developing an interactive, motion-activated experience for young kids to train a dog. By movement, they were basically teaching this dog how to fetch, pick up a ball, stop, sit, etcetera. Simple moves, but it’s a great experience for young people to learn a little bit more in a medium that they’re very familiar with about how to train a dog. I think it’s really important to point out that experience design just does not only involve the digital world. We created analog moments focused around families and children where they could sit down and draw and color and create their own art version of a dog. And that’s something that’s a nice analog balance to some of the more digital experiences.

And then we created one last element that was really built into the phone for adults, and also for kids. For kids, we had “Arty” who was your pet and your friend that would, in an AR state, come out of his dog house on your phone. And you could follow him to find and discover key paintings. And with that was a reward for the child. Engaging with the physical, but using mobile as a tool. And then it was also being used as a tool to get more information on specific paintings. So you could hold your phone up, it would push content to you, tell you more about the artist, the breed, its origin, and whatnot. We’re looking at all these overall touch points in a holistic way. So it’s not just a museum with art on a wall. It’s something that’s really more of an experiential thing around the notion of the joy of the dog.

When we develop the personas, we really do it in a very highly narrative way, thinking about who they are, where they came from, what their interests are, and what their needs are. If we think about human experience, we can think about task-based activities, discovery-based activities, or entertainment-based activities. We start looking at those behavior and experience modes modes against the persona. A 60-year-old woman is going to have a different need-case scenario of how she will do whatever activities that we’re looking at than a different type of user would.

We create these great narratives, and sometimes they’re done as “simply” as quotes. This morning when I got up, I needed to get to x, y, or z and take care of this. I walked or I got on the high-speed train and started creating these sort of emotional narratives that our clients can picture in their brain. Essentially, it’s the narrative of how their customers are going to get to a location or activate or engage online.

It’s easier to understand that than speaking in the abstract, so these personas become really important. Often, we have names for them or descriptions about them in terms of their behaviors. Those things help. They lend a little bit more insight to the uniqueness of the persona.

In UX Design, you’ll learn about developing personas based on user data research. These personas are important when creating UX design and UI design. UX and UI is only effective when it’s based off of the needs of real users, and those needs are seen through the personas.

“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.