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?

Industrial design is one of the broadest professions there is because we design anything, from small housewares, to transportation, to exhibits. I designed this product development course to mirror the design process. It starts with an exploration of the field and what kind of opportunities there are.

The next step is where you start sketching. We’re going to sketch out more what the industrial design profession does. And we’re going to show you how designers sketch in different media.

Industrial design is basically designing things, which humans have been doing ever since they got out of the cave. We pulled up a rock, and that was our first design.

The industrial design profession really started in the 1920s when we were called upon by the industry to design things for their machines so they could mass produce. That required us to create this new profession that was focused on manufacturing techniques and also about how to satisfy customers.

What’s great about industrial design is it’s really focused on user needs. What has happened over those last years is our tiny profession has become the dominant method of business nowadays. Everybody’s doing design thinking. They’re all focused on the user’s needs. And all the things that industrial designers invented now are the normal things that everyone uses.

The difference with what real industrial designers bring to the party, besides all that good stuff, is that we actually make real things.

The design process includes sketching up ideas. But by sketching, we mean actually sketching three dimensionally to make a mock up or something. So, the design process goes from trying to understand things, exploring what’s around, brainstorming ideas about how to solve the issues, or what opportunities we can find, taking those ideas, and refining them and trying to figure out how to make them into a real product.

Finally, we have to work with the factories and engineers to actually make the things. So, we get down to the nitty gritty of choosing which materials to use and what manufacturing processes are going to be used.

Then we even try and sell the product because we’ve been through the whole process. This product is our baby. We know where it’s good. We know when it’s bad. We know how to make people want that baby.

Basically, that’s the industrial design in a nutshell. In this module of product design, we call it “explore” because that’s the first phase of an industrial design project. What you do when you start exploring is you don’t know where you’re going. You have to start off with a blank slate.

We’re going to look at different ways you fill up that slate with information you didn’t know when you started out. But, at the end of this phase you’re going to have a good idea of what the project is about.

This is what a product design education course can offer you.

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.

“I’m always encouraging my students to aim for 100 ideas,” says Jamer Hunt. “You may think that there are only two or three good ideas for one single opportunity, but I say try for 100.”

When you start generating ideas, you often reach a point of frustration where you think there’s nothing else to think about. When you reach this point, you have to just keep moving forward.

“Just keep sketching,” encourages Jamer. “You have to keep iterating your ideas because eventually, you’ll reach ideas you didn’t know you had.”

Product Design

This is when things start getting exciting. This is when design really takes off. I like to refer to this as the unknown unknowns. These are the things that we don’t know we don’t know. This is the real magic of design. Most design falls under the unknown unknowns. For example, how can we take this vacuum cleaner and improve it by 3%? How do we take this experience on an airline and improve it by 3%?

Product Design Education

The unknown unknowns are those breakthrough ideas that really transform a way of designing into a way of creating new products. However, you don’t get there on your first, second, or third ideas. You have to push through to your 20th, your 30th, your 40th, and your 100th ideas. This is when you really put stress on your own sense of what you know. This is where you push yourself beyond your comfort zone into an area where the things in your head come forward. These are the things you aren’t prepared for and the things you don’t anticipate.

This is when the magic starts to happen.

“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.

Let’s say you’re on Zoom. How many of you have heard the phrase, “Oh, you’re muted. Could you repeat yourself, please?” The mute button is a great example of a product design opportunity. It’s something that we are all really familiar with, but fundamentally it’s poorly designed because it’s not intuitive to how we want it to work. That is a design opportunity. Again, it could start in everyday frustration. It could start because something is not working the way it should be. And really, if you can’t figure it out, that’s a design flaw. The person has not designed it to be easy to use and easy to figure out. There’s a better way to do it if you can’t figure it out.

So, what are ways that you can try and tackle this problem-solving process in product development? First, it’s really about identifying what the problem is. How you frame that problem is really important. Are you asking the right question? Coming back to the example of the mute button, is it, “Am I asking how do I make this mute button easier to turn on and off, or am I really asking how do I make the mute button work for me? How do I make the mute button intuitive? And how do I make the mute button work in a way that makes sense for most people?” Or is it also about making a solution that’s not about a mute button at all, but just about filtering out sound and being able to bubble up the important parts of speech and lower and suppress the parts of speech that are not as important? For example, filtering out white noise but raising voices when you really want to be heard.

The first part really to tackling a problem is framing the problem and figuring out what is the question you’re really trying to answer. You might think you’re asking one question but as you go forward in the design process, and you research, and you develop ideas, you actually come back to the question, and the question isn’t quite right. Let me rephrase this. Let me adjust this and rejigger it to a way that makes more sense and actually gets at the heart of what I really care about. That’s the first part: just framing the question. It sounds easy, but it’s actually really hard.

We often ask questions in the phrase of “how might we?” How might we design a better mute button? Or, how might we come up with a sound system that’s more intuitive? How might we filter out background noise? How might we ensure that voices are heard? There’s a whole different way, and each one is focused on the same problem but with slightly different perspectives. That’s framing the problem.

These are the kinds of questions tackled in our product design education courses.

Emily Rothschild says, “When you start out in product design and product development, it’s really important to understand who your audience is and who your user is.” Where is this design, this project that you’re working on going to resonate most? You will need to think about where it’s going to land, where it’s going to live, who’s going to understand it, and most importantly, who’s going to use it.

Do a thorough analysis into the types of users that you’re working with. That can be creating personas. It has to involve talking to people, it has to involve putting ideas forward to get feedback and responses, it will involve testing when you come down a little bit farther down the road with the initial ideas. You’ll begin to build prototypes, even quick and dirty, sketch models. This means putting together something to express an idea that somebody can take and hold and react to. Through that process, you will better understand whether your ideas and your hunches are beginning to land and work and resonate with the people who need this or want this new design.

“Industrial designers think of the audience as actually the user,” says Tucker Viemesiter. “But the real audience for a product includes the guy who has to make it in the factory, the person who sells it to the customer, or the customer who buys it.” The customer who buys it is not necessarily the same person who uses it. For example, your mother buys a toy, but your mother is not going to use it, the baby’s going to use it. Each one of those people in the audience has something else that they’re trying to get out of this thing. You have to address all those people, and everybody has a different need. When you answer all of those things, hopefully, you have a really successful product.

Scott Henderson explains, “Back when the baby brand skip hop, was, again, just a husband and wife team, I came on as one of their first consultants. At the time they were making soft goods, diaper bags, and things like that, and leaving the industry in that area. They wanted to go ahead and make some hardgoods products, not so much designed for the baby. Because it’s really hard to design for someone from a third person point of view. And since babies are so young, it’s almost a useless exercise to try to get into their head as to what they really need. It really is about the parent.”

Henderson continues to say, “We created a strategy where we were going to create five or six hardgoods products: one in the area feeding, one in the area of in and around the sink, cleaning of bottles and things, one in the area of nursery, diaper management, and a couple of nursery products. We broke it up like,” a person’s house has a nursery, they have a kitchen, they have the refrigerator.” Once we establish these zones — kitchen, bathroom, kid’s room, nursery room — I set out to create a bunch of products that would work in these spaces.”

Our product design education course helps you design products with the user in mind.

How do you come up with the requirements for a product development project? Well, we can start with this user journey and say, “OK, how does this person use it, and what are their needs?” What are the needs of a person in this scenario, and what are the minimum requirements? What are the maximum bounds of what we want to create? At the very least, when it comes to this mute button scenario, we need it to be able to turn sound on and off essentially. That’s one way of looking at it. But, really what we want it to do is not communicate anything that shouldn’t be communicated and share what should be shared. So, what should and shouldn’t be shared across audio?

For example, you want to hear your grandma telling you a story about what it was like when she was growing up, but you don’t want to hear the toilet flushing. How do you distinguish, and how do you design a system that’s going to do that?

We’re looking at minimum performance in product design. Success would be that. Let’s say you want it to be easy to use. What does “easy to use” mean? Does “easy to use” mean it reads my thoughts? Does it mean it’s easy to push on and push off? Does it mean the button is big enough so that my visually impaired friend can use it? What does that mean for it to be “easy to use?”

On the other end, it also needs to be “not too complicated,” and that’s sort of combined with “easy to use.” This is the same way that you might develop financial metrics for success. Let’s say you want to hit a sales target of $6 million. That’s a very straightforward number. But, often metrics have more nuance to them. And similarly, you might have metrics for sales in terms of not just sales targets, but amounts like percentage yield or percentage of success, like how many attempts were successful, that kind of thing.

Likewise for a product design project, you want to think about not just making it work, but what are the nuances underneath making it work? Making it work better might be your overall department. But then within that, make it easy to use, not too complicated, and facilitate communication. Those might be a set of very simple requirements for a design project.

These requirements are what you go back to time and time again when you are testing your concepts and your prototypes. You’ll say, “OK, is this successful? How do I tell if this is successful? Does it meet my requirements? Is it within my requirements? Yes or no?”

The minimal requirements of success are some topics covered in our product design education courses.

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.