UX Designs Essentials expert, Jo Gulliver, on design language, a communicative tool that helps designers create visually coherent designs.

My name is Tiago Valente, and I’m a creative director, strategist, designer and professor at Parsons The New School.

In this rapidly evolving and lucrative industry, employers from a variety of fields are looking for creative thinkers and innovators who can create new types of UI design. It is our goal to give you all the skills necessary to create compelling projects that will enhance your UI and UX design portfolio.

We’ll walk you through the crucial stages that will enable you to create compelling experiences and engaging interfaces. You will understand exactly what UX is about and what UI is about. What is the difference? What are the complements? What’s the background? Why do we behave in the way that we behave?

You will learn to look at your environment in much more detail using observation and many other skills. You’ll learn some of these skills in your online UX design education, but you’ll realize that you already have many of them.

We’ll guide you through all the stages that lead to a successful user experience journey while leading you to build your very own portfolio.

When you’re working in product design or product development, the first phase of a project is the same for anything, because you’re going to be starting with a blank slate. In a way, you want to feel like you don’t know anything, and you can explore what the field is.

You look at other comparable products. You try to talk to experts. You look at users and what they’re currently using. That exploration phase can go all over the place. For example, if the client is a factory, and they make things out of glass, then you already know that the solution is going to be something made out of glass. But if it’s an entrepreneur who has some new invention, then you have to look at that in a different way.

Either way, the basic thing is that you need to look at everything with an open mind. And really, the fact that you don’t know anything about it yet is a really big advantage because a lot of the time, people who think they already know everything actually miss all of the good ideas.

When you start a project, you really need to be sure that you understand what else is out there. You need to understand the parallel projects or products and understand how whatever the thing that you’re making or designing, whether it be an object or system or experience, fits in.

Also, is it something that’s really needed? Is it something that really stands out? Do you need an object? How does it work? How does it fit in with that structure? These are all questions to ask yourself that will help you come up with the way that it’s used, the way that it looks, the way that it’s priced, and how it fits into the marketplace.

Really, what it comes down to with both product design and product development is doing your research, and understanding what’s out there and what’s needed.

You can learn much more about these concepts, as well as a wide variety of other lessons and concepts related to both product design and development, with online product design education. Choosing to do your learning online is by far the most convenient way of getting a quality product design education.

In the next stage, you add a little bit of dynamics to your prototype to figure out what is the best way to create this conversation. You start by looking at different elements, including animation, colors and images. By adding dynamics, you can also start to go to the specific person that you’re designing for to seek more input. After all, at that stage, you want to have a very specific scenario in mind as well.

UX Design Prototype Feedback

When you go to a person and you design a system, such as a map for a person who wants to go from Point A to Point B, the user flow that you create should have a very specific scenario so that you can have a person try out your system or the prototype. For example, they might try out one that has colors, one that has animation or one that is dynamic in other ways. The user can actually try to use that system to help them go from Point A to Point B.

If they’re successful, your prototype is successful. If they’re not successful, and more often than not they won’t succeed with your UI in the first few stages of the prototype’s design, you have to ask yourself: Where did they come across a UX problem? Did they fail when they tried to press a button because they interpreted the button as text and not as a button? Did they fail because they interpreted the image as something that conveyed too much information and looked more like text? Did they fail to enter the information into a text box because the text box was just too small?

These are the things that you can identify in your UI design with a digital, high-fidelity prototype. When you allow this type of interaction with one or more users, the results convey to you the exact areas in which your prototype is failing. You then have to decide how best to reverse course and quickly refine the prototype so that you can try again to see if a user can accomplish that task.

As you’re learning through your online UX design education studies, a prototype gives you the ability to do something that you don’t have to fall in love with and can even throw away. A prototype allows you to more successfully get to the goal of designing a simple pleasurable application.