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.

“How projects come in is incredibly varied,” says Kate Hixon. “Oftentimes you’ll get a call with someone who thinks they want one thing. As you speak to them about what their needs actually are and what their problem is that needs to be solved, the result or the solution becomes something quite different.” There are other times where it is really specific and you’re just fulfilling a brief for that particular product design. Hixon continues, “I’d like the client to be involved in the product development discussion about crafting what the issue is so that the solution is something that really resonates with them. In terms of how to start once we have a brief, is we try to just frame it in the broadest context possible.”

“You receive a design brief,” explains Jean-Jacques L’henaff. “You receive a timeline and you work with different departments and coordinate with them. When I was working at Dreyfuss, we had an exceptional situation where we were so early in the projects that we were actually able to define the interior of the plane and dictate the fuselage, which is very unique in the industry.” He goes on to say, “In comparison, when we work, for example, in my current occupation at LIXIL, we can work that way when we receive a design brief because it is part of an initiative that is company-wide and has been led by, defined by, the marketing team. Sometimes we also initiate our own research and discover opportunities for new products and new technologies in our industry. That last type of project is very interesting because that’s when you really have projects that are truly user-centric and insight-led. Usually, the outcome is much, much more innovative and much more interesting.”

These are the two main differences that you have, as explained in online product design education. “I would say,” L’henaff demonstrates, “we get a strategy or marketing-led initiatives and we get a brief. Sometimes we actually gather insights and from there go and suggest a type of product and work with the other department to develop it.”

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.

Learning a complex skill like product design can be painful because we’re flexing new muscles. We’re growing them, whether mental or whether in our eye-hand coordination. Taking shortcuts may risk the nourishment and development of your ideas. There is something that cannot be replaced from the incremental growth of an idea, pulling it apart, doubting it, not falling in love with your own drawing. When you become enamored with your own drawings, then your product development designs become about your own drawings, and they lose the real goal, which is beyond yourself and your individual aesthetic appreciation.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t love drawing. As you might learn in any product design education, you should draw at least 20 sketches a day, rain or shine. These should be of anything, using any material. Your drawings can be based on simple subjects, such as your own hand. They might be of the book that you’re holding or the person sitting across from you on the subway. Just draw. Keep your sketchbook with you wherever you are to be able to take notes, to draw, to sketch. And you should experiment with rendering techniques using different colored pencils, water-soluble colored pencils, gouache, or digital software. All are valuable tools. You should experiment with all of them. You might adopt strategies offered in an online product design education class.

But when you rush to finish and try to create that facsimile too quickly, you are cheating yourself from the real subtlety and nuance of what the product can and should become. And the chances are you’re actually creating shortcuts that are eliminating the creative flow; they’re shortening the field, so to speak, reducing some of the complexities that you should engage with in testing your idea in the broader world. Ultimately, the question you should be asking is not just what it looks like and how you can sell somebody on it, but why are you doing it in the first place? Why are you making another artifact in this particular design and material?

Now that you’ve learned how to create an efficient plan for your user research, it’s time to implement all of that knowledge and learn how to choose the right test strategies to help you with the user research stage. In this module, our experts guide you in this process and help you to design test strategies. Again, we promote the best ethical practices during every stage.

As you progress, you will learn how to implement principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the world of UX and UI. You will learn why these are so important in the user research stage. Once you gather all of that information from user research, you can refer to the personas and compare data, which can help you create a user flow that allows you to inform your UI design prototype.

Online UX Design Education

During your studies, you receive many opportunities to expand your knowledge and increase the tools in your UX design toolbox. This module can really help you learn how to use the data you acquire as optimally as possible so that you can take your prototypes to the next level.

In your online product design education, “You have to know the context within which the ultimate design solution is going to exist, and you have to put that in the context of what the goals are for your client,” Kate Hixon advises. “One of the essential things is to remember that the design is not personal expression; it is problem solving for someone else. The way you come up with the most relevant solutions is to know what needs are being met, both for your client and for the end users.”

John-Michael Ekeblad explains, “Opportunities cannot surface everywhere. It’s up to you to be very receptive for what you see going on in the market and in people’s lives. It’s not like there’s a bank of opportunities to suddenly say, ‘Hey, here you have it.’ It’s really about you starting to do a lot of footwork, doing a lot of your own research, and listening to your intuition. Ask yourself, ‘What does my heart tell me when I see it? What does my brain tell me when I see it?'”

This is not necessarily a bad thing because such research is one part of product design education, Ekeblad says. He suggests asking yourself questions like, “Where do I find opportunities?” and “Where do I find and identify a gap in the market?” He suggests going to the bigger companies, just as a consumer in their stores or on their websites, and seeing what products seem to be missing. When you find one, ask yourself if it could be an opportunity for you to introduce something new in product design.

“It really is about you scanning, revising, and editing your material,” Ekeblad notes. “Start all over again, and do it 10 times forward because you would come up with the answer, and you will be the one who comes up with this new idea. Even though these more prominent companies do million-dollar research projects, they usually have a particular focus in mind. They are looking for a specific answer while you really aren’t.” He points out that doing independent research like this presents a great opportunity to discover by bringing your new, untrained eyes to explore the world around you. He concludes, “That’s how, at some point, you will discover that hidden gem, this hidden undiscovered culture that you can actually do something fabulous with.”