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.

“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.”

In our module “Module for Visual Design,” the next level of UX magic starts happening.

It already started at the very beginning when you decided to tap into a problem that you wanted to solve, which shows that you have empathy and willingness to be of service with your work as a UX designer. But, now, let’s talk about the next step:

How do you communicate those ideas and services, products and solutions visually?

In this module, our experts explore all of the visual codes that are key to translating UX data, all of that information that you gather from different sources, into a viable user interface (UI). Visual UI design is not only attractive or aesthetically pleasing. It is useful, seamless and intuitive and directs the information in a seamless and effective manner. Visual design is all of that navigation. It is the buttons, colors, iconography and typography in a global context. All of these factors are very important to create a successful user interface.

This module outlines important, useful information that can help you succeed with your online UX design education studies and improve your chances of success once you pursue a UX design career.

“To be a UX designer, you need to have multidisciplinary thinking. And that means not only the specifics to UX in multidisciplinary thinking that we will review in a bit but also perhaps some other talents and gifts that you already have,” Tiago Valente says.

Cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, and sociology are more specific ones you will learn in your UX design practice. These will assist you in understanding human behaviors and the relationship between humans and their context—their social, cultural, political, and economic context.

“The role of the designer on product teams is also really maturing where, in the very beginning of this field, the designer was just expected to take requirements and create visual artifacts based on that. But now designers are really expected to be facilitators and thought partners to engineers and product managers,” Agnes Pyrchla states.

As a result, the field’s image is maturing. That is very exciting because it is simply a more fruitful way of sharing ideas.
One intriguing thing that came out was a Figma plug-in based on GPT-3, an artificial intelligence UX and UI model called Designer, which I believe scared people for a little while. Because you could say and write in “I want an interface that shows photos and has a like button,” and list out the features that you wanted. It would also create a templated wireframe and a mockup for you.

And I believe this demonstrates that, at this point, creating a template out of components is not the actual work of a designer. It all comes down to asking good questions and gathering relevant information. Knowing when to move on, the appropriate scope for the feature at hand, the use case you’re attempting to create, and how to iterate. You can get to learn these skills through online UX design education.

All of the softer skills associated with UX and UI design, I believe, will become more important as technology advances and some of the more rote aspects of the job can potentially be outsourced.

“User flow diagrams are when you start getting to the meat of how somebody is going to flow through your experience and what decisions they need to be making at every single step,” Says Agnes Pyrchla concerning UX design. “Whereas a journey map is a bit more contextual about entry and exit points of what someone is going through, their context, where they have pain in general, and what makes them happy. A user flow diagram is trying to solve that pain and communicate, ‘At this point, you’re here, you’re doing this, you have a decision point.’ You can move in either of these ways. It’s a chart that helps understand the movement from touchpoint to touchpoint, decision nodes across all of those touchpoints, and how that continues.” These are methods that are well-taught in online UX design education.

It’s really helpful because it starts to create a visual artifact so that product managers, engineers, and anyone else who’s part of the team can understand how this thing is going to work, especially when you’re going to be working with engineers who then need to make each of those steps happen and will have valuable questions for the intention and the actual feasibility of implementing that withing UI design.

The usability diagram is a great thing to do before getting into creating actual mocks for how things will look because it allows people to ask questions about the overall bones of the experience before getting into exactly how it’s going to look and feel. Think about it as an itinerary as if taking a trip somewhere. That’s almost a user diagram flow in the everyday life when starting here.

You’re going to go here. From there, you need to decide where to eat, and you have a few different options. Then, you go back to something. And what you’re trying to do is communicate to the rest of your group what you’re trying to accomplish and the whole of the experience. From there, you can add more and more detail.

In product development, sketching is not merely drawing. The sketching phase that some people think of when discussing product design is the most creative part of the process. You’re taking intangible ideas that you discovered in your mind and trying to manifest them somehow into something that’s tangible.

The Importance of Sketching

It’s great when you have an idea while resting, but then, when you try to sketch it or produce it in real life, you might realize that it really can’t work. It’s like a chair that has only one leg and can’t stand up on its own or anything else that just doesn’t work as expected in reality. You only start to see product design problems when you sketch ideas.

Online Product Design Education

You also start to reveal your ideas, which means that you can share them with other people. Another one of the powerful tools of industrial design is that you start to share ideas in ways that help other people to see them and work on them too. With a product design education, you receive opportunities to share your ideas with mentors and peers who can help you to better realize them.