“The way that we start UX Design projects-or how we build products-in all of the UX roles that I’ve worked on is typically focusing on people and determining what are those people’s needs,” says Pilar Serna. “Like sometimes, people have a need to do something better. Or perhaps, they have a current pain point. So we try to do lots of research at the beginning of every project to really understand what are those UI needs, and what are the pain points and opportunities in order to start elaborating a solution for people.”

“So the UI Design process is very human-centric, as we say,” continues Serna. “And there is always a moment where the team gets together, and we do a kick-off and alignment. That’s when we try to really understand what the problems are that we are going to solve. And a big part of this is continuing to do this research and talking to people so that we can better understand what their needs are. What are the opportunities that we can tackle? Every project is different. The process is very diverse depending on the kind of solutions that we’re bringing.”

“So, usually, when a client comes to me, they have a particular problem that they want to solve. They don’t always know what it is, but they definitely have a need,” adds AJ Camara. “And the whole idea is that I need to help them solve that problem and ultimately help them reach their goals. The process starts off with a discussion, just getting to know the client and getting to know some of their day-to-day business, the ups and downs, what’s working for them, and what’s not working. And then from there, I look into how we can dig deeper. And then we go down a path of trying different things that, ultimately, help them achieve that goal.”

“Since the problem is not always what they think it is, there’s a lot of iteration involved,” Camara continues. “Someone might think that, for example, their website needs a redesign of their homepage, but the real problem might be that their product page has a button that doesn’t work. So some of these different things are what we dig into, as we go down this path of exploration, and figuring out what the true solution is for their problem. And, throughout that process, the conversation, essentially, continues, and it goes down different paths.”

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.

Product design and product development begin in stages. Some of these projects begin as ideas outside of a company, but a lot of them are initiated internally. Innovation inside the company starts with an idea that is further developed by research, which is conducted on a regular basis to create a type of road map toward design and development.

“Part of that research,” says Jean-Jacques L’Henaff, “involves ethnographic research and just talking to random people on the street and in the community. This is different from a focus group, which selects a set group of people to engage in a question and answer sort of research project.”

“It also doesn’t try to steer people in the direction of answering direct questions about things they like or want or even need,” L’Henaff continues. “Instead, ethnographic research of this sort engages them in a discussion and then observes the person’s reactions to gauge unmet needs. We are looking for points of friction and coping mechanisms too. That is because people don’t even realize most of the time that when there is a point of friction, they find a coping mechanism to get around it. That is why it is so important to observe people and decipher what people are telling you in order to understand where the true issue is.”

Product design education, and particularly online product design education, uses these approaches a lot. Once you get what the true issue at hand is, you can take all this data and all of this quantitative information and turn it into valuable insight. Then, you decide if this valuable insight is worth focusing on and whether or not it’s worth turning into a project. Maybe it isn’t a separate project unto itself, but it becomes part of a project that’s already in the works. That’s a pretty common practice too.

Daphne Lin, an online UX design education professional, argues that Apple was the biggest driver for user experience in the tech industry. “They showed a huge competitive edge by creating and designing products from a user perspective,” she says. “I think companies still have a long way to go when it comes to design.”

Industries understand design is important. However, they still view design as only visual design. In Lin’s own day-to-day work, she educates people that design is not just what it looks like, but how it works. Her goal is for people to realize that, even when they are brainstorming ideas and features or writing requirements documents and specifications, they are still doing design work.

To UI design expert David Owen Morgan, the first iPhone, which came out in 2008, was a game-changer. “It was just rethinking what it would be like to have websites in your pocket, and to be able to access the voicemail interface being totally different,” he comments. “You can just scroll through a visual interface for voicemail. It just gets so exciting to rethink the paradigms that we’re stuck in and recognize that there’s an opportunity to introduce new ones.”

The advent of material design in phone operating systems was a sea change. It was big tech companies showing priority on design and the UX design language. Companies must think about a two-sided marketplace where they’re not just catering to millions of users, but also to hundreds of thousands of developers. They must provide guidelines and tools for a long tail of engineering and ingenuity. “Building tools that help others build tools are always ones that have been important for me,” Morgan adds.

Toward the end of the product development ideation workshop sprint, after we’ve completed our divergent and convergent brainstorming, we’ll end up with a good list of concepts that we think are going to be promising. Since we still have a handful of ideas under investigation, we then go through a prioritization exercise in which we use conceptual filters to narrow our list. We use filters related to desirability for the user, feasibility from a technological perspective, especially in product design cases when we need to actually make or manufacture a thing and viability from a business point of view. When you think about all of the concepts that came from our sprinting ideation exercises and you filter them through these three main areas, usually one or two concepts pop out that we then bring to the sketching stage.

Sketching After the Sprint

At first, we do very rough sketching in digital applications. We basically fill in templates that look like interfaces or screens or fill a series of wireframes that allow us to tell a story, such as how a person needs to achieve a specific goal. We might tell their story by saying: “He starts here. He clicks here. He transitions to the next thing and the thing after it and so on.” It’s really important to show how it’s going to work over a series of interactions.

You probably see a lot of wireframing going on in the sketching stage. Sometimes, before we even start sketching the actual product, we go through a process of creating a concept poster or something similar to make certain that we thought of everything. We ask ourselves:

– What’s the name of your product?
– Who is it targeting?
– What’s the key, cool differentiating message?
– What does the product do?

We go into the sketching stage and then emphasize creativity with this one foundational document about what this thing actually looks like and how it works.

Online Product Design Education

During your product design education courses, you will learn a lot more about these and other processes that product designers often rely upon during ideation workshops to aid them in fulfilling the needs and desires of their clients and consumers. Every course is designed to help you move steadily one step closer to your dream of becoming a successful producer designer.

Scott Henderson is an industrial designer, so therefore he creates primarily three-dimensional objects. “I find that it is critical to work in 3D. So even before all of this CAD stuff was available, I would carve foam. They used to call me the foam king because I would walk around like a snowman just covered in dust from literally carving forms out of foam to get these forms exactly right,” says Henderson. He’s a good person to learn from as you continue your online product design education.

That training of carving these things by hand has tuned his brain to be able to think three-dimensionally. “I don’t need to really do that foaming process anymore; I can go into the 3D virtual CAD model and do the same thing without losing any quality or compromise of any kind. Also because I fine-tuned my CAD skills so that I’m sort of like a Jedi master of CAD.”

But the reason he did that was because he sees the value, and the value is there. You cannot compromise the form for any lack of a skill that you might not have, because it can compromise the success of the design. And that’s the last thing you want, so remember that as part of your product design education.

One of the first things you’ll learn to do in good UX design is quantitative research. In quantitative research, you ask people questions that lead you to a very specific set of answers. Hopefully, you get the answers you were looking for.

Through these answers, you might discover whether a feature on your website works the way you were expecting or whether it would be good to include that feature if the site is visited by 10,000 people or 1 million people.

The power of quantitative research in UX and UI design comes in when you get answers to questions like those.

Imagine you don’t want to invest the time into doing quantitative research with hundreds of users so you’re working with a much smaller sample size. In this case, qualitative research is a more appropriate strategy. Personal interviews can still be done with one person, or you can hold group interviews with five or 10 people.

Good online UX design education will teach you that it’s important to have a specific goal for these interviews and to start with that goal. You can do this whether you’re building a physical product or something digital like an app or a website. Let’s use digital products as an example.

Your goal might be to figure out whether you need some kind of a feed feature on a website or app you’re building and, if so, what that feed should be about? Would it be something that is more like storytelling or would it be something more like a news feed?

In a case like that, you’d want to find the appropriate users that you’re targeting with your app or the website that you’re building. You would talk to them and ask them open-ended questions instead of specific questions about the UI of your site or app.

What do they generally do during the day? When they go on a social website, how do they browse? When they go on a news website, how do they browse?

Using those interviews and the transcripts that you gather from them, you would start to code the interviews to figure out the patterns between all of these users. If those patterns lead you to something that overlaps between all of the interviews, that’s a specific result you’ll probably want to implement on your app or website.

In product development, you go through what we call the human-centered design process that involves you really trying to understand as much as possible about who is going to be able to use the product or idea. You have to do what we call ethnography and really try to recall and understand the insights, backgrounds, pain points and motivations of consumers in general and the members of a specific target market. You need to learn from their demographic framework, which means you need to study their class, race, gender, sexuality, employment status, level of education, geographic location and academic, work and social networks. We call these people, the ones who interact with our products and ideas, stakeholders.

Recognizing Every Stakeholder

If you are designing a product for a child, for instance, they are a stakeholder. Yet, the child’s parent who buys their toys, objects, articles of clothing and other items product designers create is also a stakeholder that you must consider during the design process. By extension, anyone else who might buy the product for the child, such as grandparents or friends, are also stakeholders, right? You need to ask yourself: Who else is influencing the person or group of people who you are designing for and what type of value do they find in it?

Recognizing Physical Elements

When we focus on humans during the human-centered product design process, we are trying to understand how people and people around them think and value things. We are also trying to understand them as physical human beings too. Oftentimes, when we are creating objects of design on the industrial design scale, we must focus on what we call “human factors.” We are trying to understand particularities about someone’s physiology, such as the strength of their body, the size of their hands, the level of their vision or the size of their head, to make certain that we understand how a product might interact with them physically.

Online Product Design Education

Human social and physical factors influence designs and economics. We need to think about how stakeholders want a product to function and the types of problems that a product can solve for them. Keep in mind that these are just a few examples of human-centered product design. During your product design education, you will learn a lot more about this process and how you can use it to turn ideas into tangible items that people need and want to bring into their lives.

Product design deadlines can sneak up on you faster than you might think possible, which means that you have to make certain that you’re working at a steady pace. How do you stay on track? How do you give yourself a little bit of leash, so to speak, to discover things that are unexpected?

There are many stories from the history of research and development days when scientists would experiment with X material for a purpose and discover, with the purpose or goal just in sight, something else potentially as important along the way. This type of scenario is challenging because the product design process requires that we design time as much as we design material. On any given day, how we design our day and how much we stick to that design matters.

Deadlines as Motivational Tools in Product Design

There are many strategies that I use to design how I use time. I don’t always listen to myself, but I try to do the best that I can when I’m working on a project. You need to recognize that someone may expect a very quick turnaround and that a deadline is not your enemy but your friend. Deadlines may come from a client that is expecting, for production reasons, a deliverable at a certain point in a certain process or sequence. You may also receive an artificial deadline for competition reasons. Deadlines aren’t to be cursed as unreasonable or horrible things. You really need to appreciate and embrace them because they can help motivate you to take an incremental amount of time and subdivide it into activities.

What Does Dishonesty Mean in Time Management?

You ask yourself how you can design your time, your timeline, and how you can get from “here” to “there” in the time that you have available from now until the deadline. A deadline gives you both time and spatial activity reference. It also keeps you somewhat honest. When you’re dishonest about time with yourself, such as if you take on too many projects at once or take too much time having fun while brainstorming and fail to leave yourself enough time for iterative testing, you can expect negative feedback from clients. Your inability to manage time changes your design and product development. It all comes out in the wash too. The more you’re dishonest and fail to manage time, the more you experiment and fail with a particular sequence. When you get better at being honest with yourself on what you actually have time to do, you can expect more positive client feedback.

Online Product Design Education

As shown, you can shortchange yourself on any number of product design projects in various ways. To prevent adverse outcomes, such as a reduction in project opportunities or potential permanent damage to your reputation, it’s important to learn as much as possible now about time management skills and tools while pursuing your product design education.