“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.

Here’s the thing, your homepage is not your homepage. Google is. That’s where people start searching for their products. So even if a potential customer types in your brand name and sweater and they end up on your site, customers won’t stay on your site if they don’t see what they’re looking for. They’ll go back to Google and look at your competitors’ pages. It’s vital to understand this. There is a real need then to correlate what’s happening on the search engine with your website. This is the key to success.

The first thing people who are trying to do this should do is think about the copy on their website. That’s the first step. If you are not writing good copy that considers SEO and how people are searching for goods, no one will ever find you. And if they don’t see you, you’re not part of the competition. Next, you should also think about your website videos and images. You’d be surprised how many people shop by Google image search. And if your images are not showing up, you’re once again not part of the competition.

Conversely, you should also consider how much you will need to pay to show up in the top page results. Because if you’re not on that first page, you’re not part of the competition. This can become very costly, but it’s part of the rules of the game. So, you need to know all about SEM, SEO, and SMM. It can be challenging to keep up with the different acronyms relevant to creating a successful website. Still, these are tech words that you need to understand as a retailer if you want to compete with other brands.

When it comes to SEO for ecommerce, one of the main things we focus on each day is keywords. SEO revolves around keywords. Keywords can be anything from a single word to a phrase or a full sentence that a user types into Google to search for something. We utilize various paid and free tools that we use to analyze these keywords. These tools allow us to identify which keywords are most valuable for our specific needs.

The keyword search volume is an important criteria that we use to determine a keyword’s value for an ecommerce brand. Keyword search volume measures the average number of searches that people make using this specific keyword in Google search. Keywords can be broken down into the more general head keywords and the more specific long-tail keywords. Keywords often follow a pattern. The more general a keyword is, the more search volume it is likely to have. Higher search volumes expand our pool of potential ecommerce store visitors.

At the same time, these more general keywords are also more vague than the specific long-tail keywords. Vague keywords makes it harder for Google to understand the specific search intent of those users. If you’re using it in your own SEO strategy, you need to have content that covers a broader topic. This type of content needs to cover everything that users might be interested in.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are far more specific. People search for them less often. However, users that use long-tail keywords often convert better if you target the keyword correctly. Simply because they are looking specifically for what you have to offer in your ecommerce store.

We need to take each user’s thinking process into consideration when planning content. If we know exactly what users are looking for, we should focus on long-tail keywords. If we have a variety of different products in your ecommerce store, services, or a broad topic that we’re trying to cover, focusing on generic keywords is a better way to go.

“In some ways the soft skills are more important for designers than the hard skills,” Daphne Lin points out. “Because software always changes. You’re always going to have to learn some new technology to design a thing. The apps that we were using to design five years ago are different from what I’m using today. But the soft skills will get you so much further, because your role is such a collaborative role, and you need teamwork to implement designs.”

“As a designer, communication is so important,” she continues. “The ability to empathize and put yourself in other people’s situations is important. Facilitation … is a growing and equally important skill, because you have to get people into a room, gather data, information, and make decisions together, especially in this day and age. Remote facilitation, that’s also huge. You need to present your ideas in a compelling way, tell a story.” She adds that the more you can achieve all those things, the more likely it is that your concepts will be implemented in UX design.

“The main three soft skills are communication, empathy, and organization,” says Tiago Valente. “Communication: It is crucial that you have an ability to communicate in a way that is clear and efficient, not only within your team but also when you’re conducting surveys, when you’re interviewing people, when you’re interacting with the UI designers, and when you interact with the developers and stakeholders and even the product manager, when they are briefing you.”

He stresses that communication is not only how we express ourselves verbally and nonverbally, but also our ability to listen and understand. Communication is a two-way street, and I’m sure you’ve been working on it.

Valente continues, “Empathy is a great, important, capital letters, key skill. And empathy is so important because in the process of user research, when you’re talking to all these people, when you’re interviewing them, you need to have an ability to identify their needs, their pain points. Empathy will give you the superpower to place yourself in the shoes of your users and to understand them better, and to humanize the personas that you will create after the user research stage.”

As for the third soft skill, he says, “Organization is key. You will be handling an incredibly large amount of information that needs to be properly organized. Organization walks hand-in-hand with communication. When you have not only the data that you will be receiving from your user research and the inputs during your usability testing process, organization is very important for site maps, for labeling information, and for keeping the information architecture clear and in a good place.”

Communication, empathy, and organization are all skills you can develop and practice through online UX design education.

Everyone can think like a designer. If you go into your kitchen and open your door, you will see some tools that you use very regularly. I bet that you will also see tools that you used once, or maybe some that you’ve never used at all. Those tools just sit there at the bottom of the drawer. Why is that?

Why are the tools that you go back to time and time again on top? Why do the tools on the bottom just sit there waiting to get cleaned out or just gathering dust? There must be something that you really like about the tools you use all the time. Other tools on top may simply be really functional.

Maybe the ones that sit on the bottom, however, could have been designed better. The fact that you have this preference for tools that you use all the time over the ones that you do not means that you, too, can think like a designer.

As designers, sometimes we undertake really long processes that take months of research and thinking. However, we can also do really short product design processes called “design sprints.” A design sprint takes a long process and presses it into a few hours, days, or weeks, depending on the nature of the project and how many people are involved. Each sprint allows you to try an abbreviated version of a product development process to see if there’s “something there.”

Take a can opener or fruit peeler, for example, such as the tools in the OXO Good Grips line of products. OXO Good Grips was inspired by the fruit peeler of a woman with arthritis.

Over time, the woman realized that it was really difficult to use her fruit peeler. It was particularly hard for her to hold it due to the limited mobility in her hands. She thought to herself: “well, I wish there was a better fruit peeler.”

The woman happened to be connected to a kitchen goods manufacturer. They enlisted the help of designer Tucker Wemeister and his team, a firm called Smart Design, to develop a better fruit peeler. The blade of the fruit peeler did not make much of a difference for the woman; it was actually the handle that helped.

The team made a nice and comfortable handle for their fruit peeler. The woman found that the peeler was a pleasure to use in the hand: grippy, a little soft (but not too soft!), and not too slippery. When her hands were wet and she was trying to peel a carrot, it worked well because it did not slip as much and was easier to hold.

The next time you go to your kitchen, I encourage you to look at the tools that you use, the tools you reach for over and over again. Ask yourself: “What is it about these products that I really love using? Why do I reach for this time and time again?”

At the same time, open your kitchen junk drawer. Ask yourself: Okay, what is in here? Why do I never use these? Is there a design opportunity with your kitchen tools? Could you design them better?

There are opportunities for design sprints all around you. They may be in the kitchen, around the house, in the car, or even in the bathroom. In your everyday life and throughout your online product design education, you will find that the world is full of design opportunities. You never know where inspiration is going to come from.

No matter if you’re working on a physical project or if you’re working on digital project, having a set and well thought out testing process is something that’s very important. Keep the following three things in mind in your pursuit of online UX design education.

I took a course in Parsons around usability testing, especially around digital app design. One thing that I thought it was really helpful that I still use nowadays is to first of all figure out a script that you’re going to follow to do your usability testing.

Secondly, when you’re doing your usability testing, you don’t want to give any social pressure to the person that’s testing your product to make them feel like they have to say good things about your product. That’s something that’s very important.

Thirdly, it’s really important to set clear tasks for your tester to complete on their own with your product. Then while your tester is testing your product, we encourage them to speak out loud in terms of whatever they’re thinking in their mind. It could be that they completely have no idea what they’re doing or they just don’t like this particular color. It could be anything. What we want is to create a safe non-judgmental environment for your tester to feel free to speak out loud and say any thought they have in their mind when they’re interacting with this product.

All of this helps you as the designer of UX or UI to get unbiased feedback, which helps drive the choices you make in UX design or UI design.

Design elements in film are a little bit different from those of a live theater production. Theater recognizes that the actors who are in front of the audience are live. They engage with one another through their energies and their sound. They feed off of one another. If they make mistakes, then it’s live. They have to account for all of those things.

This is opposed to, let’s say, a how a movie tells a story. In a way, that’s a very finite linear narrative. Because of that linear quality, it allows the audiences, through this technology, to sit back and think about the interface of a cinema, or later, on your TV. The idea that you sit back and you absorb this story that’s being told without really being able to interject with it is a very different way of viewing a story.

That’s not to say that your brain is not working. That’s not to say that your brain doesn’t go between scenes and that this story is taking you somewhere else, which is that level of interactivity that takes place.

This places more emphasis on the UX design or UI design of the product that’s being displayed. It’s important for anyone pursuing online UX design education to think about what each choice in UX or UI requires of the audience. Think about what the anticipation or expectation of the audience is in terms of their role in viewing or experiencing this story that’s being showcased. Is their passive or active? How does that affect the design choices in the film?

If you want to learn about the history of viewing media, you need to look a little bit further away from the decade we’re in. We can perhaps go back, at least within the realm of the digital experiences, to the interface that really defined so much of what we are experiencing now, which is the screen. But the screen itself has really come from much further back than that, right? So, let’s talk about the implications of camera, picture, and then motion picture.

If we look at just the way in which experiences have been created and interfaces have been constructed, we have to really look at the essence of motion pictures. Motion picture is, at least to me, really one of the technologies that has truly defined our sense of self in the 20th century, which we are going away from now. We’re now seeing that process of being and becoming away from the motion picture.

I say that because what the motion picture really created was the understanding that you have frames that are still photography. You place them on a continuum, and you show it at a certain rate per second. And then you have the illusion of reality on a screen through that projection. It’s exciting to think about it if we put ourselves in the shoes of those who, for the first time in the early 20th century or late 19th century, were experiencing those kinds of interfaces.

To think about the first time the idea of a train coming into the screen, which was simply captured by holding a camera down on the railroad, and to think about what that really meant for people who had never seen this illusion of reality, is really amazing. The anecdote says that those who saw those first movies were quite terrified by what they saw, as they really felt that there was a train coming through the screen, and as a result, they left the cinema. That in itself has really defined how we came to understand the role of the audience.

Understanding the history of the screen interface can also help those who are taking online UX design education. In this type of online course, you will learn about UX, UI, as well as UX design and UI design.

I like to start this discussion with a question: How do you keep stakeholders happy?

Part of your job as a designer is to understand the needs and wants of stakeholders early in the product development process. We usually learn what their requirements are through a combination of interviews and various experiments. Sometimes, you find out that what they tell you during the investigation stage might not actually be what they need to make them happy. As a result, it’s important to maintain contact with stakeholders and check in with them regularly throughout the process.

Determining Stakeholder Needs and Wants

Let’s discuss the dinner analogy to break down stakeholder requirements: Let’s say you’re in a family of four people that includes yourself, a partner and two kids. You must pick something for dinner that meets everyone’s requirements. Yet, one of your children has an allergy, which means that you can’t use, let’s say, peanuts in whatever you’re cooking. Your other kid really loves mac and cheese and is going through a phase in which they want it and nothing else. That said, you can usually convince them to eat pizza if there are no other options. And, then, you must please your partner and yourself. The adults are a little bit more easygoing, but maybe one of you is trying to eat a heart-healthy diet.

You have all of these pieces in your requirement box. You now must come up with something to make for dinner. You start by thinking about what the different stakeholders are in this scenario:

– Will the kid with the peanut allergy eat a pizza. The answer? Yes.
– Will the kid who loves mac and cheese eat a pizza? Yes.
– Will the adults eat a pizza? Yes.

Okay. Pizza might be the winner. But before you can move forward by going through the trouble of making the dough and putting it all together and then putting the pizza in the oven, you check in with the stakeholders and say, “Hey, are you on board with pizza? Yes? No?” and use their additional input to guide you.

Online Product Design Education

The happiness of stakeholders isn’t easy to determine by just reviewing data specific to certain types of personas in a target market based on demographics researched by previous designers and marketers. You need up-to-date information. As part of your product design education, you learn how to approach stakeholders and directly receive all of the details you need to determine their needs and wants through the product design process.

For the best user interface (UI) design, you have to think carefully about the features of the product you want to make.

Let’s take something in the physical world as an example. We have public accessibility codes designed to help disabled people navigate their way through a city. What does that mean as far as user experience goes? What does good UX design look like in this case?

The design includes the things we have that meet the goal of those accessibility codes. We have things like ramps, walkways, and spaces on the sides of a metro station specifically for disabled people to use.

We don’t have that kind of accessibility code in the digital world. More accurately, we do have it, but it’s not enforced in UI design like the real-world code is enforced by the government.

What ends up happening if you don’t follow the accessibility code is that you end up not including a large section of society who would also be benefiting from and enjoying the kind of products that you’re making. This is a common UX flaw.

How do you take care of this issue as a business? How do you correct it as an organization that caters to a large section of millions of people? What are the concerns that you need to have so that your product is not just usable by a few people?

Something that online UX design education stresses is that whether you’re making a real-world product or something digital, it needs to reach all sections of society and be accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

You have to take care to make sure you’re not restricting any particular set of people from using it.

When we’re building products and solutions that cater to the needs of a broad spectrum of users, we need to bring the engineering team on board as soon as possible. The expertise and knowledge they have about how to build products that are accessible is key to planning and creating those products.

Their insight can help us enrich our prototypes and design solutions. Production is also easier once the engineers start working on the implementation of our solution. They appreciate and understand why accessibility is so important. They’ll build the product from the ground up with that in mind and include accessibility at its core.