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.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the audience and what the word “audience” means in terms of products that you design for any given project. As we were talking about before, it’s important to think about who’s currently using a particular product or who you’re designing that particular product for when you research different user groups.

The audience is really who you’re designing it for, right? The audience is going to be using it after it leaves your hands and goes into the world.

Why Audience Interest Matters

It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of that audience from a human-centered design perspective, but you also need to think about demand, marketing and sales: Are there enough people really interesting in or using this type of product? Is there enough demand for it in the current market? Do current trends imply any type of future interest?

“As a designer, you are part artist, but you also have to have a little bit of a business hat on in terms of, is it worth your time, and effort, and energy, and investment of yourself to launch a product?” explains Alicia Tam Wei. “Is there demand? Are people going to like it?”

You receive the answers to these questions by doing some testing and getting feedback from people. You might ask: Is a consumer actually going to like this? Are people going to use it? Are they willing to pay any or enough money for it? How much are they willing to pay for it? Is there an audience for this project?

The Minimum Viable Audience

There’s again one question you should always ask: “Is it worth my time?” Is it really worth the investment of my time, effort and energy, as well as my financial investments?

And, so, that’s where the minimum viable audience really comes into play. Is there enough of an audience? Is there enough of a demand for what you want to make?

Online Product Design Education

The greatest product design in the world won’t matter if it fails to draw the interest of more than a handful of people after you complete product development. As you continue your product design education, you will learn how to determine the right demographics for a target audience for any design and the right size for a viable audience.

Information hierarchies in UX UI design guarantee that users see all content organized in an ascending or descending order of importance in regards to the onscreen layout. Information hierarchies are one of the essential components of the visualization of content experiences in UI design required by visual designers and also writers.

I actually love this part. I’m dyslexic. When I read something, I need to be able to really quickly understand what I’m reading because it’s difficult for me if I get tripped up in too many words or the text doesn’t get the point in a relatively short amount of time.

Bites of Information

People don’t swallow their food whole. They take bites. The same is true of content. When people are looking at screen surfaces, you can only feed so much information to them. If they get to a point where they want more, you can let them add more to their plates by diving deeper and getting into more content.

In today’s world, you really need to create a well-edited, deeply considered content strategy so users actually walk away with knowledge or learn or understand something important. For example, they might walk away with a better understanding of something they need to do, such as filling in paperwork for a medical appointment or something related to education.

Online UX Design Education

With all UI content scenarios, you need to be really thoughtful with the written word. It’s essential for UX design. During your studies, you will see both good and bad examples of information hierarchies. You will also receive steps to craft fantastic content strategies that are well thought out and that work at attracting and holding user interest while making content easier for users to consume.

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.