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.

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.