There’s visual design in the corporate world, so you’re probably entering a space where there is branding and a design system has already been created. So your job would be to understand that system, whether it’s UI or UX design, and make sure you’re aligned with it. This might be a little bit different from creating a visual design system from scratch.

If you were thinking about creating a visual design system from scratch, then you still would want to consider the brand and how it wants to be perceived. For example, if you know there are three adjectives that the brand wants to express, you might choose different colors. You might choose different typography. You might lay out your page in a different way if your company wanted to be playful.

If your company wanted to be more professional, then you might also pick a different grid structure. You might pick typography that leans a little bit more toward sans serif. All those visual choices are going to express your company’s brand in a certain way.

But then, there are also visual design choices that should follow more universal principles. This is more of a personal taste, but I do always want to make sure that when I see a well-designed page, I know what the primary actions on that page are. And it should be the most highly contrasted item on that page because all my attention will be drawn to this particular button, for example.

There are some basics to UX or UI design that you should adhere to and some personal principles that you’ll develop over time, but that’s how I would explain it.

CRM stands for ‘Customer Relationship Management’. These software systems allow you to manage and grow the relationships that you have with your customers.
But how do you effectively use CRM? And how do you understand what type of CRM is correct for your business? There are many CRM platforms available. Many can do the same basic things, but some offer unique features.
Before selecting which platform to use, you must decide what it is you want to know in your business and know the size of your business. You need to understand what you want to get out of your customer database. Is it to understand how your customer’s behaviors converts to a purchase? Or is it that you just want to be able to regularly reach out and create client retention?
At the bare minimum, a CRM program should automatically be able to categorize your customer base, securely store their information, and give you reporting on their behaviors, whether it’s by spin decile or regional decile. Depending on the CRM program, you can go deeper and wider from there.
Ecommerce industry companies have started to use gaming industry CRM platforms. The reason for this is because in the gaming industry, the CRM platforms look at the behavior that a customer is doing on a website. This website interaction behavior can be useful information for ecommerce to convert more sales.
We are moving into a space where customers want to feel like they are in control. This is the concept of CMR, or ‘Customer Managed Relationship’. Businesses are now asking how they can give tools to the customers so that the customers feel like they are choosing how they engage with the brand, rather than forcing them into the way the brand wants them to engage. This can be hard, especially for luxury companies that are used to managing the whole customer experience.

An aspirational customer is a customer who doesn’t know you yet. They are interacting with you for the first time. You can call them an aspirational customer or a seeker.
Then there is the intermediate customer. They shop with you sporadically, maybe a few times a year, but you want to grow them into being a loyal customer.
Finally, there is the loyal customer who is a frequent visitor to your site.
You can get this kind of information on your customers from your CRM platforms. Much of the software available today helps you segment your customers so that you can make the right choices.
When you think about customer segmentation, understanding the countries in which you are doing business is vital. For instance, your site should allow customers to switch to the language of their choice. So, if you do business in France, it should automatically ask a French customer whether they want to see the site in English or French.
These are some considerations you have to make when doing the segmentation of your customer base.
You’ve got to understand how the different cohorts of consumers use your product and what functionality they need. Then you can address the various consumer groups with a clear-cut message and targeted merchandise.
In the e-commerce world, now we have more and more data that can help you understand the diverse customer needs and wants. You can use tools like email or CRM, segmentation, and data analysis to personalize and fine-tune your message at a more granular level.
That’s how you can use the power of e-commerce to personalize your message.

When you’re creating a product, it’s important to think about what information you want to continue building, or even start out with.

“So when you’re first starting out, I really like to get a market context and read up about the space as much as possible to understand trends, who the big players are, how big the market is, how much money is being made in that market,” says Agnes Pyrchla. “And that’s when I’m really defining the scope of the product”

Even if a product manager, strategist, or someone with a business perspective is likely to be in charge of that type of analysis, if a designer is interested in it as well, it’s always beneficial to add new perspectives to the UI and think about the problem more holistically which is important in UI design.

“When I think about design research versus market research, I think they have a lot of similarities in that you’re talking to end-users or potential customers,” says Daniel Holtzman. “But they have a lot of differences that are really important as well. Market research is really aimed again at and understanding people’s preferences, at describing the behaviors that they might have”

It’s all about developing people’s profiles. When we think about design research, I believe it is important to understand their motivations. It’s all about understanding the differences between what they say and what they do. And it’s all about instilling empathy in users. The way we do these things is also usually quite different. Focus groups are frequently used in market research. So there are a lot of people in a controlled environment with a moderator talking to them about a specific product, idea, or campaign and gauging their reactions. Surveys and other types of inputs are other common tools used in market research to ensure superb UX design. These skills can be attained through Online UX Design Education

These are large samples, involving a large number of people and attempting to elicit very specific data points from them. But, when I think of design research, I think of a smaller sample size than, say, market research, and it’s really focused on figuring out what the motivators behind behaviors are. Market research, on the other hand, is frequently focused on describing behaviors or understanding preferences to determine needs from a UX perspective. But what we try to do is meet people where they are.

“Human-centered design is, as the name suggests, it puts the humans at the center of whatever we design, whatever solutions that we’re creating,” says Rinat Sherzer. “And so when we look at a business, a lot of times decisions are being made driven by business opportunity, by the bottom line, by revenues and profits. And when we create a product, we first of all look at the humans, and what are their needs, and how we’re going to create an experience that is really transformative for them”

Then there’s the belief that once we crack that, the profits and revenues will follow. But first and foremost, we need to solve a real problem and get to the heart of what we’re trying to solve.

How do we manage a project for InDesign? Let’s look at making dinner in a product design and product development context.

When you’re managing dinner, you know you want to get the food on the table by a specific time, and you know everything that’s going into the meal, from the starter to the entree to the dessert.

You want everything to be done by 6 o’clock, you’ve got that deadline, and you’ve got multiple things in play. You’re often doing things simultaneously or in parallel. You’re not making the appetizer, then the main entree, then the dessert. You’re making several parts of the meal at the same time.

You have a set deadline because people are hungry and don’t want to wait. You don’t want to have a starving kid, trust me!

You understand that you need to start by a certain time and run these processes in parallel, depending on where your resources are. Do you have a microwave? Do you have a stovetop? A toaster oven? An oven? How many different processes can you run at the same time to get dinner on the table at a certain hour?

Running a product design process is kind of similar in terms of having a launch date and an optimal deadline. Unlike the deadline hour for dinner, the launch date for a product is often determined by the time of year.

If you’re launching, let’s say, a new toy you expect to be a big seller, then you want that toy out in time to get to the retail trade buyers that are going to launch it. You’ll do everything you can to get that toy into their stores for Christmas.

Something product design education tries to do is to get you to think through all the decisions and planning that happen in a case like that. You think through the process, and you know that you need to have this toy finished and ready for the buyers to look at by a certain date.

It has to be ready by the time the trade show is happening (if we still have trade shows after COVID).

Here’s where good product design education is so important. You have to learn to work backward from your deadline to consider production timelines. You need to be able to produce the prototypes and the finished product in factories around the world. You have to think about how you’re going to get those processes going.

This includes not just finishing the design, but also finishing all the tooling and manufacturing. It also includes anticipating all the problems that might come up in going from a prototype to something that’s ready for manufacture.

When your product is ready to go to a retailer, will the retailer want a special version of that new toy? Sometimes retailers want an exclusive version for their stores, and you have to bake extra time into the process for that.

Your online product design education needs to help you figure out how to do all the anticipating and planning and still be able to get your product ready by Christmas to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.

To go back to the example of making dinner, you’d want to get your bread in the oven first. Then you’d cook the fish before you worried about the dessert. You’d do things in a certain order, but the tasks would overlap rather than be one after another.

You have to plan the order of your tasks and how you’ll handle them so that all the food is ready at the same time. This is the same thing you’ll do when you figure out the sequence of processes you need to design and create a product by a deadline.

In UI design, many people are relying on colors or are drawn to colors to differentiate things, like illustrating the meaning of two different buttons or distinguishing a link from a regular text. However, if a user is colorblind, they may not perceive the difference. This online UX design education blog will help you build an interface that’s accessible for everyone.

Wireframe First

As a designer who has red and green colorblindness, one thing I like to do is work in as much detail as possible for the final version of wireframes for my app design or web design. I’ve found that’s really, really helpful in my work itself. You can look at a detailed wireframe as if you’re looking at a black-and-white version of your design. Working in as much detail as you can to create a UI with just black, white, and gray allows you to create a visual hierarchy for someone to successfully navigate and use your interface.

Adding Color

Black, white, and gray have a definite contrast of tonality in UX design. Use that tonality to define your color usage as well. When you’re adding colors to your UI, you can base the contrast of the colors in terms of the black and white and gray tonal contrast.

Back to Basics

I think sometimes when we give ourselves a limited amount of tools, we actually create a more accessible UX design. This is another reason why I say start in black, white, and gray. Try to reduce your tool kit first, and then design a successful UI. Then on top of that, you can add colors to make your UI design a little bit more exciting.

In regards to ethical issues, the most important thing is to be very, very sensitive. When we go out and interview people, we want to really understand the world. Because human beings are very complex creatures, our world sometimes is very vulnerable.

What I would always recommend when you interview someone is to be hypersensitive to where they are and look at their body language either when they’re closing up, when they’re opening up, when they’re looking away, when they’re looking straight at you, when their eyes open up with excitement, etc. If we see them closing up, it means that we’re touching something that is sensitive there.

This is really where our ethics come into the picture. Do we want to probe them more and push them towards more answers, or is this enough information for us and do we want to back up? The idea is to really respect whoever you’re interviewing and observe what they’re not saying, and be sensitive about when you’re going to explore further.

In your online UX design education, it’s important to keep the method of your research at the forefront of your mind. Your UX and UI decisions are based on these interviews, and it’s important that the UX design and UI design data you gather are collected in ethical ways.

Often, when designers use the word modeling, and if you were to look up an industrial design model, you would see a product that really looks like the real thing. So if you looked at the model of a shoe, a model of a surgical tool, or a model of a bandage, it’s just going to look like that specific product that represents the product design concept.

But that model in what we call the high-fidelity state is not really for testing. That model is to show what we call a proof of concept or to illustrate our final design intent to help others visualize the concept. But before we ever get to that model, we’re doing all sorts of Frankenstein modeling or low-fidelity models, because we’re just trying to figure this idea out. So, there may be several steps that lead to a satisfying end result.

If we never made a drone before, we’re trying to figure out how we can pull together a drone. You might buy existing products that work similarly, take them apart, and reverse engineer them to try to understand from a product development standpoint how they work, how they fit together, and how the pieces fit. You might be taking measurements or looking at the circuits.

But you’re really trying to understand the design from existing products, and some of these things can be almost exactly what you want to create. At other times, though, the design may be very different. But we’re trying to look for those influences and inspiration from analogs. Then we’ll pull that design together into functional or semi-functional prototypes where we’re just testing these ideas. For prototyping for designers, it really is about the inquiry of trying to test hypotheses about how things might work. This process is similar to what you might learn from a professional product design education.

Designing products from models is about aesthetics. So, sometimes we’re making form prototypes where we’re trying to understand how things should look or feel in the hand or while in use. Sometimes we’re experimenting with different materials on an object. We might want to see how one material behaves versus another. That can range from a fit in the hand to how it feels to your skin, but also it includes functionally pertaining to how these things work.

If you had something that had to spin or hinge or had to be very strong, you would want to test it to see if that material and that form factor or that shape would actually be able to do what you want it to do. You can learn more about this process by getting an online product design education.

Steph Mantis gives this advice on product design education: “Once you have a rough sketch and you’re starting to know the direction you’re moving in, you want to start thinking about materials. You want to start thinking about ‘How do I refine this?’ And ultimately, you want to think about ‘How am I going to communicate this to my fabricators, and my audience?'”

She goes on to explain, “If you can communicate it to your fabricators really clearly, you can use a number of tools. It can be auto-card; it can be solid works. I’ve designed stuff where I just put together a mood board. I say, ‘Like this, not like that.’ And I give that to a factory, and it communicates enough for them to get to the next sketch, which then comes back to me so I can critique that.”

Mantis makes it clear that at the end of the day, it’s about how you are communicating this idea of yours. You can use various tools for product design and product development. Pinterest, for example, is great for mood boarding. The Internet itself is a plethora of images that you can easily just start pulling out and organizing. It’s a source of online product design education. She personally likes things like Google Drive to organize concepts and uses spreadsheets to start her sourcing and pricing. Steph says she also likes Keynote.

“I think Keynote is really easy,” she continues. “It’s an Apple-based product. It comes on every Mac product basically. It’s cloud-driven, so it’s super easy to pull presentations together, share them, edit them, get them on your phone, get them on a tablet, get them on a desktop.”

Usability tests in online UX Design Education come in two broad categories: moderated and unmoderated.

A moderated UI usability test is when the researcher or you, as a designer, work with the user, either in the same space or online, to take them through the prototype. You ask the questions while the user completes the tasks answers the questions.

In an unmoderated test, the users work by themselves. There is no one there in the room, or in the virtual room, to help them, prompt them, or ask the question in a different way. This really tests the UI design. So, unmoderated tests can be challenging for users, but, equally, can give you really good insight into where those UX challenges are. If the users are struggling to complete the test, then that is a clear indication that something with your solution isn’t quite right, and may need some extra attention.