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.

The double diamond ideation product design process starts as literally a drawing of two diamonds sort of placed next to each other. It’s a process diagram that explains the ideation methodology. It’s also known in product development as the design method.

Double Diamond Basics

We start with divergent thinking in the first diamond. We broaden ideas related to discovering insight into a problem and defining a focus area from one outside tip of the diamond to the other. In the second diamond, we develop and deliver potential solutions.

You’re not trying to think about the exact thing that you want to design but everything around it. No idea is a bad idea when you’re using this process. Your goal is to have ideas converge by taking all of the ones that you’ve written down and narrowing the list by placing them into groups of ideas that make sense together by category or theme.

The design process is really, really cool because you go through this a couple of times so that the ideas in the double diamond diagram are diverging, converging, diverging, and converging again. This process works because you’re really thinking out of the box. The diagram also promotes good discipline so that you can narrow down and focus on the things that you’re supposed to focus on.

Product Design Education

You can learn about the double diamond process and other ideation workshop tools with a formal online product design education. Formal training covers this and many other important product design and development processes that you need for a successful career.

Learn how live shopping and community building can provide you with the information and context needed to enhance your ecommerce shopping experience.

With live shopping, something that is incredibly valuable is understanding your communities on a deeper level. Communities are changing every hour, every minute, and every day.
I think one of the most beautiful things about live shopping events is that you’ll be able to understand what your audience is thinking, what they’re asking from you, and what they’re doing in real-time. In a way, that feels holistic and allows you to put context to the situation.

For example, we had one women’s health brand that used our solution a few months ago. We wanted to understand a little bit more about this customer. People think that live shopping events and live shopping are only for digital-first brands that are innovative and easy to sell. Such as a makeup or skincare company. However, what we’re noticing is that if you can build a community and engage, live shopping is for you.

This brand made use of a lot of our engagement modules. They asked a lot of questions and triggered a lot of polls within the live shopping experience. One of the great takeaways was they found out that 54% of their audience was first-time moms.

Now that not only is insightful information to target the rest of your live shopping event but is helpful for future events and to figure out what kind of products you want to launch later on.

Data is something that I think we’re all a little bit wary of. However, insights, context and information from your community, especially in real-time, really are priceless.

With product design, we start by trying to understand user needs and behaviors. Once we have this important information, we then move on to the ideation stage of product development.

The ideation process usually takes place in a workshop. We gather a bunch of people in a very specific room or other type of physical space for a condensed period of time to brainstorm problem solutions and other ideas. It’s critical to select a very good mix of people for a great ideation session. We never concentrate exclusively on designers or technology-focused people. Instead, we select a cross-functional team of people who can think about the product topic from all types of different angles.

An ideation workshop team is normally composed of people who pursued a formal product design education, received hands-on training and possess extensive professional experience. If you don’t think you can afford to spend the time or money pursuing a degree in this field, you should consider an online product design education.

“A product design project begins a number of different ways,” says Alicia Tam Wei. “Sometimes it’s about something that annoys you. Sometimes it’s about something that’s a big dream of yours. Sometimes it’s about something that you wish existed. It’s often kind of like the ultimate wish fulfillment.”

Stephanie Mantis states, “I think it’s important to figure out why you’re doing something. So for me, oftentimes, my product development starts with a need, be it functional and physical, or emotional and more personal.” “First,” she continues, “identifying what am I trying to do and why, is an amazing place to start. If it’s your problem, it’s probably somebody else’s problem. And if your solution works for you, it probably works for somebody else.”

Mantis further explains, “When I graduated college, I kind of looked around my apartment, and I was like, ‘Oh, you’re a college graduate like maybe it’s time to upgrade some of your choices and fixtures.’ One of those things were my necklace racks, which at the time were literally thumbtacks in the wall. You know, there’s five or six of them. I said, ‘You can do better than this.’ I happened to have a collection of small plastic animals on my bookshelf. I looked at them, and I said, ‘Sorry guys, but I’m going to cut your heads off and mount them to a piece of wood.’ That kind of touch upon what was happening at the time with an animal trophy trend. And that’s how my first product post-graduation was born. And that is the pack rack.”

Online product design education reiterates the importance of producing an organic and believable product. “It became this sort of organic situation where I’ve had this problem and decided to make my own solution. Over the course of time, I refined that solution so that it would be producible, and scalable, and sellable,” Stephanie Mantis concludes.

There are a lot of different techniques to use when looking at product development. The various techniques go beyond product design and development. We call the type of research that we do “generative research.” We call it “generative” because it’s not necessarily about quantified research. In quantified research, we can have access that can inspire thoughts and ideas. For this reason, it is necessary to make such techniques part of product design education. It means including it in online product design education too.

We’re interested in inspirations that allow us to look at problems differently. In this case, we are trying to surround ourselves within project spaces. Frequently, and for the longest time, it’s been boards on a wall. More recently, that’s turning into more virtual project spaces, where it’s possible to modify things much more.

Most importantly, we’re trying to immerse ourselves and surround ourselves with inspirations. We immerse ourselves in these inspirations that allow us to look at a problem holistically and get at specific insights. Sometimes, that comes from detailed ethnographic research, where we spend time with people in their homes so that we can understand the tasks that they’re doing. Also, we may be looking at the whole context around using a specific kind of device or technology.

Many times, we are also pulling inspiration from similar products and trends. Again, we are looking at the culture of how people live. Often, we’re designing for different cultures, sometimes in other countries.

At the same time, there’s culture and subculture. You can define it in very narrow slices as you’re looking at who you’re trying to connect to within a brand. In this case, we’re trying to create a very holistic picture as much as possible through imagery. It is often on the wall through notes and quotations from people who we might speak to within a culture or subculture. As we do this, we are looking specifically at some technologies. You can use these technologies in parallel with what we’re designing toward.

We work to get those things together into territories. Then, we might look to design within and try to create personas around the person who we’re designing toward. We want to connect those personas to real things that we see in real life with real people as much as possible.

We try hard not to fall back on our predisposed way of thinking about the person’s identity. We want to get outside of ourselves. We want to have empathy toward the life of the person who we’re designing toward. In this effort, you dive in and look for solutions that can help the identified persons.

The mark of success in your online UX design education is having the ability to translate insights into designing equitable, inclusive products. It is especially important for everyone on your UI design team to be on board and in the room throughout the entire design process. This way, everyone will understand why the insights you are focusing on are important.

For visual and UX design, you should try to have a mindset of intersectional identity. What does this mean for your product? For example, let’s say you are designing a mental health product for communities of color to be matched with therapists of color. What imagery do you think about? What language would be important?

What features would such an app need to have? Let’s say some users might not speak English as a first language. These people should be able to select an option in a form that would match them with a therapist speaking their first language and thus better speaking to their needs. It is important for each feature in your UI to be implemented into wireframing, mockups, and the visual design process.

UX professionals also need to be thinking about how different people would react to the products they engage with. This is the reason why intersectionality is so important.

Continuing with our example, you are trying to make a product tailored for people of color. You have the imagery down and feel like the result is inclusive; perhaps pictures of people of color are included in the marketing materials.

However, you may test the app on a user over 60, who might not see themselves using the product. Simply saying “let me get a bunch of people of color in the materials” may exclude age, gender, or other important components of intersectional identity. To ensure that everyone truly feels seen, it is important to have each component in your mind as you design.

A particular type of research that UX design professionals typically do is called generative research. In this type of research, designers will often engage their end users to come up with UI ideas or solutions.

One thing you can do to practice generative research is to have each person you interview come up with their “perfect solution.” Draw it out with them. Ask them where the search bar should go or what the buttons on the screens should do.

Do not feel limited to what is actually possible. Have your testers dream big and imagine big. Ask them what they want to get to, what they would like to see, and what they would like to actually do. “The point of this is not necessarily to go out and design exactly that, but to understand, what the motivators are behind that, and to spark some ideas within yourself,” says UX design educator Daniel Holtzman.

The idea behind generative research is to co-create. Instead of thinking about what users need or listening to what they think they need, it is to sit down with them and ask them their biggest challenges. If you had a magic wand and could do anything, how would you solve their challenges? Ask them to draw this solution for you or build it from very simple prototyping materials.

Any UX workshop that you do with your users which involves the co-creation of a solution will be 100% more powerful. This is because your users have all the answers. “They know. They are there every day with their challenges in the settings that they are, in the cultures that they are,” states UI design professional Rinat Sherzer. Asking your users to help you design a solution will bring out ideas that you could never have thought of.

One of the most significant lessons that you should take away from your online UX design education is not to solve for someone, but to solve with them. Listen to the stories, then let them imagine a solution. Let them draw, act out, or prototype the solution. Through these responses, many new challenges will arise, and you will always get their perspective. You can then go and refine, iterate, and work with their prototypes. Getting users’ points of view and co-creating with them is priceless.