Thinking about inspiration is interesting because, in truth, inspiration is everywhere. Inspiration isn’t a cookie-cutter concept, where you can simply define it as one thing and be done with it. It’s really about being open-minded and being receptive to things that are coming your way. You might have this idea of a design or product, and then, you see chewing gum while you’re walking down the street, and suddenly, inspiration hits you, just like that. Maybe the shape of the chewing gum becomes a doorknob, or at the grocery store, you see a strange looking red carrot, and that suddenly becomes the base of a lamp.

This is to say that inspiration and influence can show up everywhere. It’s about you being open to it and not filtering as many things out because, as you walk around in your life, you’ll realize that even the most highly ridiculous idea can actually trigger a really positive reaction. It’s not like you can simply count to three, and suddenly, you’ll have the key and code for unlocking inspiration. It’s really about being open-minded and being brave enough to take ideas that you see and process them, using your mind to turn them into new thinking and new ideas.

This can come from a wide range of things whether it be colors, shapes, sounds, or details; it’s endless. You just have to start walking. Start allowing yourself to see and to be receptive. The great thing about inspiration is that it truly comes from everywhere, and as you walk through life, you’re going to realize that. Inspiration for me was completely different at age 20 than it is today.

Today, I find inspiration in sound; I translate sounds that I hear into shapes. I find inspiration in food; I taste something, and the flavor suddenly becomes something new. I ask myself if color has a shape or if different colors like green and blue have a different vocabulary. Ultimately, you have to figure out what inspires you because inspiration is just as personal as people think it is. Again, you have to be very open. There’s no right or wrong; there’s only moving forward. Just allow yourself to be surprised.

To learn more about finding inspiration and harnessing creativity, as well as product design and product development, think about starting on a path with product design education. If you’re interested in learning about these things from the comfort of your own home, online product design education might be perfect for you.

How do we move through 3D ideation, especially today, with so many digital tools available? I find in my classroom quite often (in fact, it happened today), when people hear the words “3D sketching”, they think it means in the computer. It’s not so in my classes or in my studio. Because what I want to do is to free up the sketching as quickly as possible and make it as free as possible.

Starting Product Development Off Screen

By working with cardboard and non-precious materials, you can sketch quite quickly. In the physical realm, on the desktop, as opposed to on the screen, you happen upon happy accidents all the time. You see relationships very differently. I believe it maps in the brain differently from looking at a screen.

Product Design Should Be Done Quickly But Not Preciously

Even if you’re looking at a three-dimensional object on the screen, you’re still having a 2D experience. It’s the richest when you start by working with simple materials, and quickly but not preciously, to frame out the basic structure of the design.

Online Product Design Education Still Necessary for Presentations

If you’re comfortable in the computer and you want to go back in, by all means, go back in. Ultimately, in this day and age, we need to do so for presentation and production methods. But during the ideation phase, if we only remain on the screen, I don’t think we involve our full artistic self.

Online UX design education will teach you to always consider your user’s journey and what your user is using this app for. As designers, we can go a little bit off on a tangent and want to create something for ourselves, but that’s not what UI design is about. So you really need to consider the final outcome and who is using and engaging with this product.

Before you even start working on design, it’s really important to have a good background knowledge of who the person interacting with your product is. We will always try and engage with our readers’ feedback. We get people who contact us and tell us the difficulties they might be having with the app. I think UX is an important thing to consider and try and make those changes where you can. But it’s also a good thing to consider early on when you’re designing the UI and creating the code, that these problems might arise.

So you need to go back and be able to adjust things. Some things can be really easy fixes, and some things could be more difficult. But you’ve got to constantly be considering feedback, comments, and your readers to keep adjusting and refreshing your product to make sure it’s right for them, it’s what they want, and it’s something with which they can engage.

You can get a mix of feedback about your app, and I think you just have to be really sensible and consider what the information is. Some people will be unhappy with what you’re creating, or their comments just have value for them. It might not be something you can fix. There are limitations in what you might be capable of doing in your UX design. If you can go away and consider it, and think, “Yes, this is something I think is going to make it easier,” and it’s easy to implement, then just go on and do it.

It’s those sorts of little changes that can make a world of difference to someone interacting with your product. It’s not always easy to make changes. It depends on your company. It depends on what you’re making and what you’re producing. But you can go and make minimal changes, and they can make a big difference.

The research process is quite sophisticated and nuanced when done right. There are steps that I always think we should take before we dive into any data. One of these steps is to understand the goal. What is the purpose of the research? We must ask ourselves this because the research itself is just a basic definition. It applies to every research education, including online UX design education.

It’s only meaningful when it’s there to be a means to an end. It’s not the end itself. We should always ask ourselves the big question of what are we trying to achieve? What is the research going to help us do?

Often, by the way, it takes much longer to figure out the challenge. It also takes time to home in on the question than to do the research. We often must wrestle our clients to the ground to say, what is it that you’re trying to understand?

I often find that the hypothesis is the most critical part of the research. It is because usually, the questions are not that hard to answer but, they need validation. In this case, when you come up with a great hypothesis, you know which direction to follow. Otherwise, you’re just bombarded with so much data.

You go in, and you try to validate the hypothesis. Or, as I said, elaborate on that hypothesis. Maybe say, no, that was the wrong hypothesis. We’ve got to start again, and that’s very valid too. It is because you want to nip it in the bud if it’s wrong. You do this before you proceed to spend many months of work and money developing something that’s wrong.

There are two key steps to take if you can before you dive into research, including UI design. One is to ensure you figure out what you’re trying to solve. For example, you are investigating UX and UI improvement. What is the ideal research question? Then, the other is where do we think is the answer? Could it be here? Maybe not.

Sometimes, I’ll tell the teams to go in with a blank slate; they should not have a hypothesis yet. Go in like you’re an anthropologist in a foreign culture, and you want to discover. Because if you’re too myopic in your thinking, you may discount other avenues. Sometimes, it depends on the timing, or how much information you have, to go down the route of having a hypothesis or two and trying to confirm it.

We learn from Agnes Pyrchla that online UX Design Education teaches you to put yourself in your user’s shoes. Who is your ideal user? Who should you be focusing on? You can use some different tools to get to know your users and focus your energy and attention on those people. The first tool to use is called behavioral archetypes. It’s a broader concept that describes a group of people who share the same characteristics, the same behavioral patterns and the same value systems. It’s different from typical traits like gender or socioeconomic status, and it goes deeper into people’s beliefs and actions.

Behavioral archetypes are helpful when thinking about your UX design strategy. One way to approach this is to set up a spectrum of users who take these behavioral archetypes to the extreme. For example, with social media, you can think about who is a creator and who is a lurker (someone who likes to consume content). When taking this approach to your design strategy, you can really start to form a notion of what types of people you’re designing for.

From there, you can get more technical and create a persona of the ideal person who fits into your behavioral archetype. This persona is what you’re going to base most of your design elements on. So, as you’re painting this picture of your ideal user, imagine yourself as that individual. You’re almost with them on their journey as you’re designing for them. Do a mental check in which you ask yourself, “If I were this person, would I like this product?”

You can get creative and wander in the mind of your imaginary user. That way, you can really embody them and figure out how they will react to the UI product or another product like it. It’s also important to know what function this person would serve. If you’re designing something for a family, are they the parent or the child? If you’re designing something within a school context, are they the teacher, or are they the student? If you’re designing something within an organizational or a business framework, are they the buyer? Are they the user? Are they an engineer? Are they a business person? These details can give you the context of what they’re trying to do.

After creating that persona, you can imagine what is going through that person’s mind and embody them, almost as if you were them. It’s a shortcut for trying to walk a mile in someone’s shoes, to the best of our ability, given that we never will be them.

Let’s think about UX design in the 1940s with Toyota and the Japanese automobile industry. This was a revolutionary milestone in the history of UX because it was the first time that the human input was taken into account throughout the entire development of these autos. Toyota designed his factories around the principle of optimizing the working environment by adding human input. In online UX design education today, we’d call that usability testing.

He was so conscious of the value of the human input that he would even allow the employers to suddenly stop the supply chain if they had some feedback about something to improve the workflow. Again, it was usability testing at its finest.

Moving on to the 1950s, we come to Henry Dreyfuss. He’s basically famous for his statement “Designing for people.” Dreyfuss was an American industrial designer who designed iconic products. Even though they’re iconic, you might not know about them or why they’re relevant to our history and today’s lifestyle. Examples include the Hoover vacuum cleaner, the tabletop telephone and the Royal Typewriter, including the deluxe model for companies.

For him, the focus of UI design was the point of contact between the product and the human being who was interacting with it. If there was some sort of friction in this interaction, then the design was completely bad and unsuccessful. However, if the point of contact — the interaction between the user and the product — was memorable, easy or happy, then that was a success. It was a particularly successful UI experience and design if it prompted the user to buy more.

Continuing into the 1960s, Walt Disney was a key figure. Disney is considered one of the very first UX designers without even owning that title. He was a visionary who envisioned a world in which the latest technology could improve human lives. He was obsessed with creating magical, immersive, authentic and seamless experiences. That was how Disney World started.

When I do a project, I consider the composition of my team. We have to understand the socioeconomic components of the market. The components within these technological areas where they’re created, researched, produced, mass-produced, and consumed are how we can understand the contributing factors of the markets we’re designing for.

Looking at the statistics between 2018 and 2019, you can see there is demand for all engineers. However, the need for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) engineers has grown by 1,400% compared to all other engineers. So that’s 14 times the amount of all other engineering capabilities. There’s a lack of UX design engineers to help make programs and systems for everyone. Online UX design education can give you the tools to understand your users’ wants and needs effectively.

And if you look at some other statistics, I think it’s fair to say that probably less than 10% of our engineers–software engineers–know what AR is and how to program and code within that environment. It’s more troubling to me that, unfortunately, the engineers who have the needed access to these technologies to learn about them are of economic privilege. This economic privilege only allows them to know this information within their economic boundaries and learn how to code within that. Ultimately, these boundaries prevent them from learning about other economic classes of society and how these technologies might benefit them as well.

This highly tech-centered environment doesn’t help our current generation of storytellers. These people are our educators, teachers, journalists, communication students, and filmmakers, and they don’t have the power to bring these new knowledge sets to their students, the next generation of artists. Essentially, UX and UI skills are highly in-demand technologies, but few people are training for them. Only those from a particular kind of environment are being trained in this field. That is from a creation standpoint.

In terms of usership, there are also incredible amounts of disparities. For example, if the next iPhone allowed you to obtain the kind of AR and VR information you need, but the glasses needed come at an enormous cost, who would be able to access it? Most people would not be able to because they cannot afford the astronomical price. HoloLens is one of the best AR glasses available currently on the market. If the cost for a pair of HoloLens glasses were $5,000, no schools could access them since their funding is limited.

These are the major conversations that we have when designing new UX and UI products. Who has access to the latest technology? Who do we want to create it for? And who is making it already? We strive to provide an answer to all of these critical questions. Essentially, we need to train more UX design and UI design individuals to supply the demand for these technologies. Online UX design education can teach you how to provide this technology to more people worldwide.

I think a really important issue when it comes to online UX design education, designing and the design space in general is that design teams themselves are often not diverse. Because of this, I’ve had several experiences when working with design teams where people are designing products and experiences, and they continue to forget about communities of color.

When you think of how many AI-enabled products come out and are unable to detect dark skin, it tells you that throughout the design-thinking process, there was probably no UX or UI researcher, designer or strategist who was a person of color who thought, “We should also be testing folks of color to see how they would interact with this product.”

The Need for Diversity in Imagery

Another thing I think people should be mindful of when designing is imagery and branding—especially when designing an app or a website. A lot of times, for communities of color, we go on a website, and we don’t see ourselves on that website at all. There is no one who thought, “We should diversify our imagery so that people can see themselves in this product.” That absence is something that can also be alienating. It goes against the root of what UX and UI design are: the ability to be empathetic.

The Need for Self-Examination and Reflection

I think that the root of the problem is really the fact that there is a lack of work done within the design space. People need the ability to look at themselves and examine the unconscious biases they have. I think that’s something that needs to be implemented within the design-thinking process in addition to having diverse teams. We want to ensure that the products that we’re coming out with are truly equitable and inclusive.

Frequently, we have these different designs that are coming out. The service, product or experience is not actually effective because the design team is not taking into consideration the actual problem space itself that may be specifically harming communities of color or other marginalized communities. It is not solving the real solution because the act of delving deeper into the nature of the problem was missing from the entire design-thinking process.

The Critical Role of Background Research

In order to make sure that we are really thinking about the full context when it comes to defining the problem space, especially when it comes to working with Black, Indigenous, and communities of color, I always like to stress the importance of first doing background research. What is the historical context? What institutional or interpersonal practices and policies have impacted these communities? This research can be done through currently published journals.

Another essential practice is intentionally connecting with community experts who have a strong sense of what the problem space is. Being able to have that context and not go into defining a problem with a colorblind mentality is really critical when it comes to determining the actual problem.

As we move away from motion pictures in the 20th century, we see the emergence of digital UI and UX design, right, and new worlds. Those were the first times we were confronted with the promise of digital technology and the kinds of new interfaces it would enable us to create, and where our creativity, combined with the complexities of the hardware and software, led us to consider other approaches to UI design.

When we have the mouse, we are already engaging with content that’s given to us on that same screen within which then there is hyperlinking for example, right, the idea of a click where you can go from one side to another, the idea of a keyboard where you can write and what you’re writing, the commands you’re putting; the input then translates into some understanding, some level of computation that takes place that then takes you to somewhere else. It’s really opened up a fissure into the linear narrative formation into one that’s based on decision trees with multiple possibilities.

So, although technology was advancing, we were reverting to interfaces with which we were extremely acquainted. And, as an example, consider my father, who is from the Caspian Sea. And he, I believe he loved fishing. And the size of his catch was always determined by the size of his audience.

So, depending on the engagement he had and the amount of absorption and enthusiasm, he would sometimes tell the same tale in 30 seconds and other times it would go on and on. And the fish of this size would eventually grow into a monster that he had captured, right? So, these new technologies are assisting us in transitioning from linear storytelling to interactive stories with decision trees, and then with augmented reality and immersive technologies, we are transitioning from screens to scenes where you are totally involved in an environment that you are in, which is known as UX.

And the ramifications are numerous. But what I find interesting is that we are attempting to return to that fundamental desire that we have to communicate with one another in ways that are more demanding of the audience, and that there is an expectation of what I term cohabitation cooperation, cohabitation, and cohabitation and co-creation.

The artist’s position is no longer one of “I will direct everything, and then I will present it in front of the public, and they will consume it.” I will always be co-creating with my audience, a little like the street magician who must always account for how the audience connects with the tale that is being delivered. These skills can be acquired through online UX design education.

“I remember in 2012, just not being able to use any emojis that were my skin tone. And that’s something that was just the norm. And so I think a really big thing within the design field itself, is something that I call the white default, which is essentially, the norm is viewed as white,” says Jacquelyn Iyamah.

So, you end up with these products like emojis, Band-Aids, self-driving cars, soap dispensers that just don’t speak to communities of color. They specifically don’t speak to folks who have dark skin. Online UX Design Education must be able to be mindful of that as well as be able to, within the design thinking process, continuously question ourselves and our biases. These issues are something that’s really critical to ensure that we’re not designing products that continuously harm.

“The kind of conversation or the kind of arguments against bias that takes place is often a matter of representation. So let me give you a little historical point here. Technologies that we come to use, if and when they’re created within a capitalistic society, then the way those technologies are pursued is usually to cater to the needs of the corporations that are creating it,” says Amir Baradaran.

Kodak is a good example of that, whereby for people of color, you had a hard time being able to actually have good photos because it was never created for BIPOC. Because it was adjusted only to fair skin, who then had better purchasing capabilities, it never even cared to allow for having devices that actually would better capture the reality of our skin colors.

So, for example, when the camera has a hard time recognizing people of color or being able to distinguish between males and females in darker-skinned bodies and faces, obviously, we have an issue. That should be regulated. We should look for a better representation of data, based on which then machines can learn.