When I’m teaching students, I often treat them like they’re just starting out a project. Later on, once they think they’re further along, I have them complete 30 drawings. I don’t have them complete one or two. They’re not doing five or 10. They’re producing 30 unique sketches.

How do you push yourself to really think past your initial ideas, understandings and assumptions and go beyond and then keep going beyond?

When you start out, whether for an assignment in a product design class or your early career, it’s really hard. You have just a couple of ideas, and you can’t imagine how you can come up with 30 to complete the exercise. But, if you keep pushing, let yourself go and imagine and put some of the thinking and self-editing aside, you find yourself producing some of your richest work. Even your most far-fetched ideas can have real legs and potential.

It’s important to put all of those ideas down on clean paper. Each sketch must be a finished drawing with a title and your name on it too. We actually put all of the sketches up on the wall, and then we walk through those ideas. You need to really understand that sometimes there are groupings and themes within them. There are similarities. There are wild ideas that sometimes generate the best discussions, and students at first push back.

Origin of the Exercise

This design exercise was actually something that a teacher had me do when I was in school. It was one of the few times in graduate school that I stayed up all night worrying. I then realized how liberating it was to create so many sketches and all of the potential that really lives in this exercise. I also recognized how important it was to not require this exercise just once but, instead, a couple of times throughout a project.

Online Product Design Education

You must make sure that you’re always continuing to push forward. I don’t only mean by producing 30 drawings. It can be in other ways. As you will learn in all of your product design education classes, you can improve your chances of having a successful career in the product development field by making sure that you’re always pushing yourself forward and beyond what you first think, the idea you first land on and your first understanding of anything.

At its core, user experience research, design and writing is really user-centered UI design. It comes down to making sure that we’re able to connect and empathize with our users. It’s not just asking surface level questions to understand what features we can build. It’s understanding on a much deeper level the broader context of users and their environments.

How can we build for people? How can we empathize with them? Empathy is something that’s really hard to accomplish. It’s something that a lot of UX and UI professionals like to tout, like to speak about, but it’s something that requires a lot of practice.

Empathy endurance is a really important thing that anyone in UX design should strive to build into their career. It’s more the idea that we can connect with users by going to their environments and meeting them where they are. It’s still really important that after we connect with those users and have those conversations, we have the empathy endurance.

A key piece of online UX design education is learning the ability to bring those conversations and connections back to the product that we’re building. Users need their voices heard by being directly reflected into the products. At its core, it’s empathy. It’s user-centered design, and it’s people. That’s the really beautiful part about UX, whether it’s quantitative research or qualitative research. At its core it’s about people. That’s what makes it so exciting to be part of the UX design process.

Our next module in online UX design education is project planning. Project planning is essential to a successful user research stage in the UX design or UI design process. In this module, we will explore how important it is to understand context. Political, social, cultural, and economic factors really have a huge weight in the way that you’re planning your use of research. You will understand how to identify the best format and how to conduct these surveys, interviews or focus groups following ethical guidelines.

Once we have concluded the user research stage, we will have gathered data. This data will be filtered in a way that will allow us to create specific psychographics and demographics, which we call personas. The reason why we call them personas, even though these are fictitious human beings, is that they are based on real data that we obtained through our user research stage.

Calling them personas is to humanize them. By humanizing them, it allows the designer of UX or UI, you in this case, to develop a higher level of empathy with this persona, this fictitious human being character. You will be able to put yourself in their shoes in a much easier manner and be more empathetic and understanding of their needs and how to connect with them. Connection: it’s very important in this process.

Ethnographic research is becoming a key part of our toolbox as designers. This type of research is not necessarily needed for every product development project, but it can be extremely valuable to make sure that you’re still responding to the needs of your market.

The idea of ethnographic research is that you’re going to really dive into a user group or type of user. You’re diving into their lives and the way they actually use your product and incorporate it into their day-to-day activities. You not only engage them and talk to them, but you also really observe the way they live and use your product.

This type of research is very different from a quantitative type of research where you simply ask people questions and analyze their responses. This used to be the main type of research you’d learn about in product design education. The people’s responses would be turned into graphs and heat maps, and you’d learn how to study those.

In today’s online product design education, the focus is going to be on ethnographic research, which is qualitative instead of quantitative. It’s usually done with a very small sample. A group of six to 12 people is a good size. You don’t need to deal with hundreds of people.

The difficult part, when you do ethnographic research, is not the research itself. It’s easy to engage people, extract some information and observe how they use your product and how they live.

The difficult part is to take that observation and turn it into an insight about your product design. That’s where it gets very challenging. We spend a lot of time actually training our team to make that passage from observation to insight.

There’s a lot of secret sauce that takes place during that passage.

Exploration in product design and product development depends on the project or the product. Exploration is a part of the process that goes beyond what you learn to do in online product design education while sitting at a desk. You get to break away from that and explore.

For example, if you’re designing a telescope, you go look at all kinds of different telescopes. You look at big ones, and you look at little ones, and you also look at stuff that’s shaped like a tube. You look at things people put up to their eyes and how the image gets from space to you, to your brain.

You try to literally think outside of the box. You’re way out, and you don’t have to presuppose what you’re going to figure out. It’s really the most fun part of the project because you’re just looking around and finding anything you want.

Or you go to the store, and you look at things in that category. Or if it’s a medical product, you go visit the hospital and see how all the other things in the operating room are being used.

It’s one of the most fun parts of the project and something that product design education has a harder time explaining than most technical concepts because, at this stage, everything is open. You can Google anything, and it’s part of the project. So, this is a fun kind of thing.

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.