There are so many instances of UX and UI we can find in real life. Once you start your online UX design education, you’ll see UX design and UI design all over the place. One great example of UX design is a museum.

When you enter a museum, there are so many touchpoints. There are so many interfaces. Even UX comes in the form of those little QRs that you see next to the artworks. When you direct your phone camera to those, it doesn’t just bring you information, it acts as a portal to extending the information and to expanding the experience. That is a wonderful example of when these two worlds are merged together.

Museums are multisensory experiences. We walk through them. We circulate. There’s a path that is created for us to follow. There’s a way that we interact with the artworks, and even more important is the emotional component.

User experience relates to an efficient, seamless, intuitive navigation or journey, whereas experience design is about the emotional component as well. It’s about how you feel when you interact with this space. What is it that comes to your mind? What are your feelings, your emotions, that are triggered in these journeys through the physical space, even more so when they are connected and they are merged?

That’s when we have hybrid spaces, or what we could call “phigital” spaces.

User flow, also known as the user journey, is a really good tool to allocate pain points. It helps you to understand the typical actions of different demographics of users when they interact with an app or website.

You don’t look at the desired state. You look at the current one. The user flow helps the user organically move from their first step to their last one to complete a task via a user interface (UI).

For this UX design journey, you can really see where a user is having challenges. You can see where they are frustrated or possibly feel like they’re being told to do something that they’re not comfortable doing. The user flow maps for us the UX UI design interventions we need to use to create a solution for them, which means that the user flow is really a map to understand what we need to change and where exactly we need to change it.

Online UX Design Education

As you can see, you can understand problems with your UX designs during your design education studies and career years via simple tools like user flow. In this case, you simply trace the path of a user’s interactions with an app or website UI to find pain points.

Now that you’ve learned how to create an efficient plan for your user research, it’s time to implement all of that knowledge and learn how to choose the right test strategies to help you with the user research stage. In this module, our experts guide you in this process and help you to design test strategies. Again, we promote the best ethical practices during every stage.

As you progress, you will learn how to implement principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion in the world of UX and UI. You will learn why these are so important in the user research stage. Once you gather all of that information from user research, you can refer to the personas and compare data, which can help you create a user flow that allows you to inform your UI design prototype.

Online UX Design Education

During your studies, you receive many opportunities to expand your knowledge and increase the tools in your UX design toolbox. This module can really help you learn how to use the data you acquire as optimally as possible so that you can take your prototypes to the next level.

In our module “Module for Visual Design,” the next level of UX magic starts happening.

It already started at the very beginning when you decided to tap into a problem that you wanted to solve, which shows that you have empathy and willingness to be of service with your work as a UX designer. But, now, let’s talk about the next step:

How do you communicate those ideas and services, products and solutions visually?

In this module, our experts explore all of the visual codes that are key to translating UX data, all of that information that you gather from different sources, into a viable user interface (UI). Visual UI design is not only attractive or aesthetically pleasing. It is useful, seamless and intuitive and directs the information in a seamless and effective manner. Visual design is all of that navigation. It is the buttons, colors, iconography and typography in a global context. All of these factors are very important to create a successful user interface.

This module outlines important, useful information that can help you succeed with your online UX design education studies and improve your chances of success once you pursue a UX design career.

I like to start this discussion with a question: How do you keep stakeholders happy?

Part of your job as a designer is to understand the needs and wants of stakeholders early in the product development process. We usually learn what their requirements are through a combination of interviews and various experiments. Sometimes, you find out that what they tell you during the investigation stage might not actually be what they need to make them happy. As a result, it’s important to maintain contact with stakeholders and check in with them regularly throughout the process.

Determining Stakeholder Needs and Wants

Let’s discuss the dinner analogy to break down stakeholder requirements: Let’s say you’re in a family of four people that includes yourself, a partner and two kids. You must pick something for dinner that meets everyone’s requirements. Yet, one of your children has an allergy, which means that you can’t use, let’s say, peanuts in whatever you’re cooking. Your other kid really loves mac and cheese and is going through a phase in which they want it and nothing else. That said, you can usually convince them to eat pizza if there are no other options. And, then, you must please your partner and yourself. The adults are a little bit more easygoing, but maybe one of you is trying to eat a heart-healthy diet.

You have all of these pieces in your requirement box. You now must come up with something to make for dinner. You start by thinking about what the different stakeholders are in this scenario:

– Will the kid with the peanut allergy eat a pizza. The answer? Yes.
– Will the kid who loves mac and cheese eat a pizza? Yes.
– Will the adults eat a pizza? Yes.

Okay. Pizza might be the winner. But before you can move forward by going through the trouble of making the dough and putting it all together and then putting the pizza in the oven, you check in with the stakeholders and say, “Hey, are you on board with pizza? Yes? No?” and use their additional input to guide you.

Online Product Design Education

The happiness of stakeholders isn’t easy to determine by just reviewing data specific to certain types of personas in a target market based on demographics researched by previous designers and marketers. You need up-to-date information. As part of your product design education, you learn how to approach stakeholders and directly receive all of the details you need to determine their needs and wants through the product design process.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the audience and what the word “audience” means in terms of products that you design for any given project. As we were talking about before, it’s important to think about who’s currently using a particular product or who you’re designing that particular product for when you research different user groups.

The audience is really who you’re designing it for, right? The audience is going to be using it after it leaves your hands and goes into the world.

Why Audience Interest Matters

It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of that audience from a human-centered design perspective, but you also need to think about demand, marketing and sales: Are there enough people really interesting in or using this type of product? Is there enough demand for it in the current market? Do current trends imply any type of future interest?

“As a designer, you are part artist, but you also have to have a little bit of a business hat on in terms of, is it worth your time, and effort, and energy, and investment of yourself to launch a product?” explains Alicia Tam Wei. “Is there demand? Are people going to like it?”

You receive the answers to these questions by doing some testing and getting feedback from people. You might ask: Is a consumer actually going to like this? Are people going to use it? Are they willing to pay any or enough money for it? How much are they willing to pay for it? Is there an audience for this project?

The Minimum Viable Audience

There’s again one question you should always ask: “Is it worth my time?” Is it really worth the investment of my time, effort and energy, as well as my financial investments?

And, so, that’s where the minimum viable audience really comes into play. Is there enough of an audience? Is there enough of a demand for what you want to make?

Online Product Design Education

The greatest product design in the world won’t matter if it fails to draw the interest of more than a handful of people after you complete product development. As you continue your product design education, you will learn how to determine the right demographics for a target audience for any design and the right size for a viable audience.

When we talk about the art of persuasion or the art of rhetoric in product design, we’re talking about everything we do to convince people to desire what we’re doing with product development and then pay for or compensate us by investing in our ideas or buying and using our products.

Showing the Value

You want to attract members of your target market by making your designs as close to reality as possible. When we are learning those design skills, we want to jump to the end and get there as quickly as possible. We want to know how to make a beautifully perfect drawing of a design or an engaging physical early prototype design, or even a finished prototype.

We think that this is all that we actually bring to potential investors and buyers. It is very tempting to feel this way. And, of course, your rendering skills, whether three or two-dimensional and digitally, are part of the skillsets you need to persuade people in that portion of design development.

Product Design Education

Yet, the art of persuasion involves so much more than your rendered designs. With a formal online product design education, you can learn the many techniques needed to persuade others that your ideas, no matter their early or finished forms, are worth their time and money.

Product design and product development begin in stages. Some of these projects begin as ideas outside of a company, but a lot of them are initiated internally. Innovation inside the company starts with an idea that is further developed by research, which is conducted on a regular basis to create a type of road map toward design and development.

“Part of that research,” says Jean-Jacques L’Henaff, “involves ethnographic research and just talking to random people on the street and in the community. This is different from a focus group, which selects a set group of people to engage in a question and answer sort of research project.”

“It also doesn’t try to steer people in the direction of answering direct questions about things they like or want or even need,” L’Henaff continues. “Instead, ethnographic research of this sort engages them in a discussion and then observes the person’s reactions to gauge unmet needs. We are looking for points of friction and coping mechanisms too. That is because people don’t even realize most of the time that when there is a point of friction, they find a coping mechanism to get around it. That is why it is so important to observe people and decipher what people are telling you in order to understand where the true issue is.”

Product design education, and particularly online product design education, uses these approaches a lot. Once you get what the true issue at hand is, you can take all this data and all of this quantitative information and turn it into valuable insight. Then, you decide if this valuable insight is worth focusing on and whether or not it’s worth turning into a project. Maybe it isn’t a separate project unto itself, but it becomes part of a project that’s already in the works. That’s a pretty common practice too.

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.