Let’s talk a bit about the history and background of user experience design, or UX. Concern about UX started quite early in history, even back thousands of years. Let’s place ourselves in 4,000 B.C. in China talking about Feng Shui.

Feng Shui is a philosophy that explores the relationship between the elements, the energy known as chi, and how that circulates through space. Feng means wind, while Shui means water.

In Feng Shui, it’s all about how we position elements in the space, like how an interior designer would place furniture or decorations in a room.

The flow and the journey of the user as the person that inhabits that space is efficient when you follow the principles of Feng Shui. Using the space is pleasant and enjoyable. This is a wonderful first milestone that always fascinates me about UX principles. This history shows that UX has been always with us.

Let’s continue on this exciting journey through history. In the year 500 B.C., the ancient Greeks started playing around with this concept of UX. The way they did it was by designing their own tools and workplaces.

They followed principles of ergonomics, or what we know as ergonomics, in order to develop and design their tools and workplaces. They followed those principles to maximize efficiency and to promote well-being in the humans that were working in those professions or using those tools.

That was basically the beginning of the relationship between the human being and those elements.

We know all this because there’s a text from Hippocrates that describes how a surgeon should be working and how to set up what we know today as a surgery or surgeon theater. The text talks about things like how the tools should be displayed, where the light should be coming from, and if the surgeon is sitting or standing.

All the information in Hippocrates’ text talks about how to create an efficient experience, not just for the surgeon, but also for the patient.

Today, as we’ve moved to using digital products, user interface, or UI, has become a new part of design history. UI design and online UX design education have to be concerned with how a user interfaces with something digital in the same way that Hippocrates was concerned with how a surgeon could best use surgical tools.

Isn’t it fascinating?

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.

Prototyping is an essential part of our job, and it is not always what we all think about. Prototyping doesn’t necessarily require a machine or a 3D printer. I always tell my team that the first rapid prototyping machine they must use in their project is a printer. It is effective because you start designing on the screen, which can be very challenging. It’s a challenge because as soon as you get into CAD, you sometimes keep the notion of proportion, but you lose the notion of scale.

For example, I have had designers repeatedly create 3D printing. The day they take it out of the machine, they look at it and say, oh, my god, this is big! It is for such reasons that a simple print is actually a great way to prototype your project rapidly. As you get into your process and refine it, maybe you will decide to cut and form the shape. Based on the print you have done, maybe you get to a point where you’re going to 3D print. It means in particular situations, 3D printing can still be a necessity.

Usually, in 3D printing, you might prefer to keep it maybe not to the last stage but the later stage of the product development process. There is a good reason behind this claim. It’s when you have already refined your design quite a lot, and you’re nitpicking the proportion and specific detail. In this case, you really want to make sure that your surface transition is proper and so forth. These are some of the fundamentals everyone in product design education must learn. Also, it must include online product design education.

When I speak about 3D printing, that’s 3D printing in plastic. We also do 3D printing in metal, which is slightly different. It is different because we don’t need metal to evaluate or shape an interface. When we use 3D printing in metal, we use what we call DMLS. It is usually to print a production part, which makes it very expensive. In such cases, it becomes rare.

We have one line of products in which their production is of that approach, but they may all cost you almost as much as it costs. It’s a little bit specific and for a particular market, and it’s also interesting. Once you are comfortable with all the plastic 3D printing technologies that are available, making that last leap to print in production is not that difficult. It’s just one more step.

We want to shift the conversation away from design focused on an end product, and instead, design as a process that could be open to a wide variety of participants. Nowadays, we tend to call that approach participant design or co-design.

The designer doesn’t have all the good ideas. Design experts have some good ideas, but many people likewise have creative ideas. So, how do you use the product design process to leverage all of those people who might be interested? They might be stakeholders in this product development process and might be able to envision possibilities that you would never see.

Sometimes we don’t know the situation well enough or we’re just getting to understand it a bit. Some people with brilliant ideas come from a different cultural background or a different language experience or a different religious orientation. Individuals from varied perspectives can offer unique perspectives that contribute to product design education. Whatever the source, it seems that the more interesting and innovative ideas are incubated outside of our heads rather than internally.

For me, the starting point is getting to know a context, a situation, a community. That might come through interviews or book and Internet research. Sometimes creativity emerges through convening community groups or listening to those who express their needs and goals.

Let’s say you are designing a new vacuum cleaner. You may have a great idea for how it should work. But you may be able to come up with much better ideas if you talk to consumers who use vacuum cleaners all the time, either residentially or commercially. Internet surveys and questionnaires along with product reviews often provide information that can best be interpreted by online product design education.

Maybe cleaners in the hotel industry, for instance, are using a vacuum cleaner all day long, and they are the actual experts. One of the things that can be incredibly valuable is to reframe this source of insight and expertise.

We tend to think of experts as people with big credentials and fancy titles or certificates from great universities or from favored consultancies. But an 11-year-old girl who lives in a neighborhood where you may be managing a project who rides her bicycle around is an expert about her sphere of activity. She has learned things that someone with a Harvard degree is never going to know.

Similarly, a hotel employee who cleans rooms for a living is going to understand much more about the essential parts of a vacuum cleaner than an industrial designer who comes to that project brand new with a college degree.

So, how do we find those practical experts? Not the experts with great credentials but those with everyday experience? Let’s look to the people who use our products every day, who encounter the strengths and weaknesses during each use, and who deal with the frustrations of a product’s flaws or limitations each time they switch it on. They’re the ones who are going to offer helpful ideas and the truest knowledge of something you may not know much about.

One piece of UI design that people really don’t think about or talk about is spending. What is the budget? How are we going to get there? Entering into this, our client has a notion of where they’re going to go. Often, our clients engage us from what we’ll call an “experience blueprint” for a project that has yet to be defined. They have a high-level idea of understanding of what they think they need.

Online UX design education shows we go through a journey with the client. It’s essentially about discovery, vision, narrative, and creating what we’ll call a blueprint for opportunities. Now that can be digital. It could be physical. But it becomes a document, and it becomes the way forward in the UI design.

The Cost

Also in that document, we’re looking at what the cost implications are. Everyone wants digital in the built environment, but they don’t really understand the process and what you need to go through to make it authentic and relatable. So whether it’s a light touch or a heavy touch, we try to give the client a sense of the cost.

Cost doesn’t just include the physical hardware, but also the back end: the UX development process, the software, how the UI system is going to operate, how it self-refreshes, all of those things based on what we think is appropriate for the project and client.

There are a lot of moving parts, but that up-front work saves the client a lot of time and cost, if it’s done appropriately. A good brief is broken down into several buckets, the tactical elements of what’s required, so the client and the team have an understanding of the project’s scale, cost, audience, and intent.

The Vision

Often, briefs focus more on technical needs and detailing all sorts of UX design elements. However, there is part of the brief that’s more of the narrative of what we aspire to for the project. It details what the client’s aspirations are and how our UX design team can build on those aspirations. A client might have a big, global wish for something, but we have to balance that aspiration and the real-life elements together into a brief.

Personally for me, and as a firm, we want to have a narration around the project that gives it a sense of opportunity. It helps the client to see and focus on vision and not get caught up in some of the smaller parts of the process.

Choosing the right materials for projects really comes down to understanding the material performance criteria of any given product.

Material Performance Criteria Considerations

What is the context for the product? What is its usage? How long do you need it last? Is it going to be subject to regular cleanings as most things are today?

It all comes down to performance criteria. Without taking these areas into consideration, you might make critical design mistakes.

Other Product Material Considerations

Visual criteria and the size limitations of the materials, such as with sheet and casting materials, are additional considerations. For example, what kind of molding can your budget handle?

It’s a constant balancing act. We must consider the specific criteria of a brief and the visual effect we’re looking for and then solve the holistic problem by balancing those two things.

Product Design Education Opportunities

You can learn a lot more about product material performance criteria, visual criteria, size limitations and other product design and product development material considerations via an online product design education. By understanding these and other areas, you can increase your chance of successfully designing and developing products that people value.

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.