“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.

UX is user experience design. Daniel Holtzman informs us that it’s a big field and it encompasses a lot of things. It comes from a few older practices, some of which form part of what UX is and some of which have been more or less replaced by it. Back in the day, it was more commonly referred to as HCI, or human-computer interface.

There are elements of it which touch UI. There are elements of it which touch technology. There are elements of it which touch business. But really, it’s about understanding how a product or an experience is going to affect a user’s life. How can you create the product or experience in a way that allows someone to use it better, get more out of it, find more delight in it and ultimately engage with it more successfully?

UX design has grown from a lot of things, and it’s at a point now where it’s really exploding. There is a lot going on as interfaces and technologies evolve.

We’re seeing voice interfaces. We’re seeing VR, AR, all of these emergent technologies, all of which are going to require that people not only understand how to bring those experiences to life but also do it in new ways. We’ll have to take all the things we traditionally do in a more digital format and bring them to these other types of formats.

We’re finding that people are specializing, but more people are also becoming generalists. The industry is at a point where it’s diverging. Before, we had a convergence of a bunch of different practices coming together under the helm of UX. Now, what we’re seeing is people specializing and diverging into these different areas.

As these areas become richer and more complex, we’re going to need people who are paying more and more attention to these specific things and are able to specialize in them.

If you have interest in learning more about both UX design and UI design, an excellent place to start would be online UX design education. It’s a convenient and accessible way to gain a much deeper and more complete understanding of these topics and many others.

One of the most valuable parts of online UX design education is the look back at the most innovative UX developments in history.

Moving on to the ’70s and Xerox, Apple, and the PC. This is the era of personal computers. Suddenly, psychology and engineering are merged together, and that evolves into the first graphical user interfaces and the mouse, which was invented by Xerox. Apple, in 1984, develops the Macintosh — the first ever mass-market PC that involved a graphical user interface, a mouse, and a built-in screen.

Now, we arrive to the big, big, big deal of UX design. That is Donald Norman. In the ’90s, Donald Norman was the first ever person to implement the word UX in his job title. He was hired by Apple as a UX architect engineer. He was a cognitive scientist who wanted to evolve what designers had understood up until to that moment as UX. He wanted to evolve that and to expand that into the realm of the physical, including UI and UI design, industrial design, the graphical user interface, the physical interaction, even the packaging.

So, thank you Mr. Norman because, thanks to you, the world now is a better place.

This is my method for doing research analysis for UX and UI design.

After I have observed my users and the task they’re doing, and after I’ve spoken to them, I’ll have a bunch of qualitative data that I want to analyze. After analyzing the data, hopefully I’ll understand some really meaningful insights about those users’ needs.

The first thing I would do to go about finding those insights is to gather all the data I have, which will include recordings and notes.

I always recommend you record your interviews, and good online UX design education will suggest that, too. Record the interviews and take notes. If possible, have someone else with you during the interviews who will also take notes. This is helpful because two people will hear and see different things, so you’ll get a second perspective on the interviews.

Once I gather the data, I’ll look at it to see what different data points are there. By data points, I mean that I would go over the interview and circle key ideas or key words that come up. Then I would write each one of those on a different Post-it note and stick it to the wall.

Today, we use Miro a lot, or other similar online and digital platforms. We have digital Post-its! Those are great collaborative tools. So, just write those ideas or those data points that are coming up on your board, digital or physical.

The next thing that I would do is start to cluster things that are similar in themes or ideas. By doing that, you’ll start to see patterns. You’ll start to see recurring themes and similar things that are coming up from many different people.

Once you understand that an issue has come up from different people, you can start to analyze it and ask what that action means. From there you would start to derive insights. This stage is what I call unpacking the data.

Getting the insights is one of the trickiest parts of analyzing the research for your UX design, but the process is only these simple steps. The more you analyze your UI data in this way, the easier it should be to find those important insights.

One important thing to consider when you’re planning and preparing for your usability study in online UX design education is how to avoid bias. This is important whether you’re testing a prototype, testing the competition, or even just having a conversation with your users to discover more about their needs how to incorporate that into your UX design or UI design.

You really have to be careful not to introduce your own biases into the conversation. Biases are very broad topics, and there’s a lot of information to learn about them and how to control for them. The easiest way to do that is by working with a diverse team with diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences.

The importance of user testing is that when you are designing, you often come with biases, and those can make their way into your work. When you’re designing for a group of people who are not necessarily you, in your demographic, or even related to things you have an interest in, you’re going to come into it with assumptions that might not be true at all. That means that it’s important to ensure you test the way real uses would actually use what you’re designing.

Getting that sort of data is going to help you to make more educated decisions in your UI and UX, especially when you’re working with a team, each individual has their own assumptions, and you really need something to drive the direction of the design.

Online UX design education is imperative for web designers to become great at what they do and improve the UX. Whenever you design accessible interfaces, you’re making the experience better for every user, not just for those with certain disabilities or handicaps.

There are a ton of things to consider when creating an effective UI design. How large is the text, and is it easy to read? Is there enough contrast between the text and its background? How large are the buttons, and are they clickable?

To create the best UX design, we really have to place ourselves in the shoes of our users who have more specialized UI needs by reading up on books to help us think them through. But more importantly, it is a must that we actually go out into the field and speak with those users ourselves so that we can fully understand their needs and capture them accordingly.

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.