If you’re pursuing an online UX design education, it’s important to understand the different terminology. You’ll hear the terms UI, UX, UI design, and CX thrown around a lot. There are really two types of user flows. We’ll take a zoomed-out perspective for the first one, which is most aligned with CX, or customer experience design, where you look at a broader context: from initial consideration (or even before the user considers using or purchasing a product) all the way to post-usage, including users referring people to a product. We want to understand all the interactions that are taking place within that space.

Zooming in a bit more is where our user experience design, or UX design, lives. This really focuses more on the usage of individual products. When are people engaging with products? At what time during the day? How are people using them? Are other people using the products with them? What does that look like?

A lot of what we can gain from user experience research is that narrative of how people are using products throughout the day. We can understand this through a process known as journey mapping. Journey mapping is basically what it sounds like, a map of the interactions a person has with your products: how they engage with them on a daily basis, what actions they’re taking throughout an app, and how that impacts other actions that they may take or impacts future behaviors.

That’s basically the difference between a CX and UX.

Everyone can think like a designer. If you go into your kitchen and open your door, you will see some tools that you use very regularly. I bet that you will also see tools that you used once, or maybe some that you’ve never used at all. Those tools just sit there at the bottom of the drawer. Why is that?

Why are the tools that you go back to time and time again on top? Why do the tools on the bottom just sit there waiting to get cleaned out or just gathering dust? There must be something that you really like about the tools you use all the time. Other tools on top may simply be really functional.

Maybe the ones that sit on the bottom, however, could have been designed better. The fact that you have this preference for tools that you use all the time over the ones that you do not means that you, too, can think like a designer.

As designers, sometimes we undertake really long processes that take months of research and thinking. However, we can also do really short product design processes called “design sprints.” A design sprint takes a long process and presses it into a few hours, days, or weeks, depending on the nature of the project and how many people are involved. Each sprint allows you to try an abbreviated version of a product development process to see if there’s “something there.”

Take a can opener or fruit peeler, for example, such as the tools in the OXO Good Grips line of products. OXO Good Grips was inspired by the fruit peeler of a woman with arthritis.

Over time, the woman realized that it was really difficult to use her fruit peeler. It was particularly hard for her to hold it due to the limited mobility in her hands. She thought to herself: “well, I wish there was a better fruit peeler.”

The woman happened to be connected to a kitchen goods manufacturer. They enlisted the help of designer Tucker Wemeister and his team, a firm called Smart Design, to develop a better fruit peeler. The blade of the fruit peeler did not make much of a difference for the woman; it was actually the handle that helped.

The team made a nice and comfortable handle for their fruit peeler. The woman found that the peeler was a pleasure to use in the hand: grippy, a little soft (but not too soft!), and not too slippery. When her hands were wet and she was trying to peel a carrot, it worked well because it did not slip as much and was easier to hold.

The next time you go to your kitchen, I encourage you to look at the tools that you use, the tools you reach for over and over again. Ask yourself: “What is it about these products that I really love using? Why do I reach for this time and time again?”

At the same time, open your kitchen junk drawer. Ask yourself: Okay, what is in here? Why do I never use these? Is there a design opportunity with your kitchen tools? Could you design them better?

There are opportunities for design sprints all around you. They may be in the kitchen, around the house, in the car, or even in the bathroom. In your everyday life and throughout your online product design education, you will find that the world is full of design opportunities. You never know where inspiration is going to come from.

No matter if you’re working on a physical project or if you’re working on digital project, having a set and well thought out testing process is something that’s very important. Keep the following three things in mind in your pursuit of online UX design education.

I took a course in Parsons around usability testing, especially around digital app design. One thing that I thought it was really helpful that I still use nowadays is to first of all figure out a script that you’re going to follow to do your usability testing.

Secondly, when you’re doing your usability testing, you don’t want to give any social pressure to the person that’s testing your product to make them feel like they have to say good things about your product. That’s something that’s very important.

Thirdly, it’s really important to set clear tasks for your tester to complete on their own with your product. Then while your tester is testing your product, we encourage them to speak out loud in terms of whatever they’re thinking in their mind. It could be that they completely have no idea what they’re doing or they just don’t like this particular color. It could be anything. What we want is to create a safe non-judgmental environment for your tester to feel free to speak out loud and say any thought they have in their mind when they’re interacting with this product.

All of this helps you as the designer of UX or UI to get unbiased feedback, which helps drive the choices you make in UX design or UI design.

Design elements in film are a little bit different from those of a live theater production. Theater recognizes that the actors who are in front of the audience are live. They engage with one another through their energies and their sound. They feed off of one another. If they make mistakes, then it’s live. They have to account for all of those things.

This is opposed to, let’s say, a how a movie tells a story. In a way, that’s a very finite linear narrative. Because of that linear quality, it allows the audiences, through this technology, to sit back and think about the interface of a cinema, or later, on your TV. The idea that you sit back and you absorb this story that’s being told without really being able to interject with it is a very different way of viewing a story.

That’s not to say that your brain is not working. That’s not to say that your brain doesn’t go between scenes and that this story is taking you somewhere else, which is that level of interactivity that takes place.

This places more emphasis on the UX design or UI design of the product that’s being displayed. It’s important for anyone pursuing online UX design education to think about what each choice in UX or UI requires of the audience. Think about what the anticipation or expectation of the audience is in terms of their role in viewing or experiencing this story that’s being showcased. Is their passive or active? How does that affect the design choices in the film?

If you want to learn about the history of viewing media, you need to look a little bit further away from the decade we’re in. We can perhaps go back, at least within the realm of the digital experiences, to the interface that really defined so much of what we are experiencing now, which is the screen. But the screen itself has really come from much further back than that, right? So, let’s talk about the implications of camera, picture, and then motion picture.

If we look at just the way in which experiences have been created and interfaces have been constructed, we have to really look at the essence of motion pictures. Motion picture is, at least to me, really one of the technologies that has truly defined our sense of self in the 20th century, which we are going away from now. We’re now seeing that process of being and becoming away from the motion picture.

I say that because what the motion picture really created was the understanding that you have frames that are still photography. You place them on a continuum, and you show it at a certain rate per second. And then you have the illusion of reality on a screen through that projection. It’s exciting to think about it if we put ourselves in the shoes of those who, for the first time in the early 20th century or late 19th century, were experiencing those kinds of interfaces.

To think about the first time the idea of a train coming into the screen, which was simply captured by holding a camera down on the railroad, and to think about what that really meant for people who had never seen this illusion of reality, is really amazing. The anecdote says that those who saw those first movies were quite terrified by what they saw, as they really felt that there was a train coming through the screen, and as a result, they left the cinema. That in itself has really defined how we came to understand the role of the audience.

Understanding the history of the screen interface can also help those who are taking online UX design education. In this type of online course, you will learn about UX, UI, as well as UX design and UI design.

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.

For the best user interface (UI) design, you have to think carefully about the features of the product you want to make.

Let’s take something in the physical world as an example. We have public accessibility codes designed to help disabled people navigate their way through a city. What does that mean as far as user experience goes? What does good UX design look like in this case?

The design includes the things we have that meet the goal of those accessibility codes. We have things like ramps, walkways, and spaces on the sides of a metro station specifically for disabled people to use.

We don’t have that kind of accessibility code in the digital world. More accurately, we do have it, but it’s not enforced in UI design like the real-world code is enforced by the government.

What ends up happening if you don’t follow the accessibility code is that you end up not including a large section of society who would also be benefiting from and enjoying the kind of products that you’re making. This is a common UX flaw.

How do you take care of this issue as a business? How do you correct it as an organization that caters to a large section of millions of people? What are the concerns that you need to have so that your product is not just usable by a few people?

Something that online UX design education stresses is that whether you’re making a real-world product or something digital, it needs to reach all sections of society and be accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

You have to take care to make sure you’re not restricting any particular set of people from using it.

When we’re building products and solutions that cater to the needs of a broad spectrum of users, we need to bring the engineering team on board as soon as possible. The expertise and knowledge they have about how to build products that are accessible is key to planning and creating those products.

Their insight can help us enrich our prototypes and design solutions. Production is also easier once the engineers start working on the implementation of our solution. They appreciate and understand why accessibility is so important. They’ll build the product from the ground up with that in mind and include accessibility at its core.

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.

Information hierarchies in UX UI design guarantee that users see all content organized in an ascending or descending order of importance in regards to the onscreen layout. Information hierarchies are one of the essential components of the visualization of content experiences in UI design required by visual designers and also writers.

I actually love this part. I’m dyslexic. When I read something, I need to be able to really quickly understand what I’m reading because it’s difficult for me if I get tripped up in too many words or the text doesn’t get the point in a relatively short amount of time.

Bites of Information

People don’t swallow their food whole. They take bites. The same is true of content. When people are looking at screen surfaces, you can only feed so much information to them. If they get to a point where they want more, you can let them add more to their plates by diving deeper and getting into more content.

In today’s world, you really need to create a well-edited, deeply considered content strategy so users actually walk away with knowledge or learn or understand something important. For example, they might walk away with a better understanding of something they need to do, such as filling in paperwork for a medical appointment or something related to education.

Online UX Design Education

With all UI content scenarios, you need to be really thoughtful with the written word. It’s essential for UX design. During your studies, you will see both good and bad examples of information hierarchies. You will also receive steps to craft fantastic content strategies that are well thought out and that work at attracting and holding user interest while making content easier for users to consume.

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.