My biggest advice when designing UX or UI is to not get too into the weeds. It really just comes down to this: don’t overthink things. Don’t get too caught up on the technical details of UX design or UI design. It’s something that not everyone can be taught.

What you do want to do is leave a lasting impression. You want to create something helpful or enjoyable for people using it. It’s about just having what I call “The vibe.”

The vibe is super important. Having the vibe drive what you’re designing means not getting caught up in numbers or technical details. In the end, the people using it don’t care about any of that. They really think about how they feel after using what you’ve designed. You want to make sure that what you’ve designed is leaving a really great impression on them.

Vibe can’t be measured. It’s one of the things that makes designers irreplaceable. A lot of people think that at some point all these vibes are going to be replaced by robots. However, when you’re designing something for people, the vibe is what people remember.

You really can’t measure it, but it is something that comes from a feeling. It has to come from passion and inspiration. It’s something that you just notice when you look at something. You just feel that it has a certain sort of personality to it. I think that’s going to have a lasting impression on the world, and it’s going to be what makes designers irreplaceable.

UI, or user interface, refers to the complement, the look and feel, and the interactivity with the product that you are designing. In other words, UI design refers to the visual components of your experience and how those visual components are going to make your journey or the user’s journey as intuitive as possible.

In the same way, we can describe UX as the foundation, structure and frame of a house. The difference between UX design and UI design is that UI refers to the wallpaper, the furniture, and all those elements that make this environment more pleasant and overall more intuitive to navigate. This ranges from the buttons, iconography, colors and all aesthetics that are involved in the interface or that adorn the interface.

One of the big things to keep in mind while pursuing online UX design education is that no matter how “usable” you think what you’ve designed is, if it doesn’t look good, people are not going to want to use it at all. It’s super important to keep in mind when actually building something.

I like to say that UX without UI is just not really a great product. You see it all the time, too. You see some products and programs that have been around for years, but they just look so outdated that no one wants to use them anymore. There are hot, fresh, new products out that just look a lot slicker, and people are gravitating towards them. Never forget that UI is always going to be very valuable to your UX.

Visual design should really follow functionality. UX and UI are kind of a complement to each other. You need to make sure that the program performs well but also looks good. The UX design and UI design elements should go hand in hand.

When designing, make sure that you don’t only have the UI part but also that the user experience is embedded in it. Also try to optimize that for consistency. If you use certain UI elements, make sure they look the same throughout your website and everything that you put in your interface and that they actually makes sense and have a reason to be there.

Things like simplicity and color, which really identify certain functionality, are like accents that you can put in your interface. For example, I really love the Gestalt principles. I try to always have the designers that I work with present not only how things look but also how they work. They need to make sure that everything they put in the interface makes sense and has a reason to be there. Everything must also be tested with users so you can make sure the functionality is right.

Sarah Douglas recalls her experience with the designer: “I had the privilege of working on a project called Wallpaper Handmade for ten years, in which we married designers and artists with makers and manufacturers to create new one-off objects that sometimes were put into production.” This was an exciting way to see the entire design journey, from conception to completion and everything in between.

Product Development for The Bookmark

“I think the one example I’d like to talk about is actually a product that we made with Paul Cocksedge the designer, and a marble manufacturer in Athens.”

“It was actually an idea that Paul had called, The Bookmark, which was to rethink the idea of what a bookmark is. He very quickly realized that actually working in this type of marble would push the boundaries for him, in terms of the object he would make. It goes against what a bookmark should be, but offers something completely different. It’s a large object that rocks. Now, bookmarks don’t rock. Marble doesn’t usually rock. It was a really joyful product.”

Product Design Education

After some extensive research, Paul made his idea happen. “He went to Athens. He actually had the ability to feel the material, watch how it’s made. This actual bookmark which is kind of like, this large, it was made by using CNC water jet cutting.”

“Paul’s work is always about pushing technology and pushing materials that don’t necessarily behave the way you expect them to. And I think this project-although there were difficulties, there were definitely more conversations to be had throughout the process-the actual final result was really, really well-considered because he had researched the material properly.”

The process by which we, ShopYourFit, went from product/market fit to revenue is very interesting because it includes a mix of more product/market fit, more experimentation, and more products we’re building. We find out even different problems that customers have.
That’s how we got into revenue. When we built ShopYourFit, we quickly understood that we were going to have different customers coming to the website. They’re going to a personalization process that we created using artificial intelligence, and using later, TensorFlow and augmented reality.
I explained how the personalization process works. Customers visit the website and manually input their height and weight. Then, they choose their style. It’s very subjective the way that customers dress. It’s not necessarily about the large, medium, or small sizes that matter. Customers may want clothing that is tighter or clothing that is looser.
Different styles are more subjective, so what we did is build a simple board where the customer selects certain pictures. Using the selections, we can gain an understanding of a customer’s behavior and how the customer wants to wear certain styles of clothing.
We ask customers to take pictures of the front and side, so we can construct a precise body type. We have the body type, we have the style, and we have the customer’s height and weight. Using all the information provided by the customer, we can populate a website for customers that is customized to what they’re looking for.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is not just for designing buildings but for anything that needs to be assembled. It turns a lot of handwritten hard work into easy workable designs on a computer. Creating two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures and changing them very easily has changed architecture and product design tremendously.

There’s no doubt that computers have helped the world do many things faster and more efficiently than traditional methods. Before computers, architects and product designers were limited because they had to hand draw their designs and use rulers to ensure their measurements were correct. And if they had made a mistake or dimensions had to change, they had to erase and start over. With CAD, you can make changes quickly to a product design without losing the other work you’ve done.

The computer allows you to make changes in product development very easily. Complex and challenging product designs can be created with ease by using CAD. You can also create multiple copies of the same design with some tweaks added. To do this, you simply copy and alter it and repeat that process as many times as you’d like. Find the perfect proportions or see where your dimensions need to change some to make it more comfortable to use in different situations. Then you have multiple versions of the same product and can see which one works the best for you and your clients.

After the design is on the computer, you can do many things with it. For example, you can start with two-dimensional drawings and then move on to three-dimensional drawings. You can see what the faces look like in two-dimensional drawings and then look at them from multiple viewpoints with the three-dimensional drawings. This process uses orthogonal drawings.

Orthogonal drawings allow you to see a top view, side views, front views, and sometimes you even can see the bottom or back views, depending on what you need. You can usually describe the object in perfect detail with a front view, top view, and side views. Product design education can help you learn these techniques to add more value to your efforts in creating products.

After using these multiple viewpoints, you can produce documents called technical specifications. These documents are sent out to the vendors so they can replicate them into real materials. The vendors use their knowledge to make your materials with their processes and the specific use of the materials. Usually, whatever your product calls for, the vendors have their methods of making it a reality for you to do your job. Once you have your materials from the vendor, you can piece together a prototype to present to your client.

There are other orthogonal views telling us the product’s size, what the dimensions are, and what the material is going to be like and how the product will be assembled together. Technical specifications are simply one tool that CAD offers you to make professional and accurate product designs.

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?

Industrial design is one of the broadest professions there is because we design anything, from small housewares, to transportation, to exhibits. I designed this product development course to mirror the design process. It starts with an exploration of the field and what kind of opportunities there are.

The next step is where you start sketching. We’re going to sketch out more what the industrial design profession does. And we’re going to show you how designers sketch in different media.

Industrial design is basically designing things, which humans have been doing ever since they got out of the cave. We pulled up a rock, and that was our first design.

The industrial design profession really started in the 1920s when we were called upon by the industry to design things for their machines so they could mass produce. That required us to create this new profession that was focused on manufacturing techniques and also about how to satisfy customers.

What’s great about industrial design is it’s really focused on user needs. What has happened over those last years is our tiny profession has become the dominant method of business nowadays. Everybody’s doing design thinking. They’re all focused on the user’s needs. And all the things that industrial designers invented now are the normal things that everyone uses.

The difference with what real industrial designers bring to the party, besides all that good stuff, is that we actually make real things.

The design process includes sketching up ideas. But by sketching, we mean actually sketching three dimensionally to make a mock up or something. So, the design process goes from trying to understand things, exploring what’s around, brainstorming ideas about how to solve the issues, or what opportunities we can find, taking those ideas, and refining them and trying to figure out how to make them into a real product.

Finally, we have to work with the factories and engineers to actually make the things. So, we get down to the nitty gritty of choosing which materials to use and what manufacturing processes are going to be used.

Then we even try and sell the product because we’ve been through the whole process. This product is our baby. We know where it’s good. We know when it’s bad. We know how to make people want that baby.

Basically, that’s the industrial design in a nutshell. In this module of product design, we call it “explore” because that’s the first phase of an industrial design project. What you do when you start exploring is you don’t know where you’re going. You have to start off with a blank slate.

We’re going to look at different ways you fill up that slate with information you didn’t know when you started out. But, at the end of this phase you’re going to have a good idea of what the project is about.

This is what a product design education course can offer you.

What impacts one impacts us all when it comes to product design. Or as Martin Luther King said, “What affects one affects all of us.” Consciously or not, we’re often considering our shared experiences and evaluating the designer of product development. We think about who is on the design team and who is authoring these products that are making their way to market. Sometimes, we realize that essential products like medical devices, educational tools, technological programs, and the cars that we drive are not crafted by a team that is as diverse as it should be.

Let’s take America, for instance. Our nation is a very diverse country. It is referred to as “a melting pot” or “a salad.” A more contemporary term might be “a hot pot.” We have people coming to this country from different cultures, different races, different ethnicities, different nationalities, different religions, and different genders. Instead of insisting on a generic, one-size-fits-all product design, we should celebrate our differences and incorporate them into our design work.

When we think about how a product that is used by people from such diverse backgrounds we ask “how can it possibly be perfect for every individual? How can one product be satisfactory to someone who is very tall, someone who’s very short, to someone who is sighted, or someone who was born deaf?” To a person with neurological challenges, a common product design might be perceived very differently than by someone who’s considered to be highly functional in a conventional sense.

These variations and the way people live as well as their individual experiences suggest that product design education is truly intersectional and is influenced by many factors. A designer can make design decisions in a studio in the Midwest or in Philadelphia where I live, but they don’t know anything about those who live in South Texas and grew up on a ranch. How do they have meaningful conversations about a product? They don’t. We make a lot of assumptions about public perception of our goods and services.

With ethnographic research, we asked a few people some questions and gathered enough insights to enlighten our understanding. With relevant feedback, I can go and work on my idea. And what happens is that there’s a disconnect between the products that are made and the people who they serve. We end up with products that don’t work as well as they should. Building inclusivity into our design approach is the first step toward meeting diverse consumer needs. Online product design education can become the next step for those who want to enter this challenging but rewarding field.

“I’m always encouraging my students to aim for 100 ideas,” says Jamer Hunt. “You may think that there are only two or three good ideas for one single opportunity, but I say try for 100.”

When you start generating ideas, you often reach a point of frustration where you think there’s nothing else to think about. When you reach this point, you have to just keep moving forward.

“Just keep sketching,” encourages Jamer. “You have to keep iterating your ideas because eventually, you’ll reach ideas you didn’t know you had.”

Product Design

This is when things start getting exciting. This is when design really takes off. I like to refer to this as the unknown unknowns. These are the things that we don’t know we don’t know. This is the real magic of design. Most design falls under the unknown unknowns. For example, how can we take this vacuum cleaner and improve it by 3%? How do we take this experience on an airline and improve it by 3%?

Product Design Education

The unknown unknowns are those breakthrough ideas that really transform a way of designing into a way of creating new products. However, you don’t get there on your first, second, or third ideas. You have to push through to your 20th, your 30th, your 40th, and your 100th ideas. This is when you really put stress on your own sense of what you know. This is where you push yourself beyond your comfort zone into an area where the things in your head come forward. These are the things you aren’t prepared for and the things you don’t anticipate.

This is when the magic starts to happen.