One of the first things you’ll learn to do in good UX design is quantitative research. In quantitative research, you ask people questions that lead you to a very specific set of answers. Hopefully, you get the answers you were looking for.

Through these answers, you might discover whether a feature on your website works the way you were expecting or whether it would be good to include that feature if the site is visited by 10,000 people or 1 million people.

The power of quantitative research in UX and UI design comes in when you get answers to questions like those.

Imagine you don’t want to invest the time into doing quantitative research with hundreds of users so you’re working with a much smaller sample size. In this case, qualitative research is a more appropriate strategy. Personal interviews can still be done with one person, or you can hold group interviews with five or 10 people.

Good online UX design education will teach you that it’s important to have a specific goal for these interviews and to start with that goal. You can do this whether you’re building a physical product or something digital like an app or a website. Let’s use digital products as an example.

Your goal might be to figure out whether you need some kind of a feed feature on a website or app you’re building and, if so, what that feed should be about? Would it be something that is more like storytelling or would it be something more like a news feed?

In a case like that, you’d want to find the appropriate users that you’re targeting with your app or the website that you’re building. You would talk to them and ask them open-ended questions instead of specific questions about the UI of your site or app.

What do they generally do during the day? When they go on a social website, how do they browse? When they go on a news website, how do they browse?

Using those interviews and the transcripts that you gather from them, you would start to code the interviews to figure out the patterns between all of these users. If those patterns lead you to something that overlaps between all of the interviews, that’s a specific result you’ll probably want to implement on your app or website.

In product development, you go through what we call the human-centered design process that involves you really trying to understand as much as possible about who is going to be able to use the product or idea. You have to do what we call ethnography and really try to recall and understand the insights, backgrounds, pain points and motivations of consumers in general and the members of a specific target market. You need to learn from their demographic framework, which means you need to study their class, race, gender, sexuality, employment status, level of education, geographic location and academic, work and social networks. We call these people, the ones who interact with our products and ideas, stakeholders.

Recognizing Every Stakeholder

If you are designing a product for a child, for instance, they are a stakeholder. Yet, the child’s parent who buys their toys, objects, articles of clothing and other items product designers create is also a stakeholder that you must consider during the design process. By extension, anyone else who might buy the product for the child, such as grandparents or friends, are also stakeholders, right? You need to ask yourself: Who else is influencing the person or group of people who you are designing for and what type of value do they find in it?

Recognizing Physical Elements

When we focus on humans during the human-centered product design process, we are trying to understand how people and people around them think and value things. We are also trying to understand them as physical human beings too. Oftentimes, when we are creating objects of design on the industrial design scale, we must focus on what we call “human factors.” We are trying to understand particularities about someone’s physiology, such as the strength of their body, the size of their hands, the level of their vision or the size of their head, to make certain that we understand how a product might interact with them physically.

Online Product Design Education

Human social and physical factors influence designs and economics. We need to think about how stakeholders want a product to function and the types of problems that a product can solve for them. Keep in mind that these are just a few examples of human-centered product design. During your product design education, you will learn a lot more about this process and how you can use it to turn ideas into tangible items that people need and want to bring into their lives.

Product design deadlines can sneak up on you faster than you might think possible, which means that you have to make certain that you’re working at a steady pace. How do you stay on track? How do you give yourself a little bit of leash, so to speak, to discover things that are unexpected?

There are many stories from the history of research and development days when scientists would experiment with X material for a purpose and discover, with the purpose or goal just in sight, something else potentially as important along the way. This type of scenario is challenging because the product design process requires that we design time as much as we design material. On any given day, how we design our day and how much we stick to that design matters.

Deadlines as Motivational Tools in Product Design

There are many strategies that I use to design how I use time. I don’t always listen to myself, but I try to do the best that I can when I’m working on a project. You need to recognize that someone may expect a very quick turnaround and that a deadline is not your enemy but your friend. Deadlines may come from a client that is expecting, for production reasons, a deliverable at a certain point in a certain process or sequence. You may also receive an artificial deadline for competition reasons. Deadlines aren’t to be cursed as unreasonable or horrible things. You really need to appreciate and embrace them because they can help motivate you to take an incremental amount of time and subdivide it into activities.

What Does Dishonesty Mean in Time Management?

You ask yourself how you can design your time, your timeline, and how you can get from “here” to “there” in the time that you have available from now until the deadline. A deadline gives you both time and spatial activity reference. It also keeps you somewhat honest. When you’re dishonest about time with yourself, such as if you take on too many projects at once or take too much time having fun while brainstorming and fail to leave yourself enough time for iterative testing, you can expect negative feedback from clients. Your inability to manage time changes your design and product development. It all comes out in the wash too. The more you’re dishonest and fail to manage time, the more you experiment and fail with a particular sequence. When you get better at being honest with yourself on what you actually have time to do, you can expect more positive client feedback.

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As shown, you can shortchange yourself on any number of product design projects in various ways. To prevent adverse outcomes, such as a reduction in project opportunities or potential permanent damage to your reputation, it’s important to learn as much as possible now about time management skills and tools while pursuing your product design education.

Here’s the thing, your homepage is not your homepage. Google is. That’s where people start searching for their products. So even if a potential customer types in your brand name and sweater and they end up on your site, customers won’t stay on your site if they don’t see what they’re looking for. They’ll go back to Google and look at your competitors’ pages. It’s vital to understand this. There is a real need then to correlate what’s happening on the search engine with your website. This is the key to success.

The first thing people who are trying to do this should do is think about the copy on their website. That’s the first step. If you are not writing good copy that considers SEO and how people are searching for goods, no one will ever find you. And if they don’t see you, you’re not part of the competition. Next, you should also think about your website videos and images. You’d be surprised how many people shop by Google image search. And if your images are not showing up, you’re once again not part of the competition.

Conversely, you should also consider how much you will need to pay to show up in the top page results. Because if you’re not on that first page, you’re not part of the competition. This can become very costly, but it’s part of the rules of the game. So, you need to know all about SEM, SEO, and SMM. It can be challenging to keep up with the different acronyms relevant to creating a successful website. Still, these are tech words that you need to understand as a retailer if you want to compete with other brands.

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.”

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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?