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.

Let’s say you’re on Zoom. How many of you have heard the phrase, “Oh, you’re muted. Could you repeat yourself, please?” The mute button is a great example of a product design opportunity. It’s something that we are all really familiar with, but fundamentally it’s poorly designed because it’s not intuitive to how we want it to work. That is a design opportunity. Again, it could start in everyday frustration. It could start because something is not working the way it should be. And really, if you can’t figure it out, that’s a design flaw. The person has not designed it to be easy to use and easy to figure out. There’s a better way to do it if you can’t figure it out.

So, what are ways that you can try and tackle this problem-solving process in product development? First, it’s really about identifying what the problem is. How you frame that problem is really important. Are you asking the right question? Coming back to the example of the mute button, is it, “Am I asking how do I make this mute button easier to turn on and off, or am I really asking how do I make the mute button work for me? How do I make the mute button intuitive? And how do I make the mute button work in a way that makes sense for most people?” Or is it also about making a solution that’s not about a mute button at all, but just about filtering out sound and being able to bubble up the important parts of speech and lower and suppress the parts of speech that are not as important? For example, filtering out white noise but raising voices when you really want to be heard.

The first part really to tackling a problem is framing the problem and figuring out what is the question you’re really trying to answer. You might think you’re asking one question but as you go forward in the design process, and you research, and you develop ideas, you actually come back to the question, and the question isn’t quite right. Let me rephrase this. Let me adjust this and rejigger it to a way that makes more sense and actually gets at the heart of what I really care about. That’s the first part: just framing the question. It sounds easy, but it’s actually really hard.

We often ask questions in the phrase of “how might we?” How might we design a better mute button? Or, how might we come up with a sound system that’s more intuitive? How might we filter out background noise? How might we ensure that voices are heard? There’s a whole different way, and each one is focused on the same problem but with slightly different perspectives. That’s framing the problem.

These are the kinds of questions tackled in our product design education courses.

Emily Rothschild says, “When you start out in product design and product development, it’s really important to understand who your audience is and who your user is.” Where is this design, this project that you’re working on going to resonate most? You will need to think about where it’s going to land, where it’s going to live, who’s going to understand it, and most importantly, who’s going to use it.

Do a thorough analysis into the types of users that you’re working with. That can be creating personas. It has to involve talking to people, it has to involve putting ideas forward to get feedback and responses, it will involve testing when you come down a little bit farther down the road with the initial ideas. You’ll begin to build prototypes, even quick and dirty, sketch models. This means putting together something to express an idea that somebody can take and hold and react to. Through that process, you will better understand whether your ideas and your hunches are beginning to land and work and resonate with the people who need this or want this new design.

“Industrial designers think of the audience as actually the user,” says Tucker Viemesiter. “But the real audience for a product includes the guy who has to make it in the factory, the person who sells it to the customer, or the customer who buys it.” The customer who buys it is not necessarily the same person who uses it. For example, your mother buys a toy, but your mother is not going to use it, the baby’s going to use it. Each one of those people in the audience has something else that they’re trying to get out of this thing. You have to address all those people, and everybody has a different need. When you answer all of those things, hopefully, you have a really successful product.

Scott Henderson explains, “Back when the baby brand skip hop, was, again, just a husband and wife team, I came on as one of their first consultants. At the time they were making soft goods, diaper bags, and things like that, and leaving the industry in that area. They wanted to go ahead and make some hardgoods products, not so much designed for the baby. Because it’s really hard to design for someone from a third person point of view. And since babies are so young, it’s almost a useless exercise to try to get into their head as to what they really need. It really is about the parent.”

Henderson continues to say, “We created a strategy where we were going to create five or six hardgoods products: one in the area feeding, one in the area of in and around the sink, cleaning of bottles and things, one in the area of nursery, diaper management, and a couple of nursery products. We broke it up like,” a person’s house has a nursery, they have a kitchen, they have the refrigerator.” Once we establish these zones — kitchen, bathroom, kid’s room, nursery room — I set out to create a bunch of products that would work in these spaces.”

Our product design education course helps you design products with the user in mind.

How do you come up with the requirements for a product development project? Well, we can start with this user journey and say, “OK, how does this person use it, and what are their needs?” What are the needs of a person in this scenario, and what are the minimum requirements? What are the maximum bounds of what we want to create? At the very least, when it comes to this mute button scenario, we need it to be able to turn sound on and off essentially. That’s one way of looking at it. But, really what we want it to do is not communicate anything that shouldn’t be communicated and share what should be shared. So, what should and shouldn’t be shared across audio?

For example, you want to hear your grandma telling you a story about what it was like when she was growing up, but you don’t want to hear the toilet flushing. How do you distinguish, and how do you design a system that’s going to do that?

We’re looking at minimum performance in product design. Success would be that. Let’s say you want it to be easy to use. What does “easy to use” mean? Does “easy to use” mean it reads my thoughts? Does it mean it’s easy to push on and push off? Does it mean the button is big enough so that my visually impaired friend can use it? What does that mean for it to be “easy to use?”

On the other end, it also needs to be “not too complicated,” and that’s sort of combined with “easy to use.” This is the same way that you might develop financial metrics for success. Let’s say you want to hit a sales target of $6 million. That’s a very straightforward number. But, often metrics have more nuance to them. And similarly, you might have metrics for sales in terms of not just sales targets, but amounts like percentage yield or percentage of success, like how many attempts were successful, that kind of thing.

Likewise for a product design project, you want to think about not just making it work, but what are the nuances underneath making it work? Making it work better might be your overall department. But then within that, make it easy to use, not too complicated, and facilitate communication. Those might be a set of very simple requirements for a design project.

These requirements are what you go back to time and time again when you are testing your concepts and your prototypes. You’ll say, “OK, is this successful? How do I tell if this is successful? Does it meet my requirements? Is it within my requirements? Yes or no?”

The minimal requirements of success are some topics covered in our product design education courses.

At larger companies, it’s harder to push the boundaries of UX design and UI design. It takes a lot more justification to create something new because so much has already been invented.

A big way to do that is to really just make sure to audit all of the UX and UI design patterns within the company to see if there is something that you can reuse. If there isn’t, you can look at a variety of other companies that are doing something similar. Look across different industries and find best practices and introduce them in a way that shows that you’ve already looked at these other existing patterns, and they just don’t fit.

For example, I worked on an e-commerce project in augmented reality, and there just wasn’t enough existing patterns of behavior in a large retail company like Williams-Sonoma. Then I started looking across at Pokémon to see what was out there: in the app store, in the market, etc. That really helped to inform some of these new decisions and new technologies that we are creating.

So, really just expanding your horizons, oftentimes, and introducing that to the company in a way that is about collaboration and bringing on new technologies—I think that’s a big part of it.

There’s visual design in the corporate world, so you’re probably entering a space where there is branding and a design system has already been created. So your job would be to understand that system, whether it’s UI or UX design, and make sure you’re aligned with it. This might be a little bit different from creating a visual design system from scratch.

If you were thinking about creating a visual design system from scratch, then you still would want to consider the brand and how it wants to be perceived. For example, if you know there are three adjectives that the brand wants to express, you might choose different colors. You might choose different typography. You might lay out your page in a different way if your company wanted to be playful.

If your company wanted to be more professional, then you might also pick a different grid structure. You might pick typography that leans a little bit more toward sans serif. All those visual choices are going to express your company’s brand in a certain way.

But then, there are also visual design choices that should follow more universal principles. This is more of a personal taste, but I do always want to make sure that when I see a well-designed page, I know what the primary actions on that page are. And it should be the most highly contrasted item on that page because all my attention will be drawn to this particular button, for example.

There are some basics to UX or UI design that you should adhere to and some personal principles that you’ll develop over time, but that’s how I would explain it.

I think one of the things to think about when we’re designing cultural spaces such as museums is that they’re competing with other types of entertainment or places to go. And museums can’t just be “go up and look at art.” And the Museum of the Dog has got a wonderful body of work, and it’s a subject matter that nobody cannot like. But we needed to create more meaning and depth. And what was essential to that is, how do we do it in a joyful way? And how do we do it in an information-based way, as well as the mobile UI component-discovery through your phone?

So, there were several UX design elements that we did in the museum that were appropriate and placed at the right place at the right time. You could still enjoy the visceral effect and experience of beautiful, cool arts with a great UI design narrative. But you could also go up to a kiosk and have your face scanned and get matched to a breed. And it was those moments of fun that became where you become more engaged with the brand of the Museum of the Dog and AKC. You learned about not just the shape of the dog that you matched, but the temperament of the dog, its personality, and all the UX elements that you could enjoy alongside the fact that you just got matched to a breed.

Sometimes, it’s more of a minimal interaction to something more in depth. For example, we created these interactive tables-essentially like going up to a dinner table-where four people could stand at a time and look at different breeds. They learn about different breeds and get into a deep understanding of the 365 breeds that the AKC currently has and capture that information to take home. So there’s an education component that’s really important. The history of the breed, where it came from, its personality, and how it behaves. Is there art in the collection that actually features that breed? So we’re connecting it back to the arts. All of this becomes all connected as a component. Learning and education have always been very important to the AKC, so we needed to bring it in a smart and compelling way.

And then finally, we worked at developing an interactive, motion-activated experience for young kids to train a dog. By movement, they were basically teaching this dog how to fetch, pick up a ball, stop, sit, etcetera. Simple moves, but it’s a great experience for young people to learn a little bit more in a medium that they’re very familiar with about how to train a dog. I think it’s really important to point out that experience design just does not only involve the digital world. We created analog moments focused around families and children where they could sit down and draw and color and create their own art version of a dog. And that’s something that’s a nice analog balance to some of the more digital experiences.

And then we created one last element that was really built into the phone for adults, and also for kids. For kids, we had “Arty” who was your pet and your friend that would, in an AR state, come out of his dog house on your phone. And you could follow him to find and discover key paintings. And with that was a reward for the child. Engaging with the physical, but using mobile as a tool. And then it was also being used as a tool to get more information on specific paintings. So you could hold your phone up, it would push content to you, tell you more about the artist, the breed, its origin, and whatnot. We’re looking at all these overall touch points in a holistic way. So it’s not just a museum with art on a wall. It’s something that’s really more of an experiential thing around the notion of the joy of the dog.