Daphne Lin, an online UX design education professional, argues that Apple was the biggest driver for user experience in the tech industry. “They showed a huge competitive edge by creating and designing products from a user perspective,” she says. “I think companies still have a long way to go when it comes to design.”

Industries understand design is important. However, they still view design as only visual design. In Lin’s own day-to-day work, she educates people that design is not just what it looks like, but how it works. Her goal is for people to realize that, even when they are brainstorming ideas and features or writing requirements documents and specifications, they are still doing design work.

To UI design expert David Owen Morgan, the first iPhone, which came out in 2008, was a game-changer. “It was just rethinking what it would be like to have websites in your pocket, and to be able to access the voicemail interface being totally different,” he comments. “You can just scroll through a visual interface for voicemail. It just gets so exciting to rethink the paradigms that we’re stuck in and recognize that there’s an opportunity to introduce new ones.”

The advent of material design in phone operating systems was a sea change. It was big tech companies showing priority on design and the UX design language. Companies must think about a two-sided marketplace where they’re not just catering to millions of users, but also to hundreds of thousands of developers. They must provide guidelines and tools for a long tail of engineering and ingenuity. “Building tools that help others build tools are always ones that have been important for me,” Morgan adds.

Toward the end of the product development ideation workshop sprint, after we’ve completed our divergent and convergent brainstorming, we’ll end up with a good list of concepts that we think are going to be promising. Since we still have a handful of ideas under investigation, we then go through a prioritization exercise in which we use conceptual filters to narrow our list. We use filters related to desirability for the user, feasibility from a technological perspective, especially in product design cases when we need to actually make or manufacture a thing and viability from a business point of view. When you think about all of the concepts that came from our sprinting ideation exercises and you filter them through these three main areas, usually one or two concepts pop out that we then bring to the sketching stage.

Sketching After the Sprint

At first, we do very rough sketching in digital applications. We basically fill in templates that look like interfaces or screens or fill a series of wireframes that allow us to tell a story, such as how a person needs to achieve a specific goal. We might tell their story by saying: “He starts here. He clicks here. He transitions to the next thing and the thing after it and so on.” It’s really important to show how it’s going to work over a series of interactions.

You probably see a lot of wireframing going on in the sketching stage. Sometimes, before we even start sketching the actual product, we go through a process of creating a concept poster or something similar to make certain that we thought of everything. We ask ourselves:

– What’s the name of your product?
– Who is it targeting?
– What’s the key, cool differentiating message?
– What does the product do?

We go into the sketching stage and then emphasize creativity with this one foundational document about what this thing actually looks like and how it works.

Online Product Design Education

During your product design education courses, you will learn a lot more about these and other processes that product designers often rely upon during ideation workshops to aid them in fulfilling the needs and desires of their clients and consumers. Every course is designed to help you move steadily one step closer to your dream of becoming a successful producer designer.

Scott Henderson is an industrial designer, so therefore he creates primarily three-dimensional objects. “I find that it is critical to work in 3D. So even before all of this CAD stuff was available, I would carve foam. They used to call me the foam king because I would walk around like a snowman just covered in dust from literally carving forms out of foam to get these forms exactly right,” says Henderson. He’s a good person to learn from as you continue your online product design education.

That training of carving these things by hand has tuned his brain to be able to think three-dimensionally. “I don’t need to really do that foaming process anymore; I can go into the 3D virtual CAD model and do the same thing without losing any quality or compromise of any kind. Also because I fine-tuned my CAD skills so that I’m sort of like a Jedi master of CAD.”

But the reason he did that was because he sees the value, and the value is there. You cannot compromise the form for any lack of a skill that you might not have, because it can compromise the success of the design. And that’s the last thing you want, so remember that as part of your product design education.

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.

“Let’s talk about soft skills and hard skills. You may probably own some of them already, but you just didn’t know. It is important to look back at your personal experiences and your professional experiences,” explains Tiago Valente. “I am sure that if you look back and you reflect on your journey, on your personal and professional journey, you will find out not only the skills that I’m about to mention, but many others that can inform your practice in UX and UI, [or UX design and UI design.] Those are your superpowers. And like I said, I’m sure you already own most of them.”

“When you talk about product design, at least from a product design perspective,” Daphne Lin adds, “you have to be comfortable learning all these new hard skills. Yes, you have to know user experience design. You have to know interaction design, interface design, etc.”

But research is something that you should be interested in diving into. Visual design, or creating visual design systems, should be something you’re interested in. All those things will definitely make you a better designer.

“When I say hard, they’re not that hard. You will learn them. And that’s why we’re here,” says Valente. “The first skill within this category is user research. User research involves creating surveys, interviewing people, handling focus groups, and market research. All that user research — it’s very important.”

And, it’s a crucial part of this process because it is what will give you actual valuable data, data to create user personas. Later on, these user personas will give you an even more detailed information that summarizes your findings throughout your user research.

Active listening is truly the most important ability that professionals need to have when interviewing someone in UX design. When I say active listening, there are a few characteristics that must be involved in UI design.

The first thing an interviewer should do is to be very present with the other person in UI. Many times when someone else talks, we tend to think about our own thoughts, how we can relate to the story that person is telling as well as any similarities our own lives may have to the person telling the story. So, active listening is really putting oneself outside of that tendency and being truly there in the moment with that person, with no agenda other than really hearing their story.

The first thing that I would recommend is be present with the UX employee. Put away all your to-do list for the day or the week aside. Put all your own personal agenda aside. Just really be there listening the person.

The second thing that is an important component of actively listening is observing body language. A person says so much more in one’s non-verbal language than in their verbal language. One would observe body language in order to see when the person is opening up, when they’re closing, when their voice becomes lower or higher, or when they’re talking really quickly or really slowly.

All these things indicate if the person is talking about something that excites them, about something that they’re ashamed of, or about something that is vulnerable to them. Body language is a great indicator of such emotions, and actively listening involves observing this nonverbal expression.

The last component of active listening is to look for stories. We constantly, as design researchers, want to look for stories because they depict the values of that human being. They hold the motivations for whomever you’re talking to. Once we understand a person’s motivation, we can create a solution that is really powerful. So, the components of active listening include being present, observing body language, and looking for stories.

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.”