A particular type of research that UX design professionals typically do is called generative research. In this type of research, designers will often engage their end users to come up with UI ideas or solutions.

One thing you can do to practice generative research is to have each person you interview come up with their “perfect solution.” Draw it out with them. Ask them where the search bar should go or what the buttons on the screens should do.

Do not feel limited to what is actually possible. Have your testers dream big and imagine big. Ask them what they want to get to, what they would like to see, and what they would like to actually do. “The point of this is not necessarily to go out and design exactly that, but to understand, what the motivators are behind that, and to spark some ideas within yourself,” says UX design educator Daniel Holtzman.

The idea behind generative research is to co-create. Instead of thinking about what users need or listening to what they think they need, it is to sit down with them and ask them their biggest challenges. If you had a magic wand and could do anything, how would you solve their challenges? Ask them to draw this solution for you or build it from very simple prototyping materials.

Any UX workshop that you do with your users which involves the co-creation of a solution will be 100% more powerful. This is because your users have all the answers. “They know. They are there every day with their challenges in the settings that they are, in the cultures that they are,” states UI design professional Rinat Sherzer. Asking your users to help you design a solution will bring out ideas that you could never have thought of.

One of the most significant lessons that you should take away from your online UX design education is not to solve for someone, but to solve with them. Listen to the stories, then let them imagine a solution. Let them draw, act out, or prototype the solution. Through these responses, many new challenges will arise, and you will always get their perspective. You can then go and refine, iterate, and work with their prototypes. Getting users’ points of view and co-creating with them is priceless.

Prototyping is an essential part of our job, and it is not always what we all think about. Prototyping doesn’t necessarily require a machine or a 3D printer. I always tell my team that the first rapid prototyping machine they must use in their project is a printer. It is effective because you start designing on the screen, which can be very challenging. It’s a challenge because as soon as you get into CAD, you sometimes keep the notion of proportion, but you lose the notion of scale.

For example, I have had designers repeatedly create 3D printing. The day they take it out of the machine, they look at it and say, oh, my god, this is big! It is for such reasons that a simple print is actually a great way to prototype your project rapidly. As you get into your process and refine it, maybe you will decide to cut and form the shape. Based on the print you have done, maybe you get to a point where you’re going to 3D print. It means in particular situations, 3D printing can still be a necessity.

Usually, in 3D printing, you might prefer to keep it maybe not to the last stage but the later stage of the product development process. There is a good reason behind this claim. It’s when you have already refined your design quite a lot, and you’re nitpicking the proportion and specific detail. In this case, you really want to make sure that your surface transition is proper and so forth. These are some of the fundamentals everyone in product design education must learn. Also, it must include online product design education.

When I speak about 3D printing, that’s 3D printing in plastic. We also do 3D printing in metal, which is slightly different. It is different because we don’t need metal to evaluate or shape an interface. When we use 3D printing in metal, we use what we call DMLS. It is usually to print a production part, which makes it very expensive. In such cases, it becomes rare.

We have one line of products in which their production is of that approach, but they may all cost you almost as much as it costs. It’s a little bit specific and for a particular market, and it’s also interesting. Once you are comfortable with all the plastic 3D printing technologies that are available, making that last leap to print in production is not that difficult. It’s just one more step.

We want to shift the conversation away from design focused on an end product, and instead, design as a process that could be open to a wide variety of participants. Nowadays, we tend to call that approach participant design or co-design.

The designer doesn’t have all the good ideas. Design experts have some good ideas, but many people likewise have creative ideas. So, how do you use the product design process to leverage all of those people who might be interested? They might be stakeholders in this product development process and might be able to envision possibilities that you would never see.

Sometimes we don’t know the situation well enough or we’re just getting to understand it a bit. Some people with brilliant ideas come from a different cultural background or a different language experience or a different religious orientation. Individuals from varied perspectives can offer unique perspectives that contribute to product design education. Whatever the source, it seems that the more interesting and innovative ideas are incubated outside of our heads rather than internally.

For me, the starting point is getting to know a context, a situation, a community. That might come through interviews or book and Internet research. Sometimes creativity emerges through convening community groups or listening to those who express their needs and goals.

Let’s say you are designing a new vacuum cleaner. You may have a great idea for how it should work. But you may be able to come up with much better ideas if you talk to consumers who use vacuum cleaners all the time, either residentially or commercially. Internet surveys and questionnaires along with product reviews often provide information that can best be interpreted by online product design education.

Maybe cleaners in the hotel industry, for instance, are using a vacuum cleaner all day long, and they are the actual experts. One of the things that can be incredibly valuable is to reframe this source of insight and expertise.

We tend to think of experts as people with big credentials and fancy titles or certificates from great universities or from favored consultancies. But an 11-year-old girl who lives in a neighborhood where you may be managing a project who rides her bicycle around is an expert about her sphere of activity. She has learned things that someone with a Harvard degree is never going to know.

Similarly, a hotel employee who cleans rooms for a living is going to understand much more about the essential parts of a vacuum cleaner than an industrial designer who comes to that project brand new with a college degree.

So, how do we find those practical experts? Not the experts with great credentials but those with everyday experience? Let’s look to the people who use our products every day, who encounter the strengths and weaknesses during each use, and who deal with the frustrations of a product’s flaws or limitations each time they switch it on. They’re the ones who are going to offer helpful ideas and the truest knowledge of something you may not know much about.

One piece of UI design that people really don’t think about or talk about is spending. What is the budget? How are we going to get there? Entering into this, our client has a notion of where they’re going to go. Often, our clients engage us from what we’ll call an “experience blueprint” for a project that has yet to be defined. They have a high-level idea of understanding of what they think they need.

Online UX design education shows we go through a journey with the client. It’s essentially about discovery, vision, narrative, and creating what we’ll call a blueprint for opportunities. Now that can be digital. It could be physical. But it becomes a document, and it becomes the way forward in the UI design.

The Cost

Also in that document, we’re looking at what the cost implications are. Everyone wants digital in the built environment, but they don’t really understand the process and what you need to go through to make it authentic and relatable. So whether it’s a light touch or a heavy touch, we try to give the client a sense of the cost.

Cost doesn’t just include the physical hardware, but also the back end: the UX development process, the software, how the UI system is going to operate, how it self-refreshes, all of those things based on what we think is appropriate for the project and client.

There are a lot of moving parts, but that up-front work saves the client a lot of time and cost, if it’s done appropriately. A good brief is broken down into several buckets, the tactical elements of what’s required, so the client and the team have an understanding of the project’s scale, cost, audience, and intent.

The Vision

Often, briefs focus more on technical needs and detailing all sorts of UX design elements. However, there is part of the brief that’s more of the narrative of what we aspire to for the project. It details what the client’s aspirations are and how our UX design team can build on those aspirations. A client might have a big, global wish for something, but we have to balance that aspiration and the real-life elements together into a brief.

Personally for me, and as a firm, we want to have a narration around the project that gives it a sense of opportunity. It helps the client to see and focus on vision and not get caught up in some of the smaller parts of the process.

Choosing the right materials for projects really comes down to understanding the material performance criteria of any given product.

Material Performance Criteria Considerations

What is the context for the product? What is its usage? How long do you need it last? Is it going to be subject to regular cleanings as most things are today?

It all comes down to performance criteria. Without taking these areas into consideration, you might make critical design mistakes.

Other Product Material Considerations

Visual criteria and the size limitations of the materials, such as with sheet and casting materials, are additional considerations. For example, what kind of molding can your budget handle?

It’s a constant balancing act. We must consider the specific criteria of a brief and the visual effect we’re looking for and then solve the holistic problem by balancing those two things.

Product Design Education Opportunities

You can learn a lot more about product material performance criteria, visual criteria, size limitations and other product design and product development material considerations via an online product design education. By understanding these and other areas, you can increase your chance of successfully designing and developing products that people value.

CRM stands for ‘Customer Relationship Management’. These software systems allow you to manage and grow the relationships that you have with your customers.
But how do you effectively use CRM? And how do you understand what type of CRM is correct for your business? There are many CRM platforms available. Many can do the same basic things, but some offer unique features.
Before selecting which platform to use, you must decide what it is you want to know in your business and know the size of your business. You need to understand what you want to get out of your customer database. Is it to understand how your customer’s behaviors converts to a purchase? Or is it that you just want to be able to regularly reach out and create client retention?
At the bare minimum, a CRM program should automatically be able to categorize your customer base, securely store their information, and give you reporting on their behaviors, whether it’s by spin decile or regional decile. Depending on the CRM program, you can go deeper and wider from there.
Ecommerce industry companies have started to use gaming industry CRM platforms. The reason for this is because in the gaming industry, the CRM platforms look at the behavior that a customer is doing on a website. This website interaction behavior can be useful information for ecommerce to convert more sales.
We are moving into a space where customers want to feel like they are in control. This is the concept of CMR, or ‘Customer Managed Relationship’. Businesses are now asking how they can give tools to the customers so that the customers feel like they are choosing how they engage with the brand, rather than forcing them into the way the brand wants them to engage. This can be hard, especially for luxury companies that are used to managing the whole customer experience.

An aspirational customer is a customer who doesn’t know you yet. They are interacting with you for the first time. You can call them an aspirational customer or a seeker.
Then there is the intermediate customer. They shop with you sporadically, maybe a few times a year, but you want to grow them into being a loyal customer.
Finally, there is the loyal customer who is a frequent visitor to your site.
You can get this kind of information on your customers from your CRM platforms. Much of the software available today helps you segment your customers so that you can make the right choices.
When you think about customer segmentation, understanding the countries in which you are doing business is vital. For instance, your site should allow customers to switch to the language of their choice. So, if you do business in France, it should automatically ask a French customer whether they want to see the site in English or French.
These are some considerations you have to make when doing the segmentation of your customer base.
You’ve got to understand how the different cohorts of consumers use your product and what functionality they need. Then you can address the various consumer groups with a clear-cut message and targeted merchandise.
In the e-commerce world, now we have more and more data that can help you understand the diverse customer needs and wants. You can use tools like email or CRM, segmentation, and data analysis to personalize and fine-tune your message at a more granular level.
That’s how you can use the power of e-commerce to personalize your message.

When you’re creating a product, it’s important to think about what information you want to continue building, or even start out with.

“So when you’re first starting out, I really like to get a market context and read up about the space as much as possible to understand trends, who the big players are, how big the market is, how much money is being made in that market,” says Agnes Pyrchla. “And that’s when I’m really defining the scope of the product”

Even if a product manager, strategist, or someone with a business perspective is likely to be in charge of that type of analysis, if a designer is interested in it as well, it’s always beneficial to add new perspectives to the UI and think about the problem more holistically which is important in UI design.

“When I think about design research versus market research, I think they have a lot of similarities in that you’re talking to end-users or potential customers,” says Daniel Holtzman. “But they have a lot of differences that are really important as well. Market research is really aimed again at and understanding people’s preferences, at describing the behaviors that they might have”

It’s all about developing people’s profiles. When we think about design research, I believe it is important to understand their motivations. It’s all about understanding the differences between what they say and what they do. And it’s all about instilling empathy in users. The way we do these things is also usually quite different. Focus groups are frequently used in market research. So there are a lot of people in a controlled environment with a moderator talking to them about a specific product, idea, or campaign and gauging their reactions. Surveys and other types of inputs are other common tools used in market research to ensure superb UX design. These skills can be attained through Online UX Design Education

These are large samples, involving a large number of people and attempting to elicit very specific data points from them. But, when I think of design research, I think of a smaller sample size than, say, market research, and it’s really focused on figuring out what the motivators behind behaviors are. Market research, on the other hand, is frequently focused on describing behaviors or understanding preferences to determine needs from a UX perspective. But what we try to do is meet people where they are.

“Human-centered design is, as the name suggests, it puts the humans at the center of whatever we design, whatever solutions that we’re creating,” says Rinat Sherzer. “And so when we look at a business, a lot of times decisions are being made driven by business opportunity, by the bottom line, by revenues and profits. And when we create a product, we first of all look at the humans, and what are their needs, and how we’re going to create an experience that is really transformative for them”

Then there’s the belief that once we crack that, the profits and revenues will follow. But first and foremost, we need to solve a real problem and get to the heart of what we’re trying to solve.

How do we manage a project for InDesign? Let’s look at making dinner in a product design and product development context.

When you’re managing dinner, you know you want to get the food on the table by a specific time, and you know everything that’s going into the meal, from the starter to the entree to the dessert.

You want everything to be done by 6 o’clock, you’ve got that deadline, and you’ve got multiple things in play. You’re often doing things simultaneously or in parallel. You’re not making the appetizer, then the main entree, then the dessert. You’re making several parts of the meal at the same time.

You have a set deadline because people are hungry and don’t want to wait. You don’t want to have a starving kid, trust me!

You understand that you need to start by a certain time and run these processes in parallel, depending on where your resources are. Do you have a microwave? Do you have a stovetop? A toaster oven? An oven? How many different processes can you run at the same time to get dinner on the table at a certain hour?

Running a product design process is kind of similar in terms of having a launch date and an optimal deadline. Unlike the deadline hour for dinner, the launch date for a product is often determined by the time of year.

If you’re launching, let’s say, a new toy you expect to be a big seller, then you want that toy out in time to get to the retail trade buyers that are going to launch it. You’ll do everything you can to get that toy into their stores for Christmas.

Something product design education tries to do is to get you to think through all the decisions and planning that happen in a case like that. You think through the process, and you know that you need to have this toy finished and ready for the buyers to look at by a certain date.

It has to be ready by the time the trade show is happening (if we still have trade shows after COVID).

Here’s where good product design education is so important. You have to learn to work backward from your deadline to consider production timelines. You need to be able to produce the prototypes and the finished product in factories around the world. You have to think about how you’re going to get those processes going.

This includes not just finishing the design, but also finishing all the tooling and manufacturing. It also includes anticipating all the problems that might come up in going from a prototype to something that’s ready for manufacture.

When your product is ready to go to a retailer, will the retailer want a special version of that new toy? Sometimes retailers want an exclusive version for their stores, and you have to bake extra time into the process for that.

Your online product design education needs to help you figure out how to do all the anticipating and planning and still be able to get your product ready by Christmas to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.

To go back to the example of making dinner, you’d want to get your bread in the oven first. Then you’d cook the fish before you worried about the dessert. You’d do things in a certain order, but the tasks would overlap rather than be one after another.

You have to plan the order of your tasks and how you’ll handle them so that all the food is ready at the same time. This is the same thing you’ll do when you figure out the sequence of processes you need to design and create a product by a deadline.

In UI design, many people are relying on colors or are drawn to colors to differentiate things, like illustrating the meaning of two different buttons or distinguishing a link from a regular text. However, if a user is colorblind, they may not perceive the difference. This online UX design education blog will help you build an interface that’s accessible for everyone.

Wireframe First

As a designer who has red and green colorblindness, one thing I like to do is work in as much detail as possible for the final version of wireframes for my app design or web design. I’ve found that’s really, really helpful in my work itself. You can look at a detailed wireframe as if you’re looking at a black-and-white version of your design. Working in as much detail as you can to create a UI with just black, white, and gray allows you to create a visual hierarchy for someone to successfully navigate and use your interface.

Adding Color

Black, white, and gray have a definite contrast of tonality in UX design. Use that tonality to define your color usage as well. When you’re adding colors to your UI, you can base the contrast of the colors in terms of the black and white and gray tonal contrast.

Back to Basics

I think sometimes when we give ourselves a limited amount of tools, we actually create a more accessible UX design. This is another reason why I say start in black, white, and gray. Try to reduce your tool kit first, and then design a successful UI. Then on top of that, you can add colors to make your UI design a little bit more exciting.