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.

When I’m teaching students, I often treat them like they’re just starting out a project. Later on, once they think they’re further along, I have them complete 30 drawings. I don’t have them complete one or two. They’re not doing five or 10. They’re producing 30 unique sketches.

How do you push yourself to really think past your initial ideas, understandings and assumptions and go beyond and then keep going beyond?

When you start out, whether for an assignment in a product design class or your early career, it’s really hard. You have just a couple of ideas, and you can’t imagine how you can come up with 30 to complete the exercise. But, if you keep pushing, let yourself go and imagine and put some of the thinking and self-editing aside, you find yourself producing some of your richest work. Even your most far-fetched ideas can have real legs and potential.

It’s important to put all of those ideas down on clean paper. Each sketch must be a finished drawing with a title and your name on it too. We actually put all of the sketches up on the wall, and then we walk through those ideas. You need to really understand that sometimes there are groupings and themes within them. There are similarities. There are wild ideas that sometimes generate the best discussions, and students at first push back.

Origin of the Exercise

This design exercise was actually something that a teacher had me do when I was in school. It was one of the few times in graduate school that I stayed up all night worrying. I then realized how liberating it was to create so many sketches and all of the potential that really lives in this exercise. I also recognized how important it was to not require this exercise just once but, instead, a couple of times throughout a project.

Online Product Design Education

You must make sure that you’re always continuing to push forward. I don’t only mean by producing 30 drawings. It can be in other ways. As you will learn in all of your product design education classes, you can improve your chances of having a successful career in the product development field by making sure that you’re always pushing yourself forward and beyond what you first think, the idea you first land on and your first understanding of anything.

At its core, user experience research, design and writing is really user-centered UI design. It comes down to making sure that we’re able to connect and empathize with our users. It’s not just asking surface level questions to understand what features we can build. It’s understanding on a much deeper level the broader context of users and their environments.

How can we build for people? How can we empathize with them? Empathy is something that’s really hard to accomplish. It’s something that a lot of UX and UI professionals like to tout, like to speak about, but it’s something that requires a lot of practice.

Empathy endurance is a really important thing that anyone in UX design should strive to build into their career. It’s more the idea that we can connect with users by going to their environments and meeting them where they are. It’s still really important that after we connect with those users and have those conversations, we have the empathy endurance.

A key piece of online UX design education is learning the ability to bring those conversations and connections back to the product that we’re building. Users need their voices heard by being directly reflected into the products. At its core, it’s empathy. It’s user-centered design, and it’s people. That’s the really beautiful part about UX, whether it’s quantitative research or qualitative research. At its core it’s about people. That’s what makes it so exciting to be part of the UX design process.

Our next module in online UX design education is project planning. Project planning is essential to a successful user research stage in the UX design or UI design process. In this module, we will explore how important it is to understand context. Political, social, cultural, and economic factors really have a huge weight in the way that you’re planning your use of research. You will understand how to identify the best format and how to conduct these surveys, interviews or focus groups following ethical guidelines.

Once we have concluded the user research stage, we will have gathered data. This data will be filtered in a way that will allow us to create specific psychographics and demographics, which we call personas. The reason why we call them personas, even though these are fictitious human beings, is that they are based on real data that we obtained through our user research stage.

Calling them personas is to humanize them. By humanizing them, it allows the designer of UX or UI, you in this case, to develop a higher level of empathy with this persona, this fictitious human being character. You will be able to put yourself in their shoes in a much easier manner and be more empathetic and understanding of their needs and how to connect with them. Connection: it’s very important in this process.

Ethnographic research is becoming a key part of our toolbox as designers. This type of research is not necessarily needed for every product development project, but it can be extremely valuable to make sure that you’re still responding to the needs of your market.

The idea of ethnographic research is that you’re going to really dive into a user group or type of user. You’re diving into their lives and the way they actually use your product and incorporate it into their day-to-day activities. You not only engage them and talk to them, but you also really observe the way they live and use your product.

This type of research is very different from a quantitative type of research where you simply ask people questions and analyze their responses. This used to be the main type of research you’d learn about in product design education. The people’s responses would be turned into graphs and heat maps, and you’d learn how to study those.

In today’s online product design education, the focus is going to be on ethnographic research, which is qualitative instead of quantitative. It’s usually done with a very small sample. A group of six to 12 people is a good size. You don’t need to deal with hundreds of people.

The difficult part, when you do ethnographic research, is not the research itself. It’s easy to engage people, extract some information and observe how they use your product and how they live.

The difficult part is to take that observation and turn it into an insight about your product design. That’s where it gets very challenging. We spend a lot of time actually training our team to make that passage from observation to insight.

There’s a lot of secret sauce that takes place during that passage.

Exploration in product design and product development depends on the project or the product. Exploration is a part of the process that goes beyond what you learn to do in online product design education while sitting at a desk. You get to break away from that and explore.

For example, if you’re designing a telescope, you go look at all kinds of different telescopes. You look at big ones, and you look at little ones, and you also look at stuff that’s shaped like a tube. You look at things people put up to their eyes and how the image gets from space to you, to your brain.

You try to literally think outside of the box. You’re way out, and you don’t have to presuppose what you’re going to figure out. It’s really the most fun part of the project because you’re just looking around and finding anything you want.

Or you go to the store, and you look at things in that category. Or if it’s a medical product, you go visit the hospital and see how all the other things in the operating room are being used.

It’s one of the most fun parts of the project and something that product design education has a harder time explaining than most technical concepts because, at this stage, everything is open. You can Google anything, and it’s part of the project. So, this is a fun kind of thing.

Thinking about inspiration is interesting because, in truth, inspiration is everywhere. Inspiration isn’t a cookie-cutter concept, where you can simply define it as one thing and be done with it. It’s really about being open-minded and being receptive to things that are coming your way. You might have this idea of a design or product, and then, you see chewing gum while you’re walking down the street, and suddenly, inspiration hits you, just like that. Maybe the shape of the chewing gum becomes a doorknob, or at the grocery store, you see a strange looking red carrot, and that suddenly becomes the base of a lamp.

This is to say that inspiration and influence can show up everywhere. It’s about you being open to it and not filtering as many things out because, as you walk around in your life, you’ll realize that even the most highly ridiculous idea can actually trigger a really positive reaction. It’s not like you can simply count to three, and suddenly, you’ll have the key and code for unlocking inspiration. It’s really about being open-minded and being brave enough to take ideas that you see and process them, using your mind to turn them into new thinking and new ideas.

This can come from a wide range of things whether it be colors, shapes, sounds, or details; it’s endless. You just have to start walking. Start allowing yourself to see and to be receptive. The great thing about inspiration is that it truly comes from everywhere, and as you walk through life, you’re going to realize that. Inspiration for me was completely different at age 20 than it is today.

Today, I find inspiration in sound; I translate sounds that I hear into shapes. I find inspiration in food; I taste something, and the flavor suddenly becomes something new. I ask myself if color has a shape or if different colors like green and blue have a different vocabulary. Ultimately, you have to figure out what inspires you because inspiration is just as personal as people think it is. Again, you have to be very open. There’s no right or wrong; there’s only moving forward. Just allow yourself to be surprised.

To learn more about finding inspiration and harnessing creativity, as well as product design and product development, think about starting on a path with product design education. If you’re interested in learning about these things from the comfort of your own home, online product design education might be perfect for you.