One important thing to consider when you’re planning and preparing for your usability study in online UX design education is how to avoid bias. This is important whether you’re testing a prototype, testing the competition, or even just having a conversation with your users to discover more about their needs how to incorporate that into your UX design or UI design.

You really have to be careful not to introduce your own biases into the conversation. Biases are very broad topics, and there’s a lot of information to learn about them and how to control for them. The easiest way to do that is by working with a diverse team with diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences.

The importance of user testing is that when you are designing, you often come with biases, and those can make their way into your work. When you’re designing for a group of people who are not necessarily you, in your demographic, or even related to things you have an interest in, you’re going to come into it with assumptions that might not be true at all. That means that it’s important to ensure you test the way real uses would actually use what you’re designing.

Getting that sort of data is going to help you to make more educated decisions in your UI and UX, especially when you’re working with a team, each individual has their own assumptions, and you really need something to drive the direction of the design.

Online UX design education is imperative for web designers to become great at what they do and improve the UX. Whenever you design accessible interfaces, you’re making the experience better for every user, not just for those with certain disabilities or handicaps.

There are a ton of things to consider when creating an effective UI design. How large is the text, and is it easy to read? Is there enough contrast between the text and its background? How large are the buttons, and are they clickable?

To create the best UX design, we really have to place ourselves in the shoes of our users who have more specialized UI needs by reading up on books to help us think them through. But more importantly, it is a must that we actually go out into the field and speak with those users ourselves so that we can fully understand their needs and capture them accordingly.

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.

No one wants to pay for returns. That is just a basic customer service attribute that you should have. Ease of exchanges and ease of returns.

A lot of e-tailers, especially who don’t necessarily have physical stores where you can maybe go and return something, partner with other companies that have outposts where you can return something.

For instance, revolve.com doesn’t have a physical store, so they partner with Paper Source. You can go to a Paper Source, and it’s called Happy Returns. I was very happy to return something when I found that out because the first thing I look at before I buy something online is how am I going to return this? If, I have to ship it internationally, find my box, drop it off, etc., I’m not doing it. I’m not buying it. I don’t care how much I like it. I need to be able to easily return something for free. I think that’s absolutely the bare minimum and one of the things you have to have in order to have good customer service online.

I had a suitcase, and they have a lifetime guarantee. I took it on a Delta flight, and they ruined my suitcase. I checked it in and they cracked it. I reached out to Away, they got back to me within less than 24 hours, and said ‘No problem. We will send you a new suitcase. Wait to get that box’ because I was wondering ‘How am I going to return a suitcase? Where am I going in a box for a luggage?’ They said, ‘Wait to get the box. Use the box that we ship you to send back the other one, and we’ll pick it up free from you from in front of your house.’ It was amazing. I’ll never buy another suitcase brand again because of that.

Let’s take a closer look as to why abandoned cart series are an integral part of winning back sales and increasing conversions for ecommerce companies.
56 to 60% of all abandoned carts come directly from shipping costs. Realistically for abandoned carts, you’re only going to recover 20% of these back if you’re aggressive.

What is your shipping strategy? How is that affecting your abandoned cart? If you’re seeing your conversion rates are low, keep in mind conversion rates are 2-2.2% across e-commerce. So, if your abandoned carts are 3, 4, or 5%, suddenly, that’s a lot of your sales.

That’s a lot of what’s affecting conversion. That’s a lot of money being left on the table. Even the best brands that are aggressive and have great automated abandoned cart recovery programs, you’re only going to see 17%-18% of those abandoned carts collected.

It’s always going to be a challenge. However, it’s something that you can front-load the work.

For example, you can automate an email marketing series. Where five minutes or 5 hours after you abandon the cart, you get an email saying, “Hey, it looks like you forgot to checkout.”

The next day, you get another reminder, “Looks like you forgot to check out! We know life’s busy. Come on back, here’s a link to your cart.”

That third day, send them another one, “Hey, you know things happen, I can’t hold this forever. Come back in 24 hours and here’s 10% off.”

But really, there’s a cliff after that. After about 72 hours, they’re gone. They’ve moved on. They’re on with their life.

You have to have a strategy in place right away. It needs to kind of fire in rapid succession in those first 48-72 hours, if you want any chance of recovering these.

Buy online, pick up in-store, commonly known as BOPIS in the e-commerce industry, is a crucial digital sales offering. It gives a consumer the option to purchase goods online and choose a unique alternative shipping option. Instead of the seller shipping the purchased item directly to the shopper’s house, they’ll send it to one of their physical storefronts nearby. After the item arrives, the consumer receives a notification that they can pick it up.

Experts say that BOPIS is a powerful tool in the modern sales arsenal. It’s useful for creating an omnichannel that merges online commerce with traditional in-store shopping. This is in line with how most of today’s consumers prefer to do their buying. Even better, offering BOPIS options could help retailers build loyalty among consumer segments still getting into online shopping. Although some of these consumers were once apprehensive about e-commerce, the pandemic forced them to adapt to the trend for lack of alternatives.

Some retailers, such as those in the luxury space, have devoted heightened focus and effort to improving their convenience offerings. The idea is to make typical shopping journeys seamless and easy for consumers.

BOPIS can contribute to these goals. Imagine that a consumer knows they’d prefer not to have a particular item shipped to their home. For instance, they might not be around when an expensive package would arrive. Or, the consumer might want to visit the storefront for another reason, such as if they need to return a different item.

With BOPIS, a shopper could solve all of these problems at once by buying an item online and handling their other errands when they go pick it up. This is also a viable choice for those who like shopping at stores that are on their route to work or school. Wherever a consumer’s motivation lies, BOPIS can ease their shopping process.

The more technology grows and the more access we have-the more content we may add to a website. Previously, if you added too much content to your site, it would bog down the whole thing. It would be sluggish and slow. With quicker streaming, you have the opportunity to add plenty of new tools to communicate with your customers.

We can now add a video that gives us a 360-degree view. Perhaps have a woman spin in the dress so you can see how the fabric moves on her body, which will help you make the emotional connection you’re looking for.

However, the more individualized it becomes, the more interesting it becomes. As a result, we’re beginning to see the potential to make a digital version of you and see yourself wearing that clothing.

Because it’s simple, we’re starting to see it on a large scale with companies like Warby Parker and glasses. Capturing your face and putting on glasses isn’t difficult. Clothing is a little more challenging, but we’re getting close, and some exciting advancements are happening.

This allows you to see yourself in the clothing as if you were standing in front of a mirror inside the store. That, I believe, will be a game-changer. If anything, one thing I’ve noticed is that fashion moves at a breakneck speed, but in fact, we’re just going back to square one. We’re returning to a time when everything can be hyper-personalized. We can get a product and see a product that’s just for us. Technology allows us to do so in a way that we never imagined.

There’s a little trick out there that many of us have used; using a different email address to get an extra discount or promo and then cancel it.
There’s something to be learned in that.
First and foremost, people love discounts. But, in reality, they want to feel like the brand is caring for them. So, the discount is more than 10% off. It’s more about this idea of “Hey, we want you to shop with us and we’re willing to give you a discount if you’re willing to spend some time with us”.
That’s an important consideration. However, that also belies the fact that we’ve become more and more product-driven.
Another way to be able to do this is through the use of loyalty programs. Now, loyalty programs are extremely important among Millennials and Gen Z shoppers. One of the reasons for that is creating a community.
So, if you have developed a loyalty program or are thinking about doing so, give your customers something back when they purchase. You’ll also be able to quickly reach out to a customer through a loyalty platform program and say “Hey, this is still in your cart. Do you want to pass this transaction?” or “just so you know, the item that you have in your cart is now 10% off because you’re a loyalty member”.
So, there are these ways that you can go about to able to get people back into a cart that they may have abandoned.

The Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) method is relatively new. It’s both a theory about consumer actions and a set of tools that you can use to help you figure out why someone is using your product. You can trace its roots to marketing.

Jobs-To-Be-Done History

The primary story that’s told about JTBD is that there were two researchers who were trying to improve sales of milkshakes. They basically had customer segmentation down, but they still couldn’t figure out how to improve sales.

As we often see in UX design, they tried an observational and feedback approach. They went into stores and watched people use and buy milkshakes. They figured out that people were buying milkshakes as a breakfast item that would help them during their commute. A milkshake would conveniently fit in one hand as they were driving to work or other locations.

It was an “aha moment” for these marketers because they realized that it’s not really your age that contributes to why you buy milkshakes… it’s your situation.

Online UX Design Education

As these marketers discovered, you can learn a great deal about user experiences during your UX studies, whether you’re working on an early UI design, UI prototype or merely trying to better understand a target market, by using a Jobs-To-Be-Done perspective. You merely need to find out more information about the job or task that members of a target market believe a particular product can complete for them.