We’ve gone from being at the end of the product development cycle (“We need buttons on this new feature we’re gonna launch”) to the very forefront (“We want to investigate all the possible ways of enabling our users to discover new music”). From being a cursory consideration as the beauticians of the Product, to the curators of that which matters most — The User Experience.
This, my friends, is Product Design.
— Erik Erikson
Product Designers are tasked with solving user experience problems. A user experience problem is an issue, subtle or obvious, that prevents a user from fulfilling a need (using Uber to transport from A to B, using Yelp to determine what to eat).
Developing applications take time and resources. When pure intuition drives innovation, some succeed. However, many products can fail, ruin experiences, and ultimately, lose revenue.
What makes designers effective is not their skills with design programs, but their skills at navigating a design process. Product Design seeks to maximize the success of products. There is no magical intuition — it is all in the design process. They use the process to ideate and iterate towards an optimal product with the intended users.
Since this course is outlined in Notion, we also advise you to use Notion to build out your case study in each assignment. You can create an account here to get started.
Disclaimer: We'll be using Figma (Free) for this course so here are some resources around how to use it! We will go over Figma during the course but for now the tutorials below should be helpful enough to get through this exercise. ***If you want to use another design tool, that is also OK too, just understand we will be using Figma for all teaching material.
Here are some tutorials to get you started.