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Shaping a better UX process by applying industrial design principles
My take on how having a background in industrial design engineer helped me boost the way I work as a UX designer developing digital products.
My career as a product designer started helping friends, small companies and startups go digital by building their websites, apps and creating brand identities for them. But by the time I was doing that, I was also studying industrial design engineering from where I would graduate after four years. This knowledge gave me enough background information to improve and optimise the projects I was working on at the same time.
Industrial design has always been considered the le field where all tangible or physical products are conceived and build. From the industrial revolution, industrial designers have been trying to solve people problems by coming up with objects that could be used or improved to make their life’s easier.
In a similar way that UX is not only fancy interfaces, but industrial designer also is not only clay models and 3D renders. If you think of the whole design process for both products, digital and tangible, industrial design has had more time to evolve, explore techniques, evaluate which methods work best and for what.
Working with digital products has some advantages over the physical ones and we should embrace the design methodologies to try to improve the experience of solving problems through digital solutions.
An industrial design approach to digital user experiences
As an industrial design engineer, when coming up with a solution to a process you must do it with having the whole production in mind to ensure that your suggested solution will be able to be executed, will be cost-effective and lastly used by the users.
There are multiple techniques used in the industrial design process that are very similar to the approach UX takes to design solutions, but there are also a few take away from the way industrial design works they can help improve the way we build digital products.
