Discover the product manager’s UX journey with Interaction Design Foundation — a review
User Experience is not only for designers; follow my product manager journey to develop UX skills.
To start
I define myself as a UX product manager who humanizes technology for people and business objectives. After years in the tech world, I realized that technology enables the business to evolve and build a common language between them is the critical factor for success.
In this article, I will show which UX courses helped me in my product manager career. How these courses supported me in developing my superpower as a product manager “find the right problem to solve and co-create a solution that has a big impact on the business, and user loves the solution.”
As product managers, we have three main pillars to do a great job. These are knowledge about User Experience, Technology, and Business. Balanced and robust expertise on these topics gives us skills to lead and align the areas to success with any product.
On my track to developing my user experience skills, I realized that humans are more complex than we thought. For that reason, it is essential to strongly understand human behavior to build incredible products and services for our users.
At Interaction Design Foundations,I am developing my skill in user experience design and the psychological aspects of humans’ decision-making process. I firmly believe that design and human understanding skills help me grow as a product manager and team leader.
4 UX courses to boost your product manager role
1.Psychology of E-Commerce: How to Sell Online.
It was the first course that helped me understand the decision-making process on e-commerce. The main business goals are related to conversion rate, but business objectives rarely show a conversion rate from a user perspective.
Therefore, if you work for an e-commerce or need to sell a product, you should understand human psychology to make better designs, retain customers, and achieve outstanding business results.
Key learnings:
- Understand a conversion rate from the user perspective helped my team create a successful marketing campaign to engage our customers.
- Compose a narrative into content that focuses on clients and not always thinks from a business perspective to sell.
2. Human-Computer Interaction — HCI
The course enabled me to learn how users interact with digital products. You will need to focus the design process on people’s needs and create comfortable and pleasurable designs for each physical device.
I worked on a hybrid online travel agency, where we tested a prototype of the online web that let the user search or request a travel package on a big screen at a shopping center.
We learned and observed how the user interacted and navigated this device. These learnings helped to improve our prototype and engaged the user that walk through the mall.
Key learnings:
- Focus on how the user interacts with your designs
- Research about the context and location of your product/service
3. Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love
As a Product Manager, you are trying to make products and services that people love and achieve your business goals. It is the most exciting part of a product manager’s tasks.
This program will help you to build a relationship between your product and customers.
This course is fascinating because you will understand how emotional humans are and how to design these emotions. Think of brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, or Nike; they are more interested in conquering the user’s heart than showing their product.
Key learnings:
- Build a relationship with your customer, not only the brand
- Humans are emotional and irrational.
4. UX Management: Strategy and Tactics
Not everything is user experience activities; if you don’t know how to manage it, you will lose tons of value. The UX Management: Strategy and Tactics course gave me tools and tactics to embrace a company culture with a user experience perspective.
Become a user-centric company is a big challenge. Start aligning the user experience strategy with the company strategy and embedded user experience in the organization’s culture.
Identify the UX maturity level of a company enables you to start and work on tactics to get into the next UX level. This was one of my favorite tools to practice on every company I worked with; even if I had left it, you can apply this and see how some changes were difficult to implement because they were in the wrong UX maturity stage.
Key learnings:
- Communicate the UX team purpose across the company
- Empower your UX Team and co-create solutions with other teams
Takeaways
User experience is an exciting field; many roles would benefit from learning about it. As a tech outlander ( I came from a career in tourism), I encourage people to discover a role in the design and tech world. It can be a bit scary to come in from other careers, but there are places for everyone.
Taking these courses gave me more tools to frame problems and transform my role into a human-centered product manager, not only focused on our client but also on employees and suppliers.
The tools shown on the different courses can easily apply to your current work, how you organize it, or how you discover o co-create a solution with others.
