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University of Maryland, College Park

Creative Design, Prototyping, and Testing

University of Maryland, College Park via Coursera

Overview

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Designing the customer and user experience is essential to creating great products today. Gone is the old paradigm of “form follows function” model of design. The process must be iterative and follow the best product design and development processes. While designing a great user experience can be a lengthy and expensive process, there are approaches to doing it faster and smarter, without compromising results.

This essential product management course explains key design thinking principles around personas, story mapping, and prototyping. Product managers need to know and appreciate product designer tools and processes. By combining these principles with good scrum processes, you’ll learn to create great products that don’t sacrifice design for functionality or feasibility.

This course enables students to transition from ideas to prototyping and concept testing of their products and services. Students learn how best to effectively translate ideas into marketable offerings so that the best product and service ideas are harnessed and create real value for customers and the organization. Emphasis is placed on an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to engineering design, concurrent engineering, design for manufacturing, industrial design, and the business of new product development. Topics include design methods, modeling and simulation, material and manufacturing process selection, platform and modular design, mass customization, planning and scheduling.

Syllabus

  • Introduction to Creative Design, Prototyping, and Testing
    • Get acquainted with the learning experience and course format, meet the faculty, and connect with classmates from across the globe.
  • Development Processes and Organizations
  • Concept Generation and Selection
  • Product Design and Architecture
  • Principles of Prototyping and User Experience
  • Wireframing and Prototyping Models
  • Robust Design Considerations
  • Testing and Troubleshooting
  • Project Management
  • Final Thoughts

Taught by

Cait von Schnetlage and Dr. James V. Green

Reviews

3.6 rating, based on 16 Class Central reviews

4.2 rating at Coursera based on 69 ratings

Start your review of Creative Design, Prototyping, and Testing

  • Anonymous
    The instructor is knowledgeable and experienced, and even could be nice in a personal relationship, but as instructor fails to make enough explanation of a list of issues that comprises a concept. If the list is composed of 10 things for example, she explained six or seven and jump to another slide.
    In the other hand, sometimes started talking about a concept with a graphic in the background that no explain, so leaving me a bad sensation of ignorance. She must no show up graphics or schemes that won't go to explain.
    This topic is very important and exited but I feel that I did not harness all the course as I did others with professor Green.
    Please remake the course.
  • Amrish Raj
    Topics and contents were good and provides with overall good understanding of Product Design, Prototyping, Testing and Project management related topics. The instructor could have delivered the lectures with more real life examples and further taken the level of the course even higher. One product from Software /app development, physical product and one from Service industry could be taken as examples in explaining and delivering the contents better. This could have been a better experience in the course
  • Anonymous
    I found the course “Creative Design, Prototyping, and Testing” to be good but I found it difficult to relate with it and comprehend it. The instructor Cait von Schnetlage is knowledgeable and experienced in her field. The course covers a wide range of topics such as product development, prototyping, and user experience (UX). However, I found some of the concepts to be complex and hard to understand. Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone who is interested in product development and design.
  • Anonymous
    Excellent course for learning what a new idea/vision needs to come to fruition, in terms of design prototyping and testing.
    Ms. Cait von Schnetlage humor is excellent and her way of providing information too.
    I can say it was an excellent presentation throughout all the modules.

    Thank you.
  • Anonymous
    Good high level overview content in slides that need improved explanation. Some of the concepts are quite technical and if there is a need for inclusion, the course needs to be calibrated to a different depth.
  • Anonymous
    I really enjoyed the course. The lecturer gave real life examples using products most people are familiar with. She is successful, knowledgeable and humorous.
  • Anonymous
    At most this is an entrepreneurship course which focuses on high level preparation to starts a design projects. Most of the content are relevant to industrial automotive engineering concepts and development while the lecturer background are more of software development, which can be confusing when the content can be quite irrelevant to the case study being explained. Most of her points are generic and lacks depth. However, good try in producing mass education to all. Thanks
  • Anonymous
    I had high hopes for this lecture, the presenter seemed knowledgable and competent at the beginning. However, a lack of examples, endlessly listing concepts without explaining them whatsoever, quizzes that reference concepts not talked about in any depth, and awkwardly personal interjections made this frustrating and uncomfortable to watch. Also, in the video on Lean UX there is a false start that they failed to edit out.
  • Profile image for Swapnil Shimpi
    Swapnil Shimpi
    Each module includes a video lecture, a quiz, and a hands-on project. The projects are designed to help you apply the concepts you learn in the course to your own design projects.

    I found the course to be very informative and helpful. Cait von Schnetlage does a great job of explaining the design process in a clear and concise way. She also provides a lot of practical advice on how to conduct user research, create prototypes, and test your designs.

    If you are a designer, engineer, entrepreneur, or anyone else who is interested in learning more about the design process, I highly recommend this course.
  • Anonymous
    This is a good course for starting building products and services from scratch, going through the general approaches and tools to be used to enable your product to succeed. Recommended!
  • Anonymous
    It is quite a technical course that has completely changed what I previously considered design, prototyping and testing. It is actually quite quantitative.
  • Anonymous
    This course is a master piece, well thought with and compiled and delivered. I love the teacher's positive energy. Every section of the course is so engaging, I will definitely go over the course again. However, I just have an observation, to be able to get into action on the go I feel the course should be delivered in form of asking questions and answering it. I feel it should be more interactive rather than taking it as a lecture since the actual aim is for people to know what to do at different stages and under different circumstances
  • Profile image for ElSayed Gad
    ElSayed Gad
    Thanks for the great explanation It was an interesting journey and very helpful for me, especially in the industrial design module.
  • Anonymous
    I have learnt alot. I have been able to develop my skill as a creative designer. So so grateful for this opportunity.
  • Anonymous
    Although, there were a few chats I still don't understand, but my overall rating will still be 5 stars.
  • Danzel Grace O. Laspoñas
    This was very informative and concise, it helped me gain more knowledge about practical terms regarding "Creative Design, Prototyping, and Testing".

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