Graduate Diploma in Digital Product Design

This course introduces you to digital products. You will gain an understanding of how they are conceived and designed for local and international markets. Using design thinking frameworks, you will experience the process of new product development (NPD), problem definition, opportunity scoping, and ethical design research. You will be introduced to the various team and stakeholder roles and capabilities that are required to successfully bring new digital products to market, including the importance of persuasive storytelling and a sound business case.

In this course, you will explore the fundamentals of leadership within a design context. You will determine your leadership capabilities as a designer, not only as an individual, but as a crucial part of a team, an organisation, and society.

This is the designated Work Integrated Learning (WIL) course for the Graduate Certificate of Digital Product Design. In the role of course facilitator, industry partners will support and review your work, as well as provide industry relevant case studies and real-world scenarios. This ensures ongoing industry best-practice in both accessing and gaining feedback from the course content. By developing a deeper understanding of the ways in which design shapes the world, you will be aware of the prevailing conversations, trends and future directions of the roles and impact of design on the economy, society, culture and the planet.

You will examine how ethics, skills of team members and culture all contribute to and constrain current and emerging design practice. You will also critically define your viewpoints, rationales and biases as you grow as a design leader.

In this course, you will design a new digital product using an existing client’s brief. Using industry standard tools and ethical best practice, you will gain hands-on experience of framing a client’s problem.

You will then apply design research to explore the client’s brief and the possibilities for the digital product and move into conceptualising, prototyping and designing a product solution.

You will gain a working understanding of digital product lifecycles and explore how products grow and change through industry and user feedback.

By understanding and enacting the roles of various team members, you will have a broad understanding of the responsibilities and expertise required to build a successful digital product, including different interface modalities, user contexts, business constraints, accessibility considerations, and market forces.

In this course, you will be introduced to the role research plays within the user experience domain. You will learn how to evaluate and implement research tools and activities to effectively articulate and interpret the ‘problem space’ and shape findings and insights for your client. You will develop an understanding of how research is used in competitor analysis, user interviews, observations, surveys, testing, and analytics in order to deliver a suitable user experience.

Project scoping protocols (including privacy, ethics, and data management) are reviewed to look at how to support your organisation to deliver evaluative and generative modes of research to enhance the user experience.

This course covers the fundamentals of product and business strategy, and how this applies to the development of products that meet customer and market needs. You will analyse the success factors for different product types and commercial and risk impacts and learn how to develop and deliver a compelling business case to stakeholders. You will apply your new skills projects based on real-world examples, including problem statements, product metrics, commercial models and market analysis.

Once you've completed the five core program courses, you will complete THREE of the following courses to make up the remaining courses in your Graduate Diploma: 

• Product Design and Customer Experience
• Product Development and Operations
• Future Skills: Digital Leadership and Digital Marketing Strategy
• Future Skills: Digital Leadership and Digital Delivery with Agile
• Service Design in Practice
• Design Strategy Practice and Principles
• Service Design Research
• Service Futures
• Programming Fundamentals
• Data and Privacy in the Digital Age
• User Experience Practice and Principles
• User Experience Design & Prototyping
• Future Skills: User Interface Design and Business Analyst Fundamentals
• Future Skills: User Interface Design and Product Management Fundamentals

For further detail on the course overview and learning outcomes for each of these courses, please refer to the Program brochure.