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The field of engineering requires quality assurance. Whatever their discipline, engineers have to create and build often complicated products. Sometimes, they review their designs and the end results themselves in order to make sure everything is functioning as it should; in other cases, that work is a separate job performed specifically by a quality assurance engineer.

Brands are all around us, although most people probably don’t consciously think about their impact. But the biggest brands all have instantly recognizable elements. Take Nike, for instance: That name is synonymous with their famous “swoosh,” which the company has used since 1971. Or, if you hear something about Tiffany’s, you’ll likely picture the particular blue shade of their boxes, a color they trademarked in 1998 so that no one else can use it. These are just two well-known examples of ways that branding links products to a company.

Who should provide learning to those who want it? This question seems straightforward, but it isn’t. The traditional list includes colleges, universities, and other types of schools, along with a few well-established learning providers like Khan Academy and Coursera. If you’re already familiar with online learning, you might also think of organizations that teach specialized content, like Duolingo for foreign languages or HubSpot for both learning and executing marketing strategies, and educational publishers who provide online content as well as books, like Pearson Education and McGraw Hill.

When you hear the term product design, what comes to mind? You’re likely imagining the evolution of a physical object like Edison’s light bulb or the first iPhone. If your own work is design related, you may also think of the most basic definition of product design: the creation of an item, from its appearance as an idea in someone’s head through to its development as a tangible entity. 

In our previous two posts about shared language, Senior Learning Experience Designer Lexie Bryan discussed the topics of vocabulary inflation, common industry terminology, and client branding, among others. Each of these concepts is key to working together to create engaging learning experiences and give  learners a clear, cohesive path to the knowledge we want to teach.