Product Design Best Practices – Uncover the Secrets

Now that we have read and developed a thorough understanding of a product and its designing, it’s time to jump on to the next step and develop a thorough understanding of the multiple steps that are involved in the process of designing a product. As we have already mentioned product designing is a mixture of both science and arts and therefore it will be practically impossible to formulate complete guiding steps involved in the designing of a product that will be suitable for all types of products. But here is a generic flow that will help you in developing an understanding of the process of product design which you can add, subtract and redefine as per your product. 

• Defining The Product Vision

The very first and initial step of the product design process actually begins before we get to the designing part. Many people often miss this initial step which plays a crucial role and lack of acknowledgment leads to product failure. The very first step is to define a proper vision for your product. This means that you should identify a problem that your target audience is facing and based on that you try to frame a very basic form of what your product will look like and be like, forming a vision for your product. 

• Product Research

The next thing that you should look at once you form a vision for your product is researching the issue you are looking to solve for your users. In this stage, you try to see if there is an already existing product addressing the same issue. If yes, then you go research that product, see its performance and the places where it’s lacking in solving the issue and try to find opportunities where your product idea fits into the picture. If there is no existing product, then this is where primary research comes into the picture, where you conduct surveys, questionnaires, and interviews asking people their point of view on the product idea that you are proposing. 

In this step of product design, apart from just empathizing with the users and coming up with a product idea, you also try to look at things from a business point of view. Here, you try to fixate on the price for your product, the return on investment that you expect, the different ways of funding for your products, and many more things that are related to your product. 

• User Analysis

Now that you have the data that you collected from your prospective audience using multiple ways of data collection like surveys and interviews, the next step involved is to analyze that data collected. The insight that you can develop from the collected data can help you know if there is some alteration required in your idea of the product, showing you a bigger picture of both criticism and appreciation. Not only this, but this data can also help your UX designer to mark the first stage of work that they need to do, that is to have a clear understanding of what is expected from them in regards to your product. 

• Product Ideation

Product ideation is the step where the art and creativity aspect of product design comes into the picture. At this stage, the designers brainstorm and come up with as many potential solutions as possible. It is believed to not discard any idea at this stage and to add them to the ‘list of possibility’ without any kind of judgement or bias. However, it should also be noted that all the ideas that come under the list of possibilities have to have a base from the product research, discarding all and any of the vague ideas without any base. 

• Refine And Validate

This next step can be very evident in the different stages of product design. Now that you have a list made of all the possible solutions, the next is to filter out on those list of possibilities and come up with another list where only the idea that matches with that of user needs and business plan are recorded. Once all the potential ideas are noted, the next is to further refine them based on their functionality, performance and suitability as per the industry and market. 

• Designing

Once you have filtered out all the ideas and run a concept testing, the product design team at this stage will actually begin the product making. At this stage of the product design process, a designer can run a concept testing for your product before moving any further on the product designing stage. This process is called prototyping and is a very crucial part of the product designing. Here the product designer comes up with the basic product with only the main functionality and gives it to the selected user to test the product. Based on the result received, the product design team can further refine the product and iterate. 

• Testing And Validation

Don’t confuse this step of product design with that of the previous step where we prototype and run a concept test. In this stage of product design, we make the complete product and not just the basic product. For testing purposes, first the final product gets tested with the product team and all the internal team people. Once a validation for them is received, we further test the product with a certain percentage of real users before actually launching the product in the market. We make the necessary changes if required. If not, then we launch the final product in the market making it widely available to all the users rather than just a certain percentage of test users. 

• Post Launch Activities

Ideally, the product design stages are done. But like the initial stage of defining product vision, the final stage of post launch activities is also very crucial. As we know that we are living in a constantly changing world and therefore we should always keep a check on the product performance, change in user preference or change in the market or anything else that can lead to making any change to the product, making the product design process a never ending loop of launching, reviewing, refining and iterating the product from time to time.