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What is product design

Product Design Indeed, product design is a familiar topic for you. We all use this term, but you must learn more when considering hiring a product designer.

As a product design coaching provider, we know a lot about product design. So, let's start from the beginning.

What is product design?

Product design is developing a usable product that meets customers' needs by determining the users' problems and finding solutions for these problems.

It is based on design thinking, an approach to solving problems creatively. It is also called the end result of this process and the design qualities of an existing product.

We can define the following three characteristics to define product design:

• Product design is a complicated process that includes various tasks, ranging from research to prototyping and Testing.

• It is human-centered (as all the good things are) but involves more consideration of the needs of the business and market situation.

• It is never-ending (or almost so). You cannot say it is a specified set of steps. Everyone follows the format they consider the most suitable and efficient.

Still, the process may consist of a surprising number of iterations crucial for comprehending the problem and finding the best solution.

Suitable product design methods weave themselves throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Product design is essential in developing the initial user experience and product offering, from pre-ideation user research to concept creation to prototyping and usability testing.

But it doesn't end here, as product design plays an enduring role in refining the customer experience and ensuring additional functionality and abilities are added seamlessly in a discoverable and non-disruptive manner.

Brand character and evolution remain critical product design duties until the end of a product's lifespan. And it's much more than just what users witness on their screens.

System and process design are critical behind-the-scenes elements that eventually drive users to witness and interact with the interface design.

Poor product design, on the other hand, falls into one of three classifications:

• The product needs to solve the problem efficiently.

• The product causes additional problems instead.

• The product is too expensive or inaccessible.

To avoid these problems, those working in product design must study the end-users routines, preferences, frustrations, and constraints.

While aesthetics plays a crucial role in product design, they are less significant than the above considerations.

History of product design

Someone has developed every product we ever interact with. Product design examples: the phone in your pocket, the clothes in your front, the car in your parking.

And while product design is often regarded as a relatively recent industrial development, its history can be outlined back to four critical historical periods:

The Industrial Revolution
Beginning in 1750 and concluding in 1850, the Industrial Revolution was when the first mass-manufactured and automated items started to hit the market. These products (like tools for weaving and pottery) marked a movement away from hand-crafted and individually manufactured products.

The Great Reform
Starting in 1850 and ending in the early 1900s, the Great Reform was a time of artistic rebirth within the industrial sphere. During this period, the first contemporary product design (like furniture) met the first pieces of advanced technology (like the bulb and the microphone).

Modernism
Starting in the 1940s and persisting through to the 1980s, product designs from the 1800s started to look more like their modern counterparts. Cars moved away from carriage designs and miniaturization directed to products such as the Sony Walkman. .

From the 1990s to today
Since the last thirty years, products have become less restrained owing to miniaturization and digitization, which permit products to take on nearly any shape imaginable. The result is practical and iterative designs, a shift to digital items, and an excess of choice in many sectors.

What does a product design process look like?

Product design starts with Problem Definition and Idea Creation. During these early stages, a team of designers will seek to comprehend the issues facing users, then come up with solutions (some possible and some not) that will solve the customers' requirements within the constraints laid out by the company. Next, the designers concentrate on Feasibility. This includes defining the cost of the product, the possible problems it might face, and how difficult it is to produce. A prototype is created before the end of this stage. Lastly, the prototype enters Testing. During this stage, the designers finish the product through constant improvements. Customers are brought to test the product, more modifications are made, and eventually, the product is ready for the market.

Determining Product Design: Understanding the Industry

In a period where the only stable changes, our culture as customers is constantly growing. With technology playing a prominent role in our everyday lives, we expect everything to be available at a single call – and as personalized an experience as possible. Whether using our phones to order food or exploring an app for a new home, we have become dependent upon different forms of technology to meet a myriad of needs. So how does product design fit into how we devour goods and services?

Designing a product is a comprehensive concept. Product design, as a verb, creates a new product to be sold by a company to its customers. The efficient and effective creation and development of ideas via a design process led to new products. Thus, it is a significant aspect of new product creation. However, many business specialists will agree that product design is the method of analyzing a market opportunity, determining the user's requirements and problem, generating a solution for that problem, and validating

it with end-users. When considering high-quality products, designers must learn about business objectives, know the product design elements, and be able to answer the following queries:

• What issue are we solving?
• Who has this issue?
• What do we want to accomplish?

Answering these things allows product design engineers to know about the user experience as a whole and not simply the interaction or visual part of a design. These principles apply to both physical items and digital product design.

The Product Design process is critical framework designers use to solve issues. The concepts and skills needed of a product designer are different and will change depending on which phase of the process you're at. As a product designer, you will get to wear different hats, which means your daily work will always look different. You'll be a researcher, designer, product manager, problem solver, analyst, and marketer.

Before we begin

Before diving into the design process, asking yourself why you and your team are making the product is crucial. Having a picture gives you purpose and allows you to define what you are trying to create. Too often, teams bounce into development with a specified goal. This can lead to catastrophic results if the end product satisfies the needs of users or stakeholder anticipations. Finding a key to a problem includes the following five primary phases:

1. Research: To form a deeper understanding of your customer audience, you must complete and gather research to cater to the individuals you are designing your product for. This is important. Some approaches for user research include: User interviews: A widespread qualitative research method can be conducted in person or remotely. While managing and analyzing findings from interviews can be time-consuming, this process can uncover insights from direct discussions with users than from surveys alone. Online surveys: Surveys and questionnaires help you get a large volume of quantitative data quickly. While they can be relatively quick and inexpensive, the downside is that you may require deeper insights than you would typically get from in-person interactions. Contextual inquiry: A process in which you see people do their daily tasks in their natural environment. This allows you to truly sympathize with your users as it pushes you to put yourself in their shoes. Market research: Understanding how your opponents approach the same problems is a crucial product design element, as it allows you to understand their design patterns and mistakes.

2. Define: Create a viewpoint based on user needs and insights.

3. Brainstorm: Design consideration and brainstorming sessions are needed during this product development stage to develop a wide range of potential solutions.

4. Prototype: Create a prototype to test your hypothesis. It allows the designer to realize if they're on the right track. It often sparks other ideas you wouldn't have thought otherwise to facilitate product development further. Nevertheless, physical prototyping tools can be expensive, depending on the product. Digital design can be highly cost-effective in the beginning phases of product design.

5. Test: Ask your users for feedback. Usability testing is an integral part of the product design process as it lets us get feedback from users during the ideation stage before anything gets created or shipped. This is crucial as it will enable you to identify any usability problems upfront before you invest more time in creating the solution. Depending on the design process stage, choose the method that minimizes work and maximizes knowledge. Some instances of usability testing methods and tools are: Moderated usability testing: In this, a natural person will help stimulate the test in person or remotely.
Unmoderated usability testing: Unmoderated forms of Testing occur when the participant is not guided. It can be conducted remotely via websites, where participants can be recruited through these platforms.
Guerrilla testing: Guerrilla testing is a process in which test subjects are selected randomly in public areas and asked to perform a usability test. It's commonly used to test a broad cross-section of users without a connection to the product and to collect data to validate designs quickly. Dogfooding. Dogfooding is a way to test your product in-house before you launch it to the public. "Eating your dog food" is a famous testing method as it allows your team to develop empathy and determine critical issues.

As we've discussed, creating and developing great products depends on forward-thinking design execution. Today's businesses rely on their product design engineers to give their products an aesthetic and functional hold over their competitors while maintaining significance in a world where technological advancement never stops.

Measuring success

Once you've shipped your product, that's still ongoing. It's only the beginning. It would help if you tracked how well it's performing now that it's out in the market and the hands of your users. You should observe the key metrics:

● Adoption
● Activation
● Drop-off
● Churn
● Retention rates

Some instances of tracking tools include Google Analytics, Mode Analytics, etc. If data analytics is not your power, get an engineer or a data analyst to aid you set up the tracking events. It would be great if you got into a regular habit of executing A/B Testing on design changes and iterations before you bring them out to all users. This gives you conviction in what performs better in terms of modifications and success metrics. Analytics alone may only sometimes provide you with the insights you could get from just chatting with your users. However, don't solely depend on analytics. It would help if you also aimed to get user feedback from email surveys, in-product questionnaires, and even hallway tests.

Product Design Strategy Instances

Amazon is the best example of a customer-oriented strategy to a product design strategy. Their product strategy is focused entirely on customer needs. Amazon likes to work backward from the target audience. They then work backward from the PR to the product. This product strategy focuses on Amazon's internal process, engaging with customers to develop a specific product that meets the customer's needs.

Apple's product design strategy Apple is the best instance of a platform/derivative strategy. They connect their top-level strategy to their entire process. They are product-driven. Apple develops products and then finds the market later. Steve Jobs recommended that customers sometimes need help knowing what they want. Apple bets that people will pay a premium price for excellent products and tends to concentrate on optimizing existing products. Apple depends on brand loyalty and is happy to allow its competitors to control the market with lower-priced products that compete with Apple's.

Netflix's product design strategy Netflix has a Profit and margin-driven strategy to maximize adoption. It is the largest streaming platform in the world. Its core offer is a subscription, including unlimited access to content. Its product strategy underlines margin growth. Monthly retention is a critical metric. Netflix relies on a solid and trustworthy brand. Its strong strategy, ease of use, and personalization are challenging for competitors to duplicate.

Coca-cola's product design strategy Coca-Cola has a product strategy that is all about the customer's voice. "If we welcome where the customer is going, our brands will flourish, and our system will continue to expand," said then-Coca-cola President and COO James Quincey. Coca-Cola has focused entirely on customers and what they want from drinks. As customer tastes vary, for instance, toward options with less sugar, Coke moves with them. Recently, the company has rolled out new products in response to customer demand. Consumers want drinks with benefits. Some call for more small, more convenient packages than the traditional Coke can. Coke's product strategy is to continue listening to the consumer's voice and responding.

IKEA's product design strategy IKEA has a strategy to concentrate on low cost at a constant level of quality. The high volume of exchangeable parts requires an expansive, worldwide supply chain. Initially, the company leased out tools to suppliers and provided training to provide quality. Later, as it became a global brand, it reorganized its supply chain to manage its suppliers' enormous volume and geographic dispersion. With its central competency in supply chain management, Ikea can follow a product differentiation strategy offering products for any home. Ikea also devotes to sustainable design principles. Its product strategy depends on innovative design driven by its best supply chain.

3 Essential Steps to A Thriving Product Design Strategy

Creating a hardware appliance comes with a unique set of design limitations. There are many influences and factors behind developing a successful product; it requires more than just looking fine or working well. So the question is, why do you require a product design strategy? Because it will eventually help you decide what product to create. A product design strategy determines what product to produce and why and how to innovate in the short and long run. Knowing what to consider from the commencement of your project will help you navigate the problems ahead. An excellent product design strategy will:

• Describe the product before it's created
• Give insight into what will make the product thriving
• Help you comprehend what you should design
• Guide the product development path
• Help with product design decisions.
• Combine other disciplines into the product design process

Who uses a product design strategy?

Some well-known and famous brands like Apple and Tesla use a product design strategy. It was no concurrency that Apple has individuals lined up in front of their stores two days in advance every time they have a new product release. The Tesla Model 3 had excellent sales and had more than 350k pre-orders from individuals who had never even seen the car. That is equal to over 14 dollars billion in sales. It was the most significant product launch in U.S. history. These companies have a strategic notion and good product design strategy.

So, how do you create a product design strategy? There are three essential steps to a profitable product design strategy.

• Comprehend the problem and the opportunity.
• Describe your product
• Envision your product.

1. Comprehend the problem and the opportunity.

You have a product vision but need to know where to start. The first thing you must do is understand why someone would buy your product or idea.

• Do you offer a key to a problem that is not currently being solved?
• Will your product function better than the competition?
• Will your product have characteristics not currently on the market?
• Does your product deliver a lower-cost solution?

Knowing why someone would buy your product has to be top of your mind, and you'd better have a quick answer when someone asks you why you will have a successful product launch.

To understand the problem, you need to:

• Know the problem that your product solves discreetly.
• Know the people that will buy, use, and experience your product. For a consumer product, the buyer may be the same person. Instance: If you have a medical instrument, the hospital may be the buyer, the doctor may be the device user, and the patient may be the one who actually experiences it. You have to understand all three.
• Understand the conditions your product will be used in. Is it going to the clinic, the ER, or home? There are different criteria for different backgrounds.

Once you fully comprehend the full use of your product, you can begin designing an effective product. However, you must follow a product design process to guarantee you get all the essential steps. To have a successful design strategy, you must complete each process stage before going to the next. If you do, you can only develop a product that functions and fits its intended market.

To add to that, for each stage of the process, you should record everything you do and all your decisions so you can look back and confirm. Are the changes you made still fair? Are they still suitable for the product or market? Does my research still hold? Now that you understand the problem that your product is solving, you can begin to describe it.

2. Define your product.

What is vital to your product? There are three features of a good product that you have to consider when determining its characteristics:

• Functional. It has to work correctly to solve a problem.
• Usable. Ease of use and must be apparent how to use it.
• Desirable. What attracts the user to it? Consider expense, performance, aesthetics, interchange, and benefits.

For instance, the medical sector used to need a functional product that could easily penetrate the global market if it worked well enough. Then, in the early 2000s, the FDA broke down because many of the products needed to be used as intended, resulting in numerous errors. As a result, the FDA created human factors regulations, directing all medical devices to be functional and usable.

Since then, a third element has increasingly come into play in medical device success:

• Desirability. Desirability's popularity and development in the medical sector are directly correlated to product design and aesthetics popularity.

Why? Because the individuals that work in the healthcare industry - the hospitals that buy the products, the doctors that employ them, and the patients that experience are all customers. They're the same people buying consumer products.

Considering all three factors when determining your product - functionality, usability, and desirability - you can make a successful product.

3. Visualize your product.

How do you make a great design? Once you have a list of needed features and a good idea of what your product will require in each stage, you must start the design process. There are three successive steps you must take while product designing:

• Ideate
• Prove
• Refine
• Ideate

Things you can do in this stage include:

• Visualize concepts that solve problems via concept drawings, brainstorming, and 3D proof-of-concept prototypes.
• Criticize the idea by reviewing its strengths and weaknesses.
• Create a design approach with style research and purpose, e.g., Are you designing an Audi or BMW? They are both luxury brands but created for different customers. One is made for convenience, the other for the best driving experience. This is where you must think about the company, brand, and marketing and how it comes into the role when designing your product. • Prove

When looking to prove your design ideas, you should:

• Test mechanical factors, ergonomics, exchanges, and cosmetics.
• Get user feedback.
• Fail early to acquire needed feedback.
• Refine

When refining your products, you must:

• Adjust your learned losses to keep enhancing.
• Compare ideas to the product description.
• Use product needs as a measuring stick.

The design strategy comes at the beginning of two stages - Survey and Envision. The survey is where we learn about the problem and define the product. At the Envision level, we begin to visualize the product we're developing and start testing and working with the engineering teams.

What Is the Work of a Product Designer?

Due to the vast needs of the Product Designer, it is, by definition, an elusive job role in describing. Because the design process keeps changing, the parts of people continue to develop, thus enclosing a broader scope of responsibilities. Due to this, anyone joining the field must have the appropriate hands-on training with a good design program. While Visual Designers manage the look and feel of a product, UX or UI Designers handle wireframes, and user flows. However, the Product Designer is a person who can take a high-level idea and see it all the way through, from beginning to completion.

Responsible for designing everything we use in our everyday lives, Product Designers use their creativity, technical knowledge, and keen eye for detail to design and implement new and creative products and services and facilitate existing products by enhancing their aesthetic appeal and functionality. To succeed in product design, you must comprehend the relationship between art, technology, and science. As a Product Designer, your duties will include planning, designing, and modeling products, making prototypes, conducting research, and rigorous product testing.

What is the salary of a product designer?

Like all skilled jobs, salaries grow with experience and term, plus location plays a meaningful role. Product Designer salaries average around 105,000 dollars in the U.S.

Connect with Madrid Software today to learn more about our Product Design course program and how we can help you achieve your educational and professional goals.