Over the past 20 years, the way people talk about product design has changed a lot. Even though the word “craftsman” makes you think of someone making something by hand, this is not the case in the information age. Because the definition is always changing, people who aren’t in the know might ask, “What is product design?” We’re here to answer that question. Product design can now refer to digital products, and in a broad sense, it usually means the ideation, creation, and launch of an app or website. Designers, developers, managers, and even users need to understand what goes into making a product.
What Is Product Design
Product design and development as a whole includes two of the most important parts of designing: the design thinking process, which looks at all of design, and the product design process, which is a much more detailed task that breaks the process down into 7 steps. In this article, we’ll go over both of these steps, as well as tools and methods that designers can use to speed up their own work.
Product Design Guidelines: The Design Thinking Process
Since the design thinking process is a natural part of the product design process, it’s important to talk about what this means to get a better understanding of product design as a whole. The design thinking process is much more vague than the product design process, which we’ll talk about in more detail later in this article.
Empathize
The first stage of the product design guideline is “empathize,” which entails a designer immersing themselves in the problem that they hope to solve in order to gain insight from all angles. In essence, this is the stage at which designers can put themselves in the shoes of those who are dealing with the problem. It’s also an important step in allowing designers to cleanse their own biases when confronted with a problem and approach it with a ‘clean slate’ mentality.
Define
This stage builds on the last one. Designers use the information and different points of view they’ve gathered about the issue to write a human-centered problem statement. This is also the place where a designer and their team should ask “how?” the most, as in, “How should we approach this problem?” Or, how should we handle the situation?
Ideate
This is a big turning point in the product design guideline. This is when product designers switch from gathering information and putting it all together to actually doing interaction design processes and everything they involve. At this stage, ideas for a product start to come together, and ideas and features start to build on top of each other. Most of the time, this is a place where all the designers working on a project can share their ideas, good or bad, to see what works and what doesn’t.
Prototype
During the prototyping phase, the product designer and his or her team start making rough designs and ideas to see how the product might look. During this phase, ideas and prototypes for solutions are talked about, tested, improved, re-implemented, or just dropped. Here, the design team will be very familiar with the main problems and limits of solving the design problem, and they will also try to get around those problems.
Test
In practice, the last step of the design process for product designers is rarely the last step. During testing, the solutions that were thought of in earlier phases are carefully looked at to see how they can be made better. Even though this is called a “process,” it is much more like a loop, with product designers going back to earlier stages, sometimes more than once, to make a product that is well-made and polished.
Product Design Process
Now we’ll talk about how to make a product. As we’ve already said, the design thinking process is a bit vague and shows the general steps that go into making a product from the beginning to the end. The product design process, on the other hand, is much more complicated and detailed. We’ll break down the most important parts of the process and offer suggestions for designers to use in their own work.
1. Pre-Design Process
The first step in the process of making a product is, of course, to think about what the product will be. This is because setting a goal or target for a project is a necessary step that gives all the design changes that will happen over the next few weeks, months, or even years something to build on. First, make a product strategy. This is a plan for what problems the product will solve in the end, and it is something that the product design process as a whole will have to deal with. In addition to the vision, challenges are gathered and defined by figuring out what problems the product design team might face and how it will have to deal with them. Overall, the product strategy asks, “Where do we need to go, and how do we get there?”
Next, it’s a good idea for any product design process to make a value proposition map. This is much more about the product and how it relates to the audience than the product strategy, which looks at how the product relates to the team. In the value proposition map, questions like “Who is this product for?” The team asks and answers questions like “When will this product be used?” to better put themselves in the shoes of the users.
2. Product Research
In this second step, the actual process of making a product comes to life. Here, the designers throw themselves into the problem to learn more about its nature and the people who use it. They also start to think about how to solve it. Remember that good research done early on will save you a lot of time and trouble later on in the design process, so don’t rush this step and spend more time on it than you think is necessary.
User research is one of the most important parts of the product design process. Since the product is being made for the users, it’s important to make sure it fits their needs. This includes anything that involves talking to the people who are having the problem that the product is trying to solve. This could be done through user interviews, where you talk to a user in person, or through an online survey where a lot of users are asked questions. Contextual inquiry is another popular method. In this method, a designer “shadows” a user in their everyday life to see what they do and how they do it.
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During the research phase for a product, there is also a competitive analysis, unless the product doesn’t have any competitors. This means taking a close look at the product of a competitor to see how it could be made better or how it could be set apart. Adding this to the process of designing a product as a whole is a good idea.
3. Analysis of Users
After the user research stage, designers have a lot of raw data that they need to turn into useful insights to move the design process forward. If user research was gathering data, then user analysis is putting all the data together. Here, designers use their research to make models that make the process of making the product easier.
The first step is to make user personas, also called UX personas. These are basically made-up characters that the user can relate to. They show the designers what the users’ needs, wants, likes, dislikes, and other important information is. This can be used as a reference by the designers, who don’t have to dig through the huge amount of information gathered in the previous step. Instead, they can just look at the persona to answer any questions that come up during the product design process.
The empathy map, which is an important tool for product design, is also made at this stage. As the name suggests, the empathy map helps the designers see the problem from the user’s point of view. This map will answer questions such as “Why does the user need this product?” In essence, the empathy map shows how the user feels, what they do, what they think, and what they say.
4. Ideation
The fourth step in the process of making a product is to come up with ideas. This is when designers put together all of the ideas that have come up for the project. At this stage, ideas are shared, discussed, and thought over. This is where the “creative spark” of a product begins.
At this stage, creating scenarios and storyboards is a good way for designers to imagine how the product will fit into the life of a user. This makes it easier to target and meet their needs as and when they arise. This ties into the story part of product design, which good designers can use to their advantage. User journey mapping is also useful. In this method, designers lay out in a very general way the basic steps a user will take to complete a task. Again, this helps set up a story for the product and lets the people working on it start to see what the app will look like.
All of these things come together to make information architecture. This is a plan that looks like a flowchart and shows how the whole product will work as far as navigation goes. Here, pages and screens are linked together to make a bigger picture of how an app will be set up as a whole. Like in traditional architecture, designers will make a plan for how the product will use the space it takes up.
The next step in the ideation phase of the product design process would be to sketch and wireframe. Individual screens or pages are made in a low-fidelity way to show what the final product will look like. This is also the time when problems are fixed, with designers going back to the research phase to fix any problems that still need to be fixed. These are very important to make sure that these problems don’t make it into the final product. They go along with the testing process, which we’ll talk about later. If information architecture plans a product on a large scale, low-fidelity wireframes show how a product will look, feel, and, most importantly, work on a small scale.
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5. Design
The design phase comes after the ideation phase. Most people would say that this is the most important phase. This starts with prototyping, which means making working models of the product to see how all of its parts work together. A prototype has a starting point, which is usually the home screen or page, and then it grows until it is the whole product. This is a sort of skeleton that designers can add ideas, visuals, or more models to. Right now, this is the best picture of the product that can be made. This starts a “prototyping loop,” which consists of three steps:
- Prototype
- Review
- Refine
When high-fidelity designs are made, prototypes look more and more like what the final product will look like. The designers then go through the prototypes very carefully to find any problems or, even better, ways to make the product even better. During the review phase, the users and other people who have a stake in the project come back to test the prototype and tell the designers what needs to be changed or improved. In the last stage, “refinement,” designs are made over and over again in an attempt to reach perfection, or at least something close to it.
6. HandOver
Lastly, a handoff happens right at the end of the design stage. When designers are happy with how a product is put together, they give it to the developer for coding, which is kind of like “making” a product. In order to do this, designers give developers a “design specification,” which is basically a document that explains everything from the information architecture to the smallest color swap. This way, developers can fully understand the product and make it so that it meets even the most specific expectations of the designers.
7. Testing & Validation
Testing and validating the product is the next-to-last step in the process of making it. This starts with a process called “dogfooding,” in which the people who helped make the product test it in a nearly finished state. Here, the team decided how close the product was to what they had in mind. Problems are also found and fixed right away so that the product can be as polished as possible.
But it’s also important that the project be looked at from a point of view other than the designer’s. This is done when the designers test the app’s usability on real end users. In product design, an example of this is when a young designer is making an app to help an older person with a problem. The difference in context, especially when it comes to technology, might not be obvious to the young designer, which is why usability testing is needed. The “father” of UX design, Jakob Nielsen, says that just 5 users testing the product can solve 85% of usability problems, and who are we to argue? After putting together and addressing all of the internal and external feedback, the product is finally put out into the world in its (for the time being) final form so that users can enjoy it and solve the problem we first pointed out in the problem statement.
8. Post-Design Process
The seventh and last step in the product design process happens after the product has been released to the public. So we’re done, right? Think again. This may be confusing to people who don’t know much about the field, but the design is a continuous process that started before the product came out and will keep going after it does. Designers will keep making changes and updates to the app, which is sure to get a lot of direct and indirect feedback. First of all, designers can now use metrics because a lot of people are using the product and giving them data. These can be used to make the design even friendlier and the user’s experience smoother and more useful.
Also, users can give feedback directly. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by leaving ratings and comments on the app store or by asking users directly through the product if they would help improve it by taking a survey, for example. In any case, this starts a new cycle of improvement, refinement, and implementation in the design process.
Conclusion
As addressed earlier, the definition of product design has evolved countless times over the years, and now, in the information age, it seems inextricably linked with the UI/UX design process. One of the most common misconceptions about the product design process is that it happens in a straight line. This is not true. The process is much more circular, with smaller cycles taking up most of the time. In this article, we looked at the feedback loop, but there are actually a lot more microcosms of design thinking that happen as well. While product designers all over the world either have a set process for making a product, from the idea to the launch, or they are always looking for ways to improve their process. No matter where you are in the product design process, if you use some of the things mentioned in this blog and stick to good UX design principles, you’re sure to make a difference for the better.
