Breaking down product design — meaning and process

The word product design isn’t new but has assumed new meaning and form over the years. The creation of the internet and its subsequent democratization opened up new frontiers to what is possible with design. The definition and role of a product designer have continued to evolve ever since.

Nowadays product designers (often called digital product designers while physical product designers are referred to as industrial designers) are some of the most sought-after professionals by companies in tech. Apps, websites, and other similar interfaces are created by product designers while physical goods found in retail stores amongst other places are designed by industrial designers.

What is a product design?

In a world where every company is battling for loyal customers, product design is essential for making sure you stand out.

At the basic level product design is about creating products that meet the needs of target users and align with the organization’s goal.

It is a process that involves identifying a problem, the cause of that problem, diagnosing possible solutions, and developing a suitable solution for the target market while ensuring a user-focused approach throughout the process.

When it comes to building great products design plays a pivotal role because of its approach to solving problems, companies that understand the power of design in business have become industry leaders.

No matter your expertise, in tech or not understanding the value of design will help you present your best work.

Design thinking process

To build anything meaningful, process and strategy are very important. In product design, designers approach problems using design thinking

Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation — anchored in understanding customer’s needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas — that will transform the way you develop products, services, processes, and organizations. — IDEO

When building, product designers need to ask key questions to understand business value and problems.

• What problem will the product solve?
• Who has this problem?
• What is the end goal of the product?
• How do we measure product success(KPI)

5 Stages of design thinking

• Empathize: To design a product for any audience, it is important to understand them, their needs, and challenges. placing yourself in the users’ shoes, entering their world to see things from their perspective. Why? Products are used by humans(people) not the design or development team who built them but everyone else. Researching at this stage provides concrete and factual information about users.

• Define: Research conducted in the first stage makes it possible to understand solutions from the past that didn’t work. Bringing a new perspective/viewpoint to the problem that aligns with users’ pain points and where necessary reframing the problem statement to uncover better solutions. This forms the basis for exploring possible solutions.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” -Albert Einstein

• Ideate: At this point, all necessary questions have been asked, quantitative and qualitative data collected it is then time to brainstorm, come up with as many solution ideas as possible, sort through for ideas that satisfies both users' needs and business goals. A cost-effective and practical solution and within the technical limitation.

Sometimes it takes a lot of bad ideas to come up with a good one. But if the team avoids even voicing the “bad” ideas, they may never reach the good ones. Many times, one person’s bad idea will get another person’s brain going in the right direction, leading to an excellent solution. Without the bad idea being voiced in the first place, the right idea may never have come along. — Toptal

• Prototype: Prototyping is very important in the design process it helps transform ideas into something tangible enough to test with users. prototypes should look as close as possible to the actual product when fully built.

Prototyping should be done in stages, starting with low-fidelity prototypes used to gather feedback from users and stakeholders. As solutions are narrowed down, higher-functioning and better-designed prototypes can be created for further testing in a more realistic production environment. -Toptal

• Test: At this point, research has been done, problems defined or refined, brainstorming concluded and the best solution has been prototyped. This is the moment of truth where the designer/design team gets feedback from users. Feedbacks help validate design efforts which can only be achieved through testing. Testing exposes flaws in the seemingly well-researched solution and when assumptions are challenged it is important to critically examine the problem to create better solutions.

Prototyping and testing go hand in hand and together they ensure design flaws and usability issues are identified on time before development.

Identifying errors and usability issues early reduces the chance of bugs or accessibility issues after launch. When testing is skipped in favor of getting the product out as soon as possible speedy, considerable time and money will be spent correcting post launch. This can be frustrating and affect the product generally.

Though design thinking has faced criticism its ability to produce results can not be questioned. Cycling through the process each time to learn more about users, come up with better ideas, prototype them, and test. It is the continuous refinement that makes design thinking unique and powerful.

Relationship between Product design & UI/UX

Product design is UI/UX and more, while UI/UX takes care of crafting human-centric solutions and designing intuitive interfaces product design goes beyond that to incorporate the business goal and vision into the mix. A product is useless if it is not profitable and also useless if it does not solve users' problems.

User interface design(UI): Here designers focus on creating interfaces for the web and mobile apps that are user friendly, intuitive, and places the least cognitive load on users. This is achieved through a variety of means including mental models.

User experience design(UX): Experience design is a little bit of research, psychology, technology, and design. experience designers design for delight, creating habit-forming product blueprints. User experience design is the process of making interaction with products more intuitive and pleasurable.

Interaction design(IXD): This is the design of the interaction between users and products(software products like apps and websites), the goal is to help users achieve their goals in the best way possible.

To create useful and delight products, designers need to pay more attention to the product’s users through research, research before building the product and constant research after launch.

This allows designers to know what people are looking out for in a product at every point in time while taking back feedbacks to improve.