-
What is Product Design?
It is a complex multi-step process at the junction of engineering, management, and graphics. Product design provides a comprehensive understanding of what the final product would look like, feel like, what tasks and with what tools it will solve. -
Period: to
Create your product
-
Period: to
Create your product
-
Brainstorming
The first step to design a product is brainstorming, which appeared in 1953 in the United States. ”
Brainstorming consists of three phases:
-Definition of the problem.
-Idea generation.
Selection of the most viable ideas among proposed. -
Defining the Product
After brainstorming, when all the viable ideas for the future product are chosen, you need to highlight a certain number of general expectations (requirements) for its implementation. As a rule, the output is a fairly abstract list, the task of which is not to form an exact guideline on the development, but rather to determine the directions for the further team activities. -
Conducting the User Research
Research implies several aspects: market research to define the presence of competitors, the definition of trends, the assessment of the product’s prospective longevity, etc. The results of this research provide grounds to build so-called customer portraits. -
Sketching
Any large project with a significant budget will only benefit from the creation of sketches. Before time is invested in finding solutions, the direction of the search must be coordinated with the client. Sketches allow to somewhat narrow down this very direction when choosing the main concept, and only then work with composition, layouts, edits, refinement of the concept, etc., would follow. -
Prototyping
Creating a prototype is no less important and crucial task than developing a design itself. Note that the obtained result is not a beautiful final appearance, but rather a “skeleton” of the future product’s look. Nevertheless, it allows demonstrating the functionality, ways of user interaction with the product and its basic appearance. The creation of the prototype allows to avoid many errors and corrections in the future. -
Compiling Specifications
Creation of a list of specifications is, in fact, the process of the above-mentioned requirement specification’s elaboration. It allows reviewing all the requirements for the finished product and possible solutions in maximum detail. Also, these specifications should contain the final delimitation of responsibilities, deadlines, and costs. These documents would be essential at the product development stage. -
Producing the Factory Samples
Manufacturing the pre-production samples will help you understand whether the core idea of the product would be viable and attractive to the real users or if, perhaps, it’s worth to shift the activity vector to other key points. In the case of a physical product, it also allows understanding how much the varying manufacture departments/manufacturing contractor are ready to produce the developed goods with required speed and quality. -
Sample Testing
Testing samples allows you to timely identify the flaws of the product or inconsistencies with the requirements. That is before you even begin an expensive (as a rule) procedure of its implementation. Manufacturing and testing the samples can be iterated as much as needed until they correspond to all the requirements and gain enough of the positive feedback from customers. -
Starting the Production/Development
At the time of starting the manufacturing/developing the product, you will already have a full set of technical specifications with clearly defined requirements, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and budget. Your goal is to break the major tasks into smaller subtasks (so that the deadline for their implementation does not exceed several weeks) and assign priorities. In the software industry today, Agile methodologies are employed for this, such as Scrum or Kanban.