10 Tips And Tricks For Creating a World-Class Product Design

When you pour creativity into your vision, a new, attractive, and useful product develops. From sketching to building a final product, product designing is a lot like art.

Both fields have their own sets of challenges. While artists need to come up with something more attractive, product designers need to focus on making it more useful.

Designing a product is challenging as most of the people aren’t designers yet as a designer, it’s your job to consider their needs.

This is very challenging since people don’t know what exactly do they want, but you’ve to figure that out and then create a product accordingly.

As a product designer, you need to know how to combine creativity and coherent vision, and this requires substantial knowledge in computer-aided design (CAD), technical skills, model making, and also management skills.

Responsibilities Of a Product Designer

Usually, product designers specialize in a specific type of product. They must ensure that the end product is qualitative, easy to use, cost-effective, and attractive as well.

Depending upon the requirement of the project, the responsibilities of a product designer mostly includes:

• Developing a product brief and understanding the client’s needs.
• Inspecting how does the actual product works.
• Visualizing ideas by sketching and outlining plans.
• Selecting the necessary tools and resources.
• Using design software to design detailed product blueprints.
• Creating prototype samples or working models.
• Checking the models for functionality.
• Modifying the design to solve issues if any.

Process of Designing a Product

Now that we understand what the critical responsibilities of a product designer are, it’s time to deep dive and understands how one can design a product.

The process of designing a product is a series of steps that a product team can follow for the formulation of a product.

It is essential primarily because of two main reasons:

• It will help you to remain focused.
• It will also let you follow a schedule.

While it is impossible to create a universal design that can fit all kinds of requirements, it’s still possible to design a general one for designing the majority of the products.

The Design Flow Includes The Following Steps

Defining a Product Strategy

One of the essential parts of a design strategy is done even before the beginning of the project.

Before you start to build a product, you need to identify the purpose of its existence.

It’s the time when you need to define the product strategy and vision.

Product Research

Once you’re done with the product strategy, you need to conduct product research.

User Analysis

Use the research done and analyze the insights gained from the analysis.

Ideation

Ideation is a part of a product strategy when the team members come up with a range of creative ideas that could help in reaching the goals.

Design

In this phase, you or your team needs to create the solution as per the problems of the client.

Post Launch Activities

Product designing is not just up to the official launch of the product, but it’s an ongoing process. And this lasts till the product is being used.

Tips And Tricks For Creating a World-Class Product Design

Start With a Concise And Clear Brief

A clear brief can act as a backbone for a successful project. Be specific about your goals and objectives, deliverables, and also user demands.

You don’t need to pen down all the business details at this phase, think broad strokes and of course the big picture.

It’s advisable to kick off a project with a meeting of both the parties. This is a great way to discover each other and asking loads of questions regarding the project, needs, deadline everything.

Make It Useful

Now, this may sound obvious to you but trust me you need to stick to it. The product has to be useful; otherwise, there would not be any sense of making it.

Afterall utility is the top priority here. But it’s not just about the product that needs to be useful, but a designer needs to add this in every aspect of the design as well.

You need to design it in such a way that every aspect of it serves a purpose. There should be a point of every aspect of the design.

Any part of your plan that doesn’t seem useful to the users can instantly draw off their attention from the product.

Know Your Users

It’s your users who are going to use the product and to serve them the best; you need to understand their needs thoroughly.

Understanding your target market can be your most significant upper hand in the bottom-line implications of building, manufacturing, and launching your product in the market.

Understanding the buyer persona and their pain points can help you to come up with solutions that have a market need.

Also, it’s advisable to check out the products that are already available in the market. It will help you to come up with better solutions than that are already available.

Functions Over Features

As a product designer, you should be focusing more on functions than the features. You might feel tempted to add loads and loads of features in your product, but that can backfire you.

Too many features mean too many colors, notes, words, space, and this can instantly annoy your users, and ultimately make them switch your product.

It’s a fact that most of the times, simplicity wins the race. And people prefer something that performs a specific activity very well rather than performing different operations.

They want something that works! Think about what’s the purpose to you build your product? What problem can it solve the best? Answering these questions will help you have a perfect mission.

Stay Focused

If you’re designing a product, then you must be having a goal in mind, and most probably it’s to make your product popular so that people could buy it.

There very fewer products that succeed as a jack of all trades. For stepping up and proving your product better than the rest, you need to stay focused on just one particular issue that you’re solving.

Be Innovative

In this time, when technology is evolving at outstanding speed, you need to make you evolve too. There are a very less number of products that are completed new and revolutionary as well.

The fact is that most of the products are just a better version of the older ones. So what’s the best way to thrive? Make it innovative!

It may be only a better version of an existing one, but you can still try to make it more creative and easy to use so that it can connect with the users.

The more creative it is, the more people will get attracted towards it.

Stay Open To Feedback

As already mentioned, designing a product is not limited to launching it, but rather it’s an ongoing process until the product is in use. And that’s why you need to stay open to feedback.

Feedback can be of great use when it comes to modifying your approach.

It will help you to understand the shortcomings of your product design and also what your users want from the product.

If taken seriously, feedback can help you design a product that would thrive in the market.

Design For Longevity

Good designs aren’t just the ones that solve a particular problem, but they are the ones that address as well as last for long.

Consumers prefer long-lasting solutions to their problems. You can’t make them buy something that would work for a few months, and then it will be gone.

While designing a product, try to develop it in such a way that it could stay with the consumers in the long run. If you do so, it can act as one of the most significant advantages of your product.

Pay Attention To Every Detail

Be it the colors, text or anything, every little thing matters. While it might not seem essential but even tiny imperfections can make your users go away.

Get everything that could impress your users and make them prefer your product. If you keep a check on every minute details, your users will also do notice because everything counts.

Do It!

From developing an idea to building the final product, the entire process takes a lot of time and effort, but the final part takes most of it.

Yes, the whole process is worth it all but the last part shapes your product and its future. Just do it and make it so useful that your users keep coming back to it.

Conclusion

The above this are simple guidelines for making your product the next big thing in your industry from the very beginning. Idea matters but every great idea don’t thrive.

For making your idea work, you need to go the extra mile. Start giving your best from the beginning and keep up the great work until the product stays in the market. All the best!

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Author Bio:

Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, ChatBot & Blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies, a Mobile Application Development Company. His 8+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and ChatBot.