Guide for the Design of a Digital Product (Part 1)

Chen it comes to creating great products, design is the most important “feature”. We’ve moved on to the stage where product design dominates – it’s what sets companies apart and provides a real edge over the competition. Understanding the product development process is essential to creating better work.

What is Product Design?

The design of the product is the p r ocess of identifying a market opportunity clearly define the problem, develop appropriate for that problem and validate the solution with real users solution.

Design Thinking as the basis of the design process

“Design Thinking” has become a popular approach to creating products. This approach encapsulates the methods and ideas of human-centered design into a single, unified concept. According to Tim Brown:

“Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws on the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the capabilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

Design Thinking is applied to product design (whether physical or digital) because it focuses on end-to-end product development, and not just in the design phase.

When thinking about products or features, designers must understand the business objectives and be able to answer the following questions first:

1. What problem are we solving?
2. Who has this problem?
3. What are we trying to achieve?

Answering these questions helps designers understand the user experience (UX) of a product as a whole, not just the interaction (feel) or visual appearance of the design. Only after answering these questions does it make sense to move on to looking for a solution to the problem.

Finding a solution to a problem includes the following five phases:

1.Empathize – Learn about the people you are designing for, with research to gain a deeper understanding of the users.

2.Define: create a point of view that is based on the needs and information of the user.

3.Devise: Brainstorm and come up with as many creative solutions as possible. Generate a range of potential solutions by giving yourself and your team total freedom.

4.Prototype – Build a prototype (or series of prototypes) to test your hypothesis. Prototyping allows designers to see if they are on the right track and often spawns different ideas that would not have come up otherwise.

5.Test: return to your users for comments.

Design process

With an understanding of what Design Thinking is, it’s time to define the design process. The design process is a series of steps that product teams follow during the formulation of a product from start to finish.
Having a strong, well-structured process is essential for two reasons: it helps you stay focused, and it helps you stay on schedule.

While it is impossible to provide a universal design process that fits all projects, it is still possible to describe a general flow for new product design. This flow includes the following steps:

1. Defining the product vision
2. Product research
3. User analysis
4. Ideation
5. Design
6. Test and validation
7. Post-launch activities

Define Product Vision and Strategy

One of the most important phases of product design is done before the design process begins. Before you start building a product, you need to understand its context for existence. It is the time when the product team must define the product vision and product strategy.

Have you ever worked on a project where the overall goal was unclear, where the people involved in design and development only vaguely understood the purpose of the product? Very often this happens because there is no vision for the product. Unfortunately, this scenario happens far too often. In most cases, this has negative consequences.

Every design project needs a product vision that sets the direction and guides the product development team. Vision captures the essence of the product – the critical information that the product team must know to develop and launch a successful product. Vision helps build a common understanding of what we are trying to build here and why. Vision also helps you define what you are not building. Being clear about the boundaries of your solution will help you stay focused when creating your product.

But the vision is only half the picture. The other half is strategy. Product strategy defines a product’s journey. Your vision helps you define a destination (the target condition) – the ultimate user experience you are targeting. You can plan your route to your destination destination by focusing on exactly what you need to build. By setting the goal (the challenge), you can adjust the direction of your product efforts.

Define the “Value Proposition”

The value proposition describes the key aspects of the product: what it is, who it is for, and when and where it will be used. The value proposition helps the team and stakeholders build a consensus on what the product will be.

“Working backwards” or Working backwards

A simple technique called ” Working Backwards ” adds clarity and definition to a product vision. The product team starts with the key users and works backwards until it reaches the minimum set of requirements to satisfy what it is trying to achieve, this approach is especially important when developing new products or features.
Advice:

• Put the user in the center. You need to focus on the customer’s problem, focus on the value that the product brings to customers.
• Make sure everyone on the team shares the same vision. You must not only define a clear vision for the product, but also ensure that all team members share it.

Define success criteria

It is essential to have a clear business objective that you want to achieve with the product. If you don’t know at the beginning of the project what the business objective is and how success will be measured, then you are in trouble. Defining explicit success criteria, such as expected number of sales per month, key performance indicators (KPIs), etc., during this phase sets goals for evaluating progress. This also helps establish a more results-oriented process.

Tip: Stakeholders are worth interviewing to define business goals and objectives for the project.

Schedule a project kickoff meeting

The kickoff meeting brings together all the key players to set the right expectations for both the team and stakeholders. It covers a high-level outline of product purpose, who is involved in product design and development, how they will work together, and what stakeholder expectations are (such as KPIs and how product success should be measured).