Product Design: How Does It Affect Your Business?
A product design is about creating a new product to be sold by a business to customers. It helps in the generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products. So, the design is thus a significant step in new product development.
It can be defined in two ways:
As a noun: It is the properties of an artifact, containing the discrete properties of the form (aesthetics of a tangible good or service) and the function (its capabilities) together with holistic properties of integrated form and function.
As a process: It is a set of tactical and strategic activities, starting from idea generation to commercialisation, used in product’s design. The engineers and experts working in this segment conceptualise and evaluate ideas, making them tangible inventions and products.
The product designer combines art, science and technology to create a new product. The evolving role has been enhanced with digital tools that let designers do things like communicate, analyse, visualise, 3D modelling and actually produce tangible ideas. The future is very wide open for this new approach, and many are trying their hands on this method.
Why Does Your Business Need Product Design?
Branding is not just advertisement, website, promotion logo or other methods. For a product to sell well, it needs a good design, from its packaging to how it feels to use it. Product packaging is often the first thing people see, and purchase decisions also depend on the first impression. In a market flooded with similar products, the design makes the difference, not just the looks but also the functionality.
The former CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, Dr Ralf Speth, once said, “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
Design is more about finding a solution for the problem of the business, and how one understands it is by asking these questions:
- What problem are we solving?
- Who has this problem?
- What do we want to achieve?
Then the next step is to find a solution for it, which these methods can find:
- Empathise: Study and do surveys on the people you are helping to solve the problem. It creates a deeper understanding of the problem.
- Define: Create the POV (Point of View) based on the user and insight.
- Ideate: The next step is brainstorming. Get as many solutions and alternatives as you can get, and choose one.
- Prototype: It is time to test your hypothesis by making a prototype. It lets the designers and engineers check the viability of the design. It also generates different and alternate ideas.
- Test: Now it is time for some user feedback. Then you can commercialise it and start an extensive scale process.
The next step is the designing process. There are seven steps through which one can design a perfect product to solve the persisting problems.
These steps are:
- Defining the vision of the product
- Product research
- User analysis
- Ideation
- Design
- Testing and validation
- Post-launch activities
The process is long and complex, but it brings the best results when the product gets launched for the public.
The importance of product design is increasing day by day, and no business can go a long way without accepting these new techniques. In the success of any product, the design plays a significant role, and it will continue to be so for a long time.
Addsion Is a Blogger and an SEO professional. Co-founder of wayssay.com, I have 2 years of experience in SEO & 1 year of Successful. I have a passion for SEO & Blogging, Affiliate marketer & also interested to invest on profitable stocks.
