Product Design Process - How to REALLY Develop a Web or Mobile App
What is the Product Design Process?
The product design process can be described as software development as a whole, from strategy and conceptual work to implementation. It's the process of planning both the visual appeal of the product and its user flow.
The product design process is not just about UX/UI design. It provides a big-picture view of the entire project because it takes into account business perspectives and goals. It's a combination of three elements: management, engineering, and graphics.
The end result always depends on collaboration that combines various skills—graphic design, UX/UI design, research, business analysis, development, as well as marketing or testing, to name just a few.
Although this process is complex, it's worth the effort. During the product design process, you can adapt the product to customer needs and increase their satisfaction.
Using pictograms and other visual elements can make a complex interface more intuitive, thereby boosting customer satisfaction with your offerings.
And that’s just the beginning of its benefits.
What are the Goals of the Product Design Process?
In many cases, the values important to customers do not align with business expectations, or developers do not understand the real needs of their users.
Thus, the main goal of the product design process is to find a balance between user needs and business value.
This gives you a broader perspective to better understand all stakeholders and develop a product with excellent functionality, attractive design, and profitability.
An ideal product design process helps you:
- understand customer needs,
- identify market opportunities,
- increase competitiveness,
- achieve desired product quality,
- gain long-term profitability,
- reduce costs.
It should serve as a guide for the entire business, like a map that helps determine the best course of action.
How Does the Product Design Process Work in Practice?
Now that we've covered the theory, it's time to put it into practice.
It would be great if all product design processes looked the same. Unfortunately, that's impossible. As we've said, even experts cannot predict the exact process—they just provide a roadmap with stages and tips on skipping or extending them. This process has many conditional variables, and unlike software development (writing code), the knowledge of decision-makers and results of interviews or research are always critical aspects.
Many factors influence this process—budget, scope of the UX project, timelines, business size, to name a few.
Nevertheless, we’ll share our approximate product design process diagram. It should help you visualize what it might look like in your business.
Let’s look at the most important stages, standard design methods, and a few tools that can help streamline the entire process.
Before You Start: Product Business Analysis?
Even being the best at something doesn't guarantee market share. If you want to turn your idea into huge profits, you need a detailed plan. That’s where product business analysis comes in.
Product business analysis begins to guide and completes the design process. It helps determine costs and forecast potential profit from the product. It combines the efforts of a business analyst and a UX designer.
The goal of business analysis is to refine technical requirements, reduce development costs, identify the target audience and their needs. It is also necessary after product launch for testing, identifying issues, and making improvements.
Elements of the Product Design Process and Who is Involved
Now we’ll describe the stages of this process and related matters.
Understanding
Does your solution meet market requirements? The key to creating a successful product is that the people involved in the design process understand all other aspects of the project—its goals and different perspectives. That’s why the main role of designers is to identify user needs and align them with business goals.
Vision
You should have a clear vision of your product—a sketch of its appearance and the problems it will solve. At the same time, you need to communicate your expectations, what exactly you want from your business, and how long the entire development process should take.
After clarifying these issues, you need to transfer your vision into the digital space. At this stage, UX designers create a prototype of your product and, in collaboration with developers and designers, turn your vision into reality.
Product/Feature
What features will your product offer? It's crucial to define your budget clearly, as it directly affects the product's complexity.
Determine which features are most important and which to focus on. Remember, people love simple solutions. The simpler the product is to use, the more likely it is to succeed.
But don't worry—UX designers are the people who will ensure users fully understand your product.
Users/Personas
Users are a key element of the product design process. That's why thorough research must be done before you even start thinking about product development.
Conduct surveys and interviews to better know your target audience. As part of user research, you also need to understand for whom the product is being created. It's useful to create user personas to put yourself in the users' shoes and view the product from their perspective.
Users are often provided and represented by decision-makers, but they don't come from them. Personas, on the other hand, result from several steps and research aimed at identifying the ideal target group.
Competition
When conducting competitive research, you should focus mainly on three things: product offering, user experience, and visual design. Draw inspiration from competitors and analyze their strengths and weaknesses.
Studying competitors also helps you better understand their customers' needs—look at what users say about your competitors' solutions. There may be a gap in the market that no company has filled, or users may complain about certain elements. In that case, you should not repeat the same mistakes but find your unique selling proposition (USP).
Risks
When implementing any project, you must always consider risks. This allows for a better understanding of the market and, consequently, being aware of issues that may arise during product development.
What are the risks associated with creating a specific product? The most common ones include failing to meet cost or quality targets, exceeding deadlines, creating a product that won't generate profit, or simply not attracting users.
Managers and analysts should constantly monitor and analyze the project to mitigate possible risks.
Product Design Methodologies
There are various types of methodologies that companies use to design products. Although each differs from the others, they all contribute to testing ideas, solving problems, and aligning product vision with goals and objectives. Which methodologies are most common in product design?
Each methodology has its own set of advantages and disadvantages depending on your preferences, experience, and circumstances.
Agile UX
Using this approach allows for quick and efficient launch of mobile games. It takes place in a collaborative environment with cross-functional, self-organized teams. This method focuses more on "doing" than on paperwork, which significantly speeds up the decision-making process.
Under the agile product development method, the process is divided into several small iterations, at the end of each you get the result of designers' work. Delivering a small feature after each iteration allows for feedback and product improvement accordingly.
As a result, you are involved throughout the entire process, and its progression is transparent to you. Moreover, you can quickly respond to any issues and make necessary changes with less impact on the budget.
Design Sprint
"Design sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers."
Google
This method was used internally at Google for custom mobile game development and later became an integral part of Google Ventures. The initial development process consists of five phases: Understand, Diverge, Decide, Prototype, and Validate. As a result, the first outcome is achieved in about three to four days, proving the intensity and result-oriented nature of the process.
A team consisting of a small number of designers, developers, marketers, and clients develops the project and seeks the best solutions to create a product that maximally meets the expectations of future users and clients.
What are its main advantages? Using this accelerated approach, you can see in advance what the finished product will look like before taking on any costly commitments. You learn whether an idea is worth implementing, and best of all, you eliminate endless debates and condense months of work into one week.
Product Canvas
Product Canvas combines Agile methodologies with UX principles. It helps create products with great user experience while focusing on future development. The goal of Product Canvas is to validate the product, not to determine whether it should be developed.
It is more of a tool than a methodology—it shows what your product is and how it is strategically positioned. It contains various UX artifacts: user stories with personas, scenarios, storyboards, or design sketches.
Summary
Having learned a lot about the product design process, let's recap the most important points:
- Product design is a lengthy, multi-step process involving many people.
- The presence of each participant and specialist is necessary to create the best product.
- The time and effort invested in the design process will pay off in the quality of the finished product.
- There are several tools and methods to carry out the product design process.