What is Product Design? A Step By Step Guide

If you want to grow your business it is essential for you to come up with a new product and bring it to the market. However, the chances are very low that a new product gets design by an accident. Since designing a product is not an easy task therefore it is better to carry out this through steps or by cyclic iterations. In the product designing process, the key factors are ideation, market analysis, testing, and technical design which help in designing a product that is reliable and provides the best user experience.

Here we provide you a step-by-step guide to the stages of product design. This method is useful if you have just started your business or if you have a small business and want to grow and introduce yourself on bigger platforms. Launching a new product or having new product design ideas automatically means opening new doors for your business and ensuring a high probability of success.

1. Collaborate:

There is not much of a thought process needed to know why collaboration might be one of the first steps in the product designing process. Two minds are always better than one. These help in thinking fast, overcoming obstacles, and generating ideas faster. For better product design development, it is better to reach out to a specialist instead of an inexperienced personal. There are areas even when you are a genius that you may have trouble conquering when designing a product. These specialists guide you and fill out the gaps in your knowledge.

Experienced product designers will help you with your product design ideas. So investing in an experienced is worthwhile and it will definitely be an investment to be proud of.

2. Surveying the market:

As mentioned earlier, coming up with new product design ideas is not an easy job. If designing a product would have been easy every person would be doing it as it pays a huge sum of money. However, following the proper channels and following a few steps makes it a whole lot easier. Surveying the market and observing the products is a key factor. Following consumer behavior is also important when pondering your product design ideas. Observing this, and staying a year and a half ahead of curve may help you in staying a step ahead of the competition as product design development takes time.

3. Develop a brief:

Developing a brief is an important factor and it is important to do it over and over. During a product designing process, there might be a few assumptions that need to be made throughout the process. However, you should mark all these right from the start to the very end.

This is an important stage in product design development as after it you will have an idea of how your project design will be structured. A product is only theorized to be as good as its brief.

4. Creation of ideas and concept design:

After the above steps, you will have an idea of where your product stands in the market. This allows you to create a sense of ideas and room for a thought process to take place. Now you can consider the product factors such as mechanics, form factor, materials, identity, styling, and basic functionality and form clarity in your decisions. Give time for your ideas to grow and ponder over them.

5. Scrutiny of concept:

After you have given enough thought process to product design ideas, it is essential for product design development that you observe your idea analytically. Your idea will give you a building block. However, the analytics might produce hindrances in your concept. Due to this, you might have to reevaluate your concept to establish suitability.

After reiterating this for a few times, you will be able to reach a suitable decision that follows the goals laid out in your brief.

6. Using Digital tools to your aid:

During the product design development, you can use different digital tools to your advantage. The best example of it can be CAD. Your designers can use CAD for virtual prototyping. This is the first step where you will see your ideas turning to reality and be more of a thing than a thought process. With CAD modeling, you can test the physical properties and structures. This also helps in reaching a final decision as determining any flaw in your idea is easier with CAD designing rather than just some analytics, thinking, or calculation.

7. Physical Prototyping:

After following the above stages of product design, you are finally capable of producing models of your products. At this point, take a moment and reevaluate your decisions taken so far. Check if your product is still achieving all goals that you set. If yes, then you can start testing this product with potential users. This is a repetitive process meaning that you may have to do it over and over again depending on your user’s feedback to get the best possible product. Added bonus to this stage is that you may encounter problems that can be resolved before final production.

8. User testing:

A great way to finally take out any flaw from your product is to have users test it beforehand. However, this is not a cheap process as compared to other stages of product design but the effectiveness of this step cannot be overlooked. With this, you can perform usability tests with focus groups.

9. Design for Manufacture:

This a phase in the product designing process where you can finally contact manufacturing teams and ask for their assistance. Here you can devise a more evolved set of prototypes that allows focusing on Design for Manufacture (DFM).

Huge amounts of money can be saved through this step as it provides a basic assessment and predicts the nature and working of your product. At this stage, you can finalize the total costing of the production of your product. You can estimate the areas that have the highest cost in your design. So, for further production, you will know exactly which area to work on.

10. Launching your product:

After doing all the hard work, it is finally time for you to taste the fruit of your hours of hard work. If your product is well-designed, it will start selling itself as soon as it makes its first appearance on the marketing platform. This is only bound to grow as your product gets more and more popular with respect to time. However, the actions of you and your team will also play an important role. Knowing a correct marketing strategy will prove beneficial in the rapid growth of your product and its popularity. Powerful promotional campaigns will definitely keep you a step ahead of your competition.

Following these ten steps are bound to help you in the production of your design. Depending on how well you utilize these steps will be vital in the market success of your product. In addition, it is important that you always keep your goal in sight and in check meaning that you don’t get deviated from the goals that you actually decided to achieve with your product. Although the process of developing a new product may be lengthy but that are compensated by its huge benefits. Having a new product up your sleeve will always help you in staying a step ahead of your competition.