All stages of product development: from concept to implementation

The process of product design can be broken down into a couple of phases. Each step in this process is vital – on the path to success you cannot miss any of them. They work together to determine whether a design is right for the needs of the market or not. Above we pointed out main activities - you can count on us at each of them.

Research & Strategy is the first, key-step in the product design process. In this phase, you want to ask yourself questions about your potential customers: Who are they? What do they need? This step includes creating hypotheses about your audience so that you can test them later on in the process.

After answering questions about your potential customers, you’ll need to think about how your business fits into this equation: What’s its value proposition? Consider who you’re trying to compete with—what products are they offering? And how does yours set itself apart? By looking at these areas during this stage, you’ll be able to create an effective strategic plan for your business that will help you grow in the future.

And that’s why we strongly recommend Product Discovery Workshop – the first step for the successful product design process.

Product designers help clients visualize their ideas and create prototypes of their products. They are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the design is functional, safe, and reliable for consumers who will eventually use it. The designer’s responsibilities also include coming up with design concepts, making sure that both form and function are taken into account, and keeping up with trends at all times.

User-centred design (UCD) focuses on putting the user into the center of product design and development. UCD requires that participants participate in the design process through a variety of research and design methods. It helps understand and meet users preferences regarding features of software, tasks or users’ flows. User data is then one of the most important components in product design. Product designers are always trying to find out the needs and wants of their customers. They use research data, feedbacks, and benchmarks to inform their next steps. The more information they have, the better. As a result, we they are able to design the whole experience perfectly suited to the customer.

User-centered design describes how users will use the product. Companies that use UCD strategies in their design process focus on users and create products that are in line with user expectations. If you collect user feedback and incorporate your findings into the design of the product it would make it better for consumers – among many products on market, they will choose yours. User-centred design will make sure that you design and develop products immediately, exactly how your client wants. Design should be always guided by conceptual design thinking processes and maintain human guiding practices.

How to Design in a User-centric way? Check our Experts Zone post.

Product development is often a difficult task. If you need an experienced and talented consultant, you should suggest options for more profitable short time companies decision-making. This should be noticed because some UX design firms and brands may be more influenced in their roles than the ones whose UX has been. In summary, it is your duty to improve brand recognition by creating user-centered design with market-friendly and affordable branding. Your efforts to design successful products demonstrate your vision and creative problem solving abilities.

A product development expert focuses on defining the user interface on a product. Designing an item is a widely used concept, e.g: an efficient, effective form of generating ideas and delivering new products using design principles. Product designer should understand business objectives and understand elements of proper design. Designing high-performance products needs to understand business expectations of all its components and attributes. Product designers are individuals capable of taking a complex concept to the next level as part of their design team. Long story short, product design should become an important component for any company that is looking forward to the design of their products – no matter if we are talking about digital projects, industrial design or others.

It is remarkably unlikely that products can actually be created or sold once and for all. The way we approach technology keeps progressing. Product development designers have to handle evolving usage habits. Technology evolves rapidly with the use of more and larger technologies and designs necessary for customer experience. Designing is not necessarily linear. Sometimes learning an individual task can be used for repetition and refinement. It’s about constant research, learning and reacting to user feedback.

Product design is regarded by countless people with wide experience and variety of skills. They need to have broad theoretical knowledge and practical skillset. However, despite slight different roles, they are always responsible for putting the customer at the top of each stage and making the best possible value to the consumers.

UX researcher
UX researchers are experts who combine qualitative user research into real user details that other designers use in design decisions. An expert in user experience research can understand user needs from an intuitive viewpoint and identify any problems that product solutions will solve. It’s good when UX researchers participate during the design validation period to ensure accurate development.

UX designer
UX designer is important to maintain user satisfaction and to ensure it effectively suits the needs of users. UX designers identify problems, develop products and provide solutions. This allows them to design products and improve their usability and functionality if needed. UX designers manage the whole project from the project to concept, retaining people-driven design at any given moment throughout the process.

UI designer
UI designers focus on the process of how users interact with digital products. It’s about visual styling (layout, graphics, and typography) and how all elements work together. While focusing on users, the user-friendly interface is their priority. Visual designers usually focus on the initial stages of product development, especially those related to prototypes – by creating all the visual elements, like screens through which a user will move while using a website or app.

Product designer
Product designers have larger skills than UX/UI designers. Although each job requires an extremely strong level of graphical knowledge, there is more analytical and business intelligence to meet the product designer job specification, which implies specialized design tasks as well as research and wireframe. Product designer’s role focus on performance and quality & performance/quality analysis. As a result, product designers are responsible for much bigger decisions. However, both positions rely upon an equal effort to make sure our product can reach its full potential.

Innovating new tools as quickly as possible is the foundation for Lean Agile software development methods. Lean product development extends into a further notch by introducing quick iteration of product development. When this process a product identifies its key evaluability proposition/differentiator the product quickly introduces a working product.

Although it’s good to have internal designers, who focus on developing core competencies for the company, outsourcing product design allows saving costs and building teams with specific expertise wherever it’s needed.

Let’s talk about your design needs.