Product Design Process: The steps crucial to the success of your next product.
Whatever features or functionality a product has, it doesn’t mean much without a great design. Not only does it give the first impression of your product, but it’s also what defines the experience for your end-users.
However, it can be challenging to put out solid design after solid design because there are so many factors to balance and issues that may arise during the product design process.
Formalizing a PDP for your team is the best thing you can do to make the process go smoother and to build more accurate products.
Some of the biggest advantages of a solid PDP are:
- Reduce time and cost spent on design and development
- Planning realistic schedules and avoiding scope creep
- And, of course, a higher quality product
In reality, a PDP will always differ from team to team and project to project. We’ll detail the one that works best for us, but feel free to adapt it to your needs.
Discovery
This might be the most tempting stage to skip, but could be the difference between a successful or failed product. Start by identifying the key problems your stakeholders want the product to solve and the possible solutions. These will inform just about every other decision you make going forward.
There are two main parts to this:
Functional or business discovery
- Headed by your product team.
- Work closely with stakeholders to identify business objectives.
- Set hard and soft requirements for the end product.
Design discovery
- Can be done on its own or kicked-off after the above.
- Analyze user expectations and needs through interviews. If useful, research personas.
- Do a comparison of your stakeholder’s direct and indirect competitors to find your niche and identify any competitive edge.
When you’ve finished both processes, assemble the whole project team. Align and prioritize your requirements by combining your business and design goals, make sure everyone understands their role, and take a quick run-through of the design process.
Ideation
Now, we get to the fun part. This is when everyone on the project team gets to air their opinions and contribute their ideas. This should be a no holds barred session to get a wide and innovative range of ideas.
Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash
Anything can be a source of inspiration. Look to sci-fi movies of the day for what could be. Visual queues can be acquired from colorful or moody images, videos, mood boards, etc.
Your engineering team should play a role to add to your pool of ideas and to make sure the functionality and technical constraints aren’t completely ignored. Also, consider how your product can evolve over time.
Solicit ideas, wireframe them, and then vote on the best ones until you have a vision for your product.
And remember, the most complex problems sometimes require the simplest solutions.
IA/Flows
Hopefully, you now have a huge cache of ideas to draw from. Now its time to start conceptualizing how they will all connect to help users access and use the end product. That’s where information architecture (IA) comes in.
The result of this stage should be an understanding of the:
- Navigational structures
- The hierarchies of the pages or main content pieces
- Any categorizations that will help organize the presentation of information
To do this, you’ll need to consider how end-users are most likely to use your product. So, coming up with user journey maps through user or job stories is essential.
This will also be an iterative process, and the first one to involve testing as part of the decision-making process. Some tools that could be incredibly handy are:
- Card sorting
- Low-effort testing methods, like hallway testing
- Flow charts
Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash
Wireframe
Now that you have a concept of how the flow of information in your product will look, its time to think about how the content will be presented on the actual pages. Because it’s early in the process, you should start with some low-fidelity, low-effort mockups.
Wireframes are a great way to communicate and share ideas throughout the team. They can be made, tested, scrapped, or redesigned in a very short timeframe.
Photo by José Alejandro Cuffia on Unsplash
Prototype
Now that you can conceptualize your product at the page and architectural level, you can invest more time and effort into higher fidelity prototypes. At the halfway point, this will crystallize your vision of the end product and enable you to get user feedback.
We like to start by creating prototypes for our core functions first. With each iteration, we move on to the next layer, adding more functionality and content. If something doesn’t quite fit, it’s easy to rework the inner layers.
Test
Before you actually start implementation, investing time and resources, now is the time to get feedback from your user base. Although you’ve done some informal testing throughout the proceeding stages, you can now get more accurate user feedback with larger sample sizes and by incorporating more testing methodologies.
The more methodologies or techniques you use, the better you’ll be able to gauge how users interact with your product under different circumstances.
On top of formal, lab-driven usability tests where users are given instructions and monitored these methods:
- Online testing – Sites like UserCrowd, UserTesting, Enroll, and Userbrain are great ways to get larger sample sizes.
- Guerilla testing – approach random people (coffee shops work well) and ask them to try out your prototypes. Some argue less formal settings can elicit more authentic responses.
When in doubt:
Photo by David Travis on Unsplash
Design
OK, so you did your research, came up with ideas, prototyped them, tested for what works and what doesn’t, and now it’s time to bring everything together. This stage will be different for any organization, team, or even project.
Almost always, you’ll need to closely cooperate with the development team. We like to create very high-fidelity prototypes and pass them on to the developers as a tangible model to work from.
Image by William Iven from Pixabay
Iterate
Things rarely work out perfectly the first time around. If ever. Although linear stages are useful to keep you on track without skipping any important steps, that doesn’t mean the process itself is linear.
Whenever something doesn’t work, you should go back to the previous step and retrofit it so you can continue. Try to complete each stage and develop an MVP, because it’s much harder to try and rework something that’s half-finished.
If you’ve done your due diligence at each stage, you shouldn’t have any major or costly changes to make. At this stage, you should be polishing and refining your end-product with further user testing as your guide.By Rosenfeld Media on Flickr
Delivery
The final phase of the PDP process can be broken down into two main stages and a number of steps.
The steps of the first stage can look something like this:
- Validation – look back at your requirements and goals and make sure you’ve met them.
- Phasing – establish the increments in which the product will be released.
- Handover – handing the product over to the stakeholder and end-users.
The second stage can be called the “analysis”:
- Evaluation – look at the success of the product post-launch and identify any remaining issues or room for improvement. This involves direct user feedback as well as using testing tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, etc.
- Feedback loops – just because a product has launched, doesn’t mean you’re done with it. Ongoing feedback can be found from indirect sources and be iteratively merged back in the PDP for future updates or changes.
Product design should be a cyclical and living process
Here are a few final tips that you should keep in mind throughout each PDP:
- Focus fully on each step at a time
- Make sure you have short feedback loops with your client
- Use any relevant tools/methodologies/techniques at your disposal
However, just like you shouldn’t let a misstep hold you back throughout the process, you also shouldn’t be held hostage by your PDP. It should also be revised and adapted with each project so that you can come up with a unique PDP that suits your team.