Empathizing
The process of product design begins and ends with user needs. By understanding and empathizing with the challenges faced by your target market, you can start visualizing the solutions that need to be incorporated into your product.
The main aspects of product layout, aesthetics, and functionality can be determined by organizing market research with target user segments or analyzing product usage, and behavioral data of existing users.
Differentiation
Product design is also instrumental in helping you establish brand differentiation. It’s what attracts customers to your product, holds their attention, and sparks an interest in exploring various features. It’s also what sets your product apart from that of your competitors.
Therefore, when you enter a competitive market where the solution is not novel, product design can help you win over the early adopters.
Validation
Product functionality and usability for the end-user don’t just happen on their own. It’s an iterative process that takes you multiple attempts to perfect. And even then, it has to keep evolving. From sketching a preliminary product design to building a wireframe design and developing a fully functional product prototype, you must go through various stages to properly design a product.
At each stage, product design has to be tested with prospective users and validated for subsequent development. Design elements that receive a positive reaction from users are retained for inclusion in the actual product. Elements that fail to favorably impact user experience are removed and replaced.
Interaction
The product interface determines how a user will perceive the product and eventually interact with it. A poorly placed button or CTA in an app can confuse the user or defer their buying decision. A cluttered design may not only irritate the user but also make your product less sticky. Intuitive product design is needed to ensure that the target users get what they are looking for.
One way to approach this is through A/B testing the product mockups or prototypes with test users. Several features and design elements can also be finalized for optimum user interaction during the product’s beta testing phase.
Experience
Ultimately, you need to map the customer journey and determine various touch points or moments of truth for product users. Collaboratively, these define the user experience and need to be carefully managed and improved. And the best way to do that is through predictive modeling of the user journey and designing the product to match user expectations.
Product design ensures that new users can successfully discover every useful feature of the product, and existing users continue to derive value from improved aesthetics and product functionality. And we, at The Able Guys, take care of everything from strategy to product design and then launch and maintain software products, be it an app or web-related product.