Module 3 Product Design

Module Introduction

A product could mean anything offered for sale and perceived to possess a
bundle of benefits to its users. Business organizations have to keep in mind that the
product they are developing should answer to a specific problem or “pain points” of
consumers. Coupled with the right mix of features and benefits and given the right price
and considerable promotion, any product could really succeed in the market if its core
reflects the needs, wants and desires of its intended users. This module will acquaint
you with product ideation strategies and approaches for you to be able to design and
develop products that are relevant and responsive to the needs of your customers.

Module Objectives

At the end of this module, you should be able to:

1. Illustrate and discuss the Design Thinking Process;

2. Differentiate vision setting and strategy;
3. Discuss product research strategies;
4. Differentiate personas from empathy map; and
5. Create “user journey maps,” “storyboard,” and “diary log.”

Discussion Proper

What is a product? Only recently, the term “product” was used only in relation to
something material and often found in a retail store. Nowadays, it is coming to mean
digital products as well. Web-based applications or Apps and websites are regarded as
modern-day products.

When it comes to building great products, design is the most important “feature.”
We’ve moved into the stage where product design dominates- it’s what sets companies
apart and gives a real edge over competitors. It’s essential to understand the product
development process in order to create a very good product.

What Is Product Design?

Product design is the process of identifying a market opportunity, clearly defining

the problem, developing a proper solution for that problem and validating the solution
with real users. Designing a new product goes through an analytical process and relies
on a problem-solving approach to improve the quality of life of the end user and his or
her interaction with the environment. It is about problem-solving, about visualizing the
needs of the user and bringing a solution.
 Moreover, product design describes the process of imagining, creating, and
iterating products that solve users’ problems or address specific needs in a given
market.

The key to successful product design is an understanding of the end-user

customer, the person for whom the product is being created. Product designers attempt
to solve real problems for real people by using both empathy and knowledge of their
prospective customers’ habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a method for the practical resolution of problems. Originally

coined by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, design thinking has become a popular
approach to creating products. This approach encapsulates methods and ideas of
human-centered design into a single unified concept. According to Tim Brown:

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the

designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology
and the requirements for business success.”

Good entrepreneurs or businessmen have always applied design thinking to

product design (whether physical or digital) because it is focused on end-to-end product
development.

When thinking about products or features, designers should understand the

business objectives and be able to answer the following questions first:

1. What problem are we solving?

2. Who has this problem?
3. What do we want to achieve?

Answering these questions helps designers understand the user experience of a

product as a whole, not purely the interaction (feel) or visual (look) part of design. Only
after answering these questions does it make sense to move to finding a solution for the
problem.

Finding a solution to a problem includes the following five phases:

1. Empathize

Learn about the people for whom you are designing. Conduct research to
develop a deeper understanding of your users.

2. Define

Create a point of view that is based on user needs and insights.

 3. Ideate

Brainstorm and come up with as many creative solutions as possible. Generate a

range of potential solutions by giving yourself and your team total freedom.

4. Prototype

Build a prototype (or series of prototypes) to test your hypothesis. Creating a

prototype lets designer see if they’re on the right track, and it often sparks
different ideas that you wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.

5. Test

Return to your users for feedback.

Image from: https://empathizeit.com/design-thinking-models-stanford-d-school/

Figure 1

Design Thinking Process Diagram

The Design Process

Now, with an understanding of what design thinking is, it’s time to define the
design process. The design process is a series of steps that product teams follow
during the formulation of a product from start to finish. Having a solid well-structured
process is essential for two reasons: It helps you to stay focused and helps you to stay
on schedule.

While it’s impossible to provide a universal design process that fits all projects,
it’s still possible to describe a general flow for designing new products. This flow
includes the following steps:

1. Defining the product vision;

2. Product research;
3. User analysis;
4. Ideation;
5. Design;
6. Testing and validation; and
7. Post-launch activities.

The Product Design Process Explained

1. Define Product Vision and Strategy

One of the most important phases of product design is actually done before the
design process even starts. Before you start building a product, you need to understand
its context for existence. It’s the time when the product team must define the product
vision and product strategy.

Every design project needs a product vision that sets the direction and guides the
product development team. Vision captures the essence of the product — the critical
information that the product team must know in order to develop and launch a
successful product. Vision helps build a common understanding of “what we are trying
to build here and why.” Vision also helps you to define what you are not building. Being
clear about the boundaries of your solution will help you to stay focused when crafting
your product.

But vision is only half of the picture. The other half is strategy. Product strategy
defines a product’s journey. Your vision helps you define a destination (the target
condition) — the ultimate user experience toward which you’re aiming. You can plan
your route toward the target destination by focusing on exactly what you need to build.
By setting the goal (the challenge), you can adjust the direction of your product efforts.

Product strategy is a combination of a vision and achievable goals that work

together to direct the team towards the desired outcome — the ultimate user
experience. Spending time and money on vision creation is a worthwhile investment
because this phase sets the stage for the success of a product.
Define Value Proposition

Value proposition maps out the key aspects of the product: what it is, who it’s for,
and when and where it will be used. Value proposition helps the team and stakeholders
build consensus around what the product will be.

Working Backwards

A simple technique called “working backwards” adds clarity and definition to the
vision of a product. As the name suggests, the product team starts with target users and
works its way back until it gets to the minimum set of requirements to satisfy what it is
trying to achieve. While working backwards can be applied to any specific product
decision, this approach is especially important when developing new products or
features.

For a new product, a product team typically starts by writing a future press
release announcing the finished product. Such a press release describes, in a simple
way, what the product does and why it exists. As with any other press release, the goal
is to explain to the public what the product (or new feature) is and why it matters to
them. The press release should enable each team member to envision the future
product.

Define Success Criteria

It is essential to have a clear business goal that you want to achieve with the
product. If you don’t know at the beginning of the project what the business goal is and
how success will be measured, then you’re headed for trouble. Defining explicit success
criteria — such as expected number of sales per month, key performance indicators
(KPIs), etc. — during this phase establishes targets for evaluating progress. This also
helps to establish a more results-driven process.

Schedule a Project Kickoff Meeting

The kickoff meeting brings all the key players together to set proper expectations
for both the team and stakeholders. It covers a high-level outline of the product’s
purpose, who is involved in designing and developing the product, how they will work
together, and what the stakeholders’ expectations are (such as the KPIs and how
success of the product should be measured).

2. Product Research

Once the product vision is defined, product research (which naturally includes user
and market research) provides the other half of the foundation for great design. To
maximize your chances of success, conduct insightful research before making any
product decisions. Remember that the time spent researching is never time wasted.
 Good research informs your product, and the fact that it comes early in the design
process will save you a lot of resources (time and money) down the road (because
fewer adjustments will need to be made). Plus, with solid research, selling your ideas to
stakeholders will be a lot easier.

Conduct User Research

As product creator, your responsibilities lie first and foremost with the people who
will use the products you design. If you don’t know your users, how can you create great
products for them?

Good user research is key to designing a great user experience. Conducting user
research enables you to understand what your users actually need. What it comes to
product research, researchers have a few different techniques to choose from.

Techniques in Product Research

Users Interviews

Gathering information through direct dialog is a well-known user research

technique that can give the researcher rich information about users. This technique can
help the researcher assess user needs and feelings both before a product is designed
and long after it’s released. Interviews are typically conducted by one interviewer
speaking to one user at a time for 30 minutes to an hour. After the interviews are done,
it’s important to synthesize the data to identify insights in the form of patterns.

Some useful tips in conducting interviews:

● Try to conduct interviews in person

If you have a choice, in-person interviews are better than remote ones (via phone
or web-based video). In-person interviews are preferable because they provide much
more behavioral data than remote ones. You’ll gain additional insights by observing
body language and listening for verbal cues (tone, inflection, etc.).

● Plan your questions

All questions you ask during the interview should be selected according to the
learning goal. A wrong set of questions cannot only nullify the benefits of the
interview session, but also lead product development down the wrong path.

● Find an experienced interviewer.

A skilled interviewer makes users feel comfortable by asking questions in a

neutral manner and knowing when and how to ask for more details.
Online Surveys

Surveys and questionnaires enable the researcher to get a larger volume of

responses, which can open up the opportunity for more detailed analysis. While online
surveys are commonly used for quantitative research, they also can be used for
qualitative research. It’s possible to gather qualitative data by asking open-ended
questions (for example, “What motivates you to make a purchase?” or “How do you feel
when you need to return the item you purchased from us?”). The answers to such
questions will be very individualized and in general cannot be used for quantitative
analysis.

Online surveys can be relatively inexpensive to run. The downside of this method
is that there’s no direct interaction with respondents, and, thus, it’s impossible to dive
more deeply into answers provided by them.

Figure 2

A Sample Survey Created using Google Forms

Some useful tips in conducting surveys:

● Keep it short.

Don’t forget that every extra question reduces your response rate. If the survey is
too long, you may find that you don’t get as many responses as you’d like. Better to
send a few short surveys than to put everything you want to know into one long survey.

● Open-ended versus close-ended questions.

Asking open-ended questions is the best approach, but it’s easy to get stuck in
data analysis because every user answer requires researcher time for analysis. Plus,
users quickly tire of answering open-ended questions, which usually require a lot of
reading and typing.
Contextual Inquiry

Contextual inquiry is a variety of field study in which the researcher observes

people in their natural environment and studies them as they go about their everyday
tasks. This method helps researchers obtain information about the context of use: Users
are first asked a set of standard questions, such as “What is the most frequent task you
typically do?,” and then they are observed and questioned while they work in their own
environment. The goal of contextual inquiry is to gather enough observations that you
can truly begin to empathize with your users and their perspectives.

Image from:
https://www.google.com/search?q=contextual+inquiry&rlz=1C1GGGE_enPH435PH444&sxsrf=ALeKk019Ni-H6gZccyNRUwMw8MS32RwdUw:159530
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WpcQnM

Figure 3

Real Users Facing Contextual Inquiry

Some useful tips in conducting contextual inquiry:

● Don’t just listen to users; observe their behavior.

What people say can be different from what people do. As much as possible,
observe what users do to accomplish their tasks.

● Minimize interference.

When studying the natural use of a product, the goal is to minimize interference
from the study in order to understand behavior as close to reality as possible.
Conduct Market Research
 You cannot ignore competitors if you want to build a great product. To be
competitive, you need to know what products are available on the market and how they
perform. That’s why conducting market research is a crucial component of the product
design process. Your ultimate goal should be to design a solution that has a competitive
advantage.

Competitive Research

Competitive research is a comprehensive analysis of competitor products and

presentation of the results of the analysis in a comparable way. Research helps product
teams understand industry standards and identify opportunities for the product in a
given market segment. A competitor is a company that shares your goals and that fights
for the same thing that your product team wants.

There are two types of competitors:

● Direct competitors.

Direct competitors are ones whose products compete head to head with your
value proposition (offering the same, or very similar, value proposition to your current or
future users).

● Indirect competitors.

Indirect competitors are those whose products target your customer base without
offering the exact same value proposition. For instance, an indirect competitor’s primary
product or service might not capture your value proposition, but their secondary product
definitely does.

The product team should consider both types of competitors because they’ll
affect the overall success of the product. As a rule of thumb, shoot for identifying the top
three direct competitors and obtaining the same number of indirect competitors.
Image from:
https://www.google.com/search?q=competitor+checklist&rlz=1C1GGGE_enPH435PH444&sxsrf=ALeKk00ZRc6tkc4ffSVBnr8_Adw3ueqspw:15953028
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Figure 4

Sample Competitor Checklist

The most efficient way to do comprehensive competitive research is to collect all

relevant data about your competitors in the form of a matrix. The matrix will help you
keep track of everything that needs to be compared.

Some useful tips in creating your competitor checklist:

● Start listing competitors before doing competitive research

Most likely you will begin to learn about competitor’s way before you conduct
competitive research. For example, during user interviews, users might share names of
products that they think are similar to the one you’re proposing. During stakeholder
interviews, the product owners will certainly give you a few names of products they see
as competitors. It’s worth creating a spreadsheet that will be used to collect the names
of competitors right at the beginning of the project, and try to fill it as you do product
research. Add new names to the list so that you don’t forget them.

3. User Analysis

After research, the product team must make sense of the data it’s collected. The
aim of the analysis phase is to draw insights from the data collected during the product
research phase. Capturing, organizing and making inferences about what users want,
think or need, can help you begin to understand why they want, think or need that.

Modeling the Users and their Environments

Personas

Based on the product research results, you can identify key user groups and
create representative personas. Personas are fictional characters created to represent
the different user types that might use a product in a similar way. The purpose of
personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of the key audience
segments for reference. Once created, personas help product teams to understand the
users’ goals in specific contexts, which is particularly useful during ideation.

Image from: xtensio.com

Figure 5

A Sample Persona

Some useful tips in defining user persona:

● Base the persona on real data.

It can be tempting to invent some details about personas to make them

attractive. Avoid that temptation. Every bit of the information in the persona should be
based on the research. If you don’t have some information, do research to fill in the gap.

● Avoid using real names or details of research participants or people you

know.

This can bias the objectivity of your personas. (You’ll end up focusing on
designing for this person, rather than a group of people with similar characteristics.)

Empathy Map

An empathy map is a visualization tool used to articulate what you know about
the user. This tool helps you to build a broader understanding of the “why” behind user
needs and wants. It forces you to shift their focus from the product they want to build to
the people who will use the product. As a team identifies what they know about the user
and then places this information on a chart, they gain a more holistic view of the user’s
world and the problem or opportunity space.

Image from:
https://www.google.com/search?q=empathy+map&rlz=1C1GGGE_enPH435PH444&sxsrf=ALeKk00VpSxTwQvr_iQys3RqRR9801Ek0Q:15953033739
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Figure 6

An Empathy Map

An empathy map describes what the user says, thinks, does and feels.

A useful tip in developing your empathy map:

● Turn your empathy map into a poster.

It’s possible to create a nice reminder of what is user thinking or feeling by

turning the empathy map into a poster. Create a few copies of the map and hang them
around the office. This helps to ensure the user remains on people’s minds as they
work.
 Image from: Paul Boag

Figure 7

An Empathy Map Poster

Turn the empathy map into a poster and hang it in a high-traffic area of your
workspace.

4. Ideation

The ideation phase is a time when team members brainstorm on a range of

creative ideas that address the project goals. During this phase, it’s critical not only to
generate ideas but also to confirm that the most important design assumptions are
valid.

Product teams have a lot of techniques for ideation — from sketching, which is
very helpful for visualizing what some aspects of the design will look like, to
storyboarding, which is used to visualize the overall interactions with a product.

Generate Ideas (How Users Will Interact with a Product)

User Journey Mapping

A user journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through
in order to accomplish a goal. Typically, it’s presented as a series of steps in which a
person interacts with a product.

A user journey can take a wide variety of forms depending on the context and
business goals. In its most basic form, a user journey is presented as a series of user
steps and actions in a timeline skeleton. Such a layout makes it easier for all team
members to understand and follow the user’s narrative.

A simple user journey reflects only one possible path during one scenario:

Image from: exstudioteam.com

Figure 8

A Sample User Journey Map

A simple user journey has one user, one goal, one scenario and one path, even
when the product or service allows for multiple paths.

A complex user journey can encompass experiences occurring at different time

sessions and scenarios:

Image from: Nform.com

Figure 9

A Sample Complex User Journey

Complex user journeys reflect different users’ paths in the same flow.
 Some useful tips in creating your user journey maps:

● Don’t make user journeys too complex.

While designing a user journey it is easy to get caught up in the multiple routes a
user might take. Unfortunately, this often leads to busy user journeys. Focus on creating
a simple, linear journey (the ideal way to get users to the given goal).

Scenarios and Storyboards

After you’ve identified personas, you can write scenarios of interactions. A

scenario is a narrative describing a day in the life of a persona, including how a product
fits into their life. A storyboard presents the user’s story in a visual way — similar to a
movie or comic. It can help product designers understand how people interact with a
product in real life, giving designers a clear sense of what’s really important to users.

Image from: Chelsea Hostetter, Austin Center for Design

Figure 10

A Sample Storyboard

A storyboard is a linear sequence of illustrations, arrayed together to visualize a

story.

Some useful tips in developing your storyboard:

 ● Build a strong narrative.

The narrative in the story should focus on a goal the character is trying to
achieve. All too often, designers jump right into explaining the details of their design
before explaining the backstory. Avoid this. Your story should be structured and should
have an obvious beginning, middle and end.

Image from: Ben Crothels

Figure 11

Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid

Gustav Freytag’s pyramid is a way of creating strong narratives. The pyramid

consists of five parts or acts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and
denouement. 

● Design a clear outcome.

Make sure your storyboard leaves the audience with no doubt about the outcome
of the story. If you’re describing an unfavorable situation, end with the full weight of the
problem; if you’re presenting a solution, end with the benefits of that solution for your
character.

User Stories

A user story is a simple description of something that the user wants to

accomplish by using a product. Here is a template for user stories:
 Image from: userstoriesuxv.com

Figure 12

User Story Template

Some tips in developing user story template:

● Use user stories to prevent feature creep.

Feature creep is the tendency to add more features than a product requires.
When designing a product, try to refuse adding any feature without a user story that
explains why that particular feature matters.

Plan the Structure of a Product

Validate Ideas

There are two types of ideas: good ideas that lead \to product success, and bad
ideas that can lead to failure. Of course, design execution is important, but the idea
itself plays a crucial role in the process. A well-executed bad idea is a big waste of time
and energy. It’s critical to reveal bad ideas as early as possible. So, how do you
distinguish a good idea from a bad one? A technique called a design sprint can help you
with that.

Design Sprint

A design sprint is a five-day design framework for validating ideas and solving
challenges. It enables product teams to build a prototype that they can put in front of
users to validate the initial design hypothesis (to see if it solves the problem for the
user).

Design sprints are a process of quickly creating a product’s future state, be it a

website or app, and validating it with a group of users, stakeholders, developers and
other designers. This whole concept is based on the idea that, by a design team setting
a direction and iterating rapidly, it’s possible to design a product that presents the
maximum value for people who will use it.
 Image from: Google Ventures

Figure 19

Design Sprint

Some useful tips in design sprint:

● Don’t get stuck with the first solution that comes to mind.

In most cases, your first ideas won’t be good enough, because at the early stage
of ideation, you won’t yet have a good understanding of the problem you’re trying to
solve. Generate as many different designs as possible instead of focusing solely on
your first solution.

5. Design

After the ideation phase, the product team should have a clear understanding of
what they want to build. During the design phase, the product team will begin to create
the solution to solve the client’s problem and implement concepts.

Prototyping

To deliver a good user experience, prototyping must be a part of your design

process. A prototype is an experimental model of an idea that enables you to test it
before building the full solution. A prototype often starts small, with you designing a few
core parts of a product (such as key user flows) and grows in breadth and depth over
multiple iterations as required areas are built out. The finalized version of a prototype is
handed off for development.

When it comes to prototyping, efficiency is vital. One of the most efficient

prototyping processes is rapid prototyping. The process of rapid prototyping can be
presented as a cycle with three stages:

1. Prototyping

Creating a solution that can be reviewed and tested.

2. Reviewing

Giving your prototype to users and stakeholders and gathering feedback that
helps you understand what’s working well and what isn’t.

3. Refining

Based on feedback, identify areas that need to be refined or clarified. The list of
refinements will form the scope of work for your next design iteration.

Image from: designgenius.com

Figure 20

The Rapid Prototyping Process

Prototypes may range from rough sketches on a piece of paper to interactive

simulations that look and function like a real product. Depending on the stage of the
design process and the goals of the prototype, you’ll need to select the appropriate
prototyping technique. It’s crucial to choose the method of prototyping that minimizes
work and maximizes learning.

6. Testing and Validation

The testing and validation phase helps a product team ensure the design
concept works as intended. Product testing is an art in itself. Do it wrong and you’ll learn
nothing. Do it right and you might get incredible, unexpected insights that might even
change your product strategy. Similar to the product research phase, this phase also
varies between projects.

Testing with the Product Team

It’s possible to conduct limited testing for the product using resources you
already have-your team or group mates.

Dogfooding

“Eating your own dog food” is a popular technique of testing. Once the design
team has iterated on the product to the point where it’s usable, testing it in-house is a
great way to find the most critical issues.

Some useful tips in dogfooding:

● Practice dogfooding to develop empathy among your team.

Testing with Real Users

Usability Testing

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, if you want to select just one type of
user research for your project, it should be qualitative usability testing. The basic idea
behind a usability test is to check whether the design of a product works well with the
target users. It’s relatively easy to test a concept with representative users: Once an
interactive version of a product idea is in the hands of real users, a product team will be
able to see how the target audience uses the product. The primary goal of this user
experience testing method is to identify usability problems, collect qualitative data, and
determine the participants’ overall satisfaction with the product. Gathering and analyzing
verbal and non-verbal feedback from the user helps a product team create a better user
experience.

Usability testing is often done formally (where a researcher creates a screener,

hires participants, has them come into the lab environment, records the session, etc.).
 Image from: Googledoodle

Figure 23

Usability Testing

In formal usability testing, you recruit some test participants and give them a set
of scenarios that lead to usage of specific aspects of a product (or prototype).

Usability testing can also be done informally — in the format of guerrilla testing.
With guerrilla testing, a product tester goes to the nearest coffee shop, finds
participants, asks them to use the product for 10 minutes, and then gives them a small
treat as a thank you.

Image from: johnferrigan

Figure 24

Informal Guerilla Usability Testing

Some useful tips in testing participants:

 ● You don’t need a lot of test participants.

According to Jakob Nielsen’s research, up to 85% of core usability problems can

be found by observing just five people using the product.

Diary Study

A diary study can be used to see how users interact with a product over an
extended period of time (ranging from a few days to even a month or longer). During
this period, study participants are asked to keep a diary and to log specific information
about their activities. Usually, the diary includes open-ended questions such as:

● Where were you when using the product?

● What tasks did you hope to achieve?
● Did something frustrate you?
A diary study helps a researcher find answers to questions like:
● What are users’ primary tasks?
● What are their workflows for completing complex tasks?

The answers provide organic behavioral insights and help develop a rich
understanding of a participant’s context and environment.

Image from: insuweb

Figure 25

Diary Logging

Participants are asked to report all important information about relevant activities
as they complete them.
 Some useful tips in diary logging:

● Create clear and detailed instructions for logging.

Be as specific as possible about what information you need participants to log.

● Remind study participants about logging.

Prompt participants to fill in their diary (for example, through a daily notification).

● Make it possible to add screenshots to a diary.

If you use a digital version of a diary, make it possible for participants to upload
screenshots. Screenshots are a nice supplement for user data and will help you with
future data analysis.

7. Post-Launch Activities

Just because a product officially launches doesn’t mean the product design is
over. In fact, product design is an ongoing process that continues for as long as a
product’s in use. The team will learn and improve the product.

Understand How Users Interact with the Product

Metric Analysis

You need to know how users are using your product out in the wild - and that’s
where analytics come in. Numbers provided by an analytics tool can be used to
understand how people are actually using your product. Metrics can also uncover
unexpected behaviors that are not explicit in user tests. Product team must continually
track product performance to see if it meets customer satisfaction and if any
improvements can be made.
 Image from: Ramotion

Figure 26

Data Driven Design

Good design has to be informed by the data, and if you learn to use it right, you
will get enormous improvements in your work.

Some useful tips in using analytics:

● Use analytical tools.

Powerful tools such as Google Analytics  can be used to understand user

behaviors.

● Don’t rely solely on analytics

You can’t determine the effectiveness of a product’s design based solely on

analytics. To validate the analytical insights, you should conduct further hallway tests.

Feedback from Users

The best way to avoid having to rework a product is to inject feedback into the
process. Regular user feedback (in the form of online surveys) should be at the heart of
the product design process. This information will drive product refinement.
 Some useful tips for using feedback:

● Don’t make it hard for users to provide feedback.

Don’t hide the “Leave feedback” option. Make it easy and, if possible, rewarding
for users to share their feelings and ideas about your product.

Four Essential Things to Remember About Product Design

1. The Process Should Morph to Fit the Project

When it comes to product design process, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

The process employed should be tailored to fit the project’s particular needs, both
business and functional. Here are just a few factors that can affect the design process:

● customer’s needs or preferences;

● how much time you have (the project’s deadline);
● project’s budget (for example, a limited budget won’t allow you to conduct a lot of
interviews).

A process tailored to the capabilities of the business and of users is most

effective. Thus, use what works the best for your project, get rid of the rest, and evolve
your design process as the product evolves.

2. Product Design is Not a Linear Process

A lot of product teams think design is a linear process that starts with defining the
product and ends with testing. But that assumption is wrong. The phases of the process
often have considerable overlap, and usually there’s a lot of back and forth. As product
teams learn more about the problem being solved as well as the users and the details of
the project (especially the constraints), it may be necessary to revisit some of the
research undertaken or try out new design ideas.

3. Product Design is a Never-Ending Process

The design process for products isn’t a one-time thing and product designers
should never assume they’ll get everything perfect right from the start. Implementation
often reveals gaps in the design (for example, bad assumptions about product usage,
which are hard to predict without shipping the product).

To design successful products, you need to adopt a process of continuous

improvement. Iterative design follows the idea that design should be done in repeated
cycles: It’s a process of constantly refining and improving the product based on both
qualitative and quantitative feedback data from your users. This is a great opportunity
for designers to see the bigger picture, improve their work based on user feedback and
make the product inherently more valuable to users.

Image from: processandpeople

Figure 27

Product Design as a Never-ending Process

A product is never done, but only evolves. Product design is a process of

constant iteration and refinement. Through the cyclical process of data analysis, getting
feedback from real users, and testing, the product team will constantly refine its
solutions.

4. Product Design is Based on Communication

While doing great design is one thing, communicating great design is equally as
important. The best concepts will fail if they don’t get approval from the your
stakeholders. That’s why the best product designers are great communicators.

Conclusion

The most important thing to remember when designing products is that design is

for people. To design great products, you must deliver the right features, with the right
user experience for the right people. Thus, define your target audience, then research
their problems, and, finally, focus on building a product that solves those problems!
Self-Assessment Questions # 1

1. Illustrate and discuss the Design Thinking Process (10 points for the illustration; 10
points for the discussion)

Self-Assessment Questions # 2

1. Differentiate vision setting and strategy formulation (10 points)

2. Discuss user interviews, online surveys, contextual inquiry, market research and
competitive research (2 points each; total of 20 points)
3. Differentiate personas from empathy map (10 points)

===============================================================

Student Activity # 1

1. Create your own “user journey” using timeline skeleton. In this situation, you wish to
buy a new laptop for your online classes. Illustrate and explain the various “stations”
that you have to pass through before you can purchase your laptop. (20 points for
illustration; 10 points for explanation)

Student Activity # 2

1. Create your own storyboard describing your “daily life” while using your mobile
phone. (20 points)

Student Activity # 3

1. Create your own “diary log” in using any product (just one product) of your choice for
three days. Be as detailed as possible in describing your experiencing using that
product. Highlight your positive and negative impressions about it and suggest ways to
improve it. (30 points)
 RUBRIC FOR SCORING ESSAY

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supporting is little to no was presented
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REFERENCES:

Babich, N. (2018, Jan. 31). A comprehensive guide to product design.

www.smashingmagazine.com. Retrieved from
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/01/comprehensive-guide-product-desi
gn/

Fleck, R. (2019, Jan. 30). What is product design? www. dribble.com. Retrieved from
https://dribbble.com/stories/2019/01/30/what-is-product-design#:~:text=Product%
20Design%20is%20commonly%20defined,solutions%E2%80%94and%20everyt
hing%20in%20between.

n.a. (2020). What is product design? www.strate.education.com. Retrieved from

https://www.strate.education/gallery/news/product-design-definition

n.a. (2020). Product design. www.productplan.com. Retrieved from

https://www.productplan.com/glossary/product-design/

Esposito, M. (2018, Sept. 20). How to explain product design to anyone.

www.invisionapp.com. Retrieved from
https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/product-design/