The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Great Digital Product Design
From Instagram to renting a space on Airbnb to catching up with a cab, you only need to tap some buttons, and here you go! Right?
But have you ever thought about what the story behind it is? How can they work so effortlessly? The credit goes to intelligently designed software products.
A well-crafted digital product design and development can seamlessly provide an immersive experience to the users and help businesses give their competitors a real edge.
For instance, if you scroll through any website or app and find the site is not easy to navigate? What do you usually do? You abandon that site and switch to the other one. Right? Poorly designed software products won’t stay for long as they are unable to live up to the user’s expectations. The outcome? You will lose your potential customers!
But you don’t want this to happen. For this reason, you can’t afford to miss this comprehensive guide on digital product design and development.
What is a Digital Product Design?
Before the digital transformation, the word “product” only defined physical products such as furniture, vehicles, soccer balls, and more. But, with the deep penetration of technology, the way the products have been seen changes. Designers and developers have started seeing digital products as equally important to tangible products or even more.
A digital product design process defines as how the design team synchronizes user needs with business objectives to create valuable and sustainable products. The primary goal is to enhance the user experience by giving the customers the desired solutions.
A product design consists of three primary steps-
• Find a market opportunity
• Articulate the customer’s problem
• Craft and validate the solution.
Key Benefits of Digital Product Design
A great digital product design enhances business performance. If businesses don’t prioritize their product design, they are going to miss out on several opportunities. Here are some commercial benefits; let’s explore them-
1. Boost product or service sales
2. Better brand positioning
3. Greater customer loyalty
4. Broaden reach into newer markets
5. Powerful brand identity
3 Intuitive elements of product design
• System design
• Process design
• Interface design
System Design
It takes a broad view of the product problem that must be solved. Then and only then would you consider how to create a new product that addresses a legitimate issue and demonstrates product-market fit. It balances the business objectives with the needs of the customer.
Process Design
The primary objective of process design is to identify the end user’s steps to complete a task or reach the user’s objective. This is a step where the attempt is to balance the customer and user needs in the best possible way.
Interface Design
Once you’ve managed to figure out the system and its workings, it’s time to design a user-friendly, captivating, and attractive interface that will entice users not to abandon your website.
Also Read: Top 10 Web Design Trends in 2022
5 Pivotal Steps of the Design Thinking Process
1. Empathize
It is the first stage of product design solutions in which the designers identify the issue’s root and make fixing it their top priority. At this crucial stage, the designers incorporate a human element into the human interaction component of the process, empathizing with customers’ concerns by putting themselves in their shoes. It is also a step that aids designers in getting rid of their prejudices, so they don’t appear in the final digital product design.
2. Define
This stage follows the initial stage, where the designers develop a problem statement leveraging the information and viewpoint they have already gathered. The design team considers the human standpoint and looks into possible product design in marketing solutions at this point.
3. Ideating
As part of the design guidelines, the team brainstorms good digital product ideas as the designer changes from knowledge gathering to the physical state. A wide range of ideas and features are considered before deciding what is best for the customer.
4. Prototype
It is a phase where the designer and the team begin to develop multiple product versions. They test low-fidelity designs that haven’t yet been implemented into a physical form. The design team examines the initial difficulties and limitations encountered in designing a new product more closely than the initial difficulties and limitations encountered in the design and concentrates on resolving them all.
5. Testing
Testing is the final and most crucial step in the design process. The solutions developed in response to customer pain points must be checked and find out if there is any way to improve the design. To eliminate flaws and errors in the design process, designers must review the design from the primary stage. They release the product once they are convinced of the complete testing process.
7 Crucial Steps of the Digital Product Design Process
#Step 1: Define Product Vision & Strategy
Product vision and strategy must be defined before the design process begins. A product’s context of existence must be comprehended before development initiates. The team must decide on a strategy once the purpose of your product has been determined. That is the path leading to finding how to design a product.
Here are the three questions that help to define the vision and make a robust strategy.
• What problem do you have to resolve?
• Who is facing this problem? Or your target audience?
• What are you trying to accomplish?
#Step 2: It’s Time For Product Research
It’s time to get a comprehensive understanding of your product. In-depth research not only enables you to design a product that is better suited to user needs, but it also enables you to win over investors and stakeholders.
S.No.ResearchDescription1User researchUnderstanding your user’s needs via interviews, online surveys, etc.2Market research You need to uptick with the market trends. The best way is to keep your eye on your competitors.
Direct competitors: Those who have the same proposition and value as you have.
Indirect competitors: Have some offerings similar to your business.
#Step 3: User Analysis
It’s now time to analyze the data you have obtained. The objective is to interpret all those statistics and data into an analysis that accurately reflects different demographic groups within your intended audience base.
#Step 4: Ideation Phase
The fun begins during the ideation stage. The product’s designers come together to brainstorm the users’ needs and map out the user’s journey. Many software product design methods are available for crafting ideas, from storyboarding interactions to drawing wireframes. It involves many different techniques for creating ideas-
• User journey map
• Sketch storyboards
• User stories
• Job stories
• Structure ideas
• Wireframes
#Step 5: Design a Product
Once the product team has completed the ideation phase, the product team will head toward the digital product design and development phase. The product team will start developing the solution to the client’s problem and putting concepts into practice.
#Step 6: Testing and Validation
A product team ensures the design concept functions as intended during the testing and validation phase.
S.NOTesting TypesDescription1In-house testingYour team will test the product to find the critical issues.2Usability testing It is a stage to check your product with your intended users.3Diary studyIt is a technique in which study participants keep a diary and note down the specific information to get valuable data insights.
#Step 7: Post-launch Activities
The digital product design is not over just because a product is officially released. Product design is an ongoing process as long as a product is in use. The team will gain insights and enhance the final product continually.
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Popular Product Designer Software Tools
Product designers use a variety of tools, regardless of the methodology they employ. But remember that proving your competency with your chosen tools is far more crucial than the tool itself, so avoid getting bogged down by comparisons. Test them, determine which tool works the best, and create products. Here are some best product design apps are:
1.UI design tools
- Adobe XD
- Figma
- Sketch
2.Motion design & animation tools
- Framer
- Axure
- Principle
3.Mockups & wireframes
- Balsamiq
- Wireframe.cc
4.Research & analytics tools
- Google Analytics
- Quantum Metric
- Mixpanel
5.Other tools
- Xmind- For mind mapping
- DropBox- file sharing
- Jira-Product management
- Xoom- Communication
- Optimizely- A/B testing
Best Product Design Examples
New and intriguing inventions created by product designers are intended to make our lives simpler and more useful in the near future. Here are some of the best influential digital product designs.
1. Uber
2. Airbnb
3. Bellroy
4. Wistia
5. Square
What’s the Next Step?
It’s always better to create products to keep your intended audience in mind. When designing a new product, you must deliver the right features with the right user experience.
In other words, it starts with comprehending the issue you’re attempting to resolve and entails discovering your potential customers’ motivating factors, needs, and user experience.
Zenesys is a leading digital product design agency helping businesses to build successful software products.
Looking to build your successful product design? Contact us Today!
