The Product Design Process Explained (How Do You Develop A Product?)

Imagine this: You have a brilliant idea for a product. The only problem? You need to figure out how to get it off the ground. Product design is a complex process, so it’s normal to feel overwhelmed before you get started. By utilizing tools for product design, you can create visually appealing prototypes that streamline the process and make your concept more tangible. But by breaking it down into manageable steps, you can confidently navigate the complexities of product design. In this blog, we’ll walk you through the product design process to help you understand how to take your idea from concept to completion.
‍
Along the way, we’ll introduce you to NUMI’s Framer web design which can help you create a website for your product as you work on your design. This tool is perfect for interactive prototypes that help you visualize your product and communicate your vision to stakeholders and customers. 

What is Product Design?

Product design is the process of creating new or altering existing products that offer solutions to a problem in a specific market. Successful product design bridges a business’s goals and user needs. While product design can include physical products, in this article, we will focus on digital product design (although, for simplicity, we refer to it as product design). 

Product design is a multi-layered craft:

• Encompassing design
• User experience
• Collaboration
• And more

Many of a product designer’s day-to-day tasks will fit into one or more categories. Product design’s foundations start with design thinking, a user-centric way to integrate real users' needs into technological and business requirements. To understand product design, you must understand design thinking well.

Product Design vs. UX Design

UX design fits into product design but centers around the product’s usability, look, and user experience (UX). Product design also involves improving usability and the user experience, but in context by focusing on big-picture implications like process, cost, and the brand’s overall position in the market.

Related Reading

• Product Design and Development
  
• Product & Service Design
• What is User-Centered Design
• MVP Development for Startups
• MVP Product Design
• Startup Product Development
• Product Design Strategy
  
• Continuous Product Design
  
• Conceptual Design

The Product Design Process Explained

Stage One: Empathize – Getting to Know Your Users

The product design process starts with researching who you’re designing for. This first phase is called empathize, and it’s all about getting to know your users to meet their needs. It’s crucial for guiding the product design process and ensuring you’re creating the right solution for the people using your product.

Empathizing normally includes some or all of the following inter-linked activities: 

• Desk Research and Preparation: This is where existing data, such as market studies and competitor analyses, are reviewed. It provides a broader context for the product and uncovers potential opportunities. 
• User Research: UX research methods like surveys, questionnaires, usability testing, ethnographic studies, and interviews can help you gain a deep understanding of the target audience by collecting data on user preferences and behaviors. 
• User Interviews: Whether in-person or remote, interviews will be key to your user research. You should practice active listening to open-ended questions and create a comfortable environment for users to share their experiences. 
• Analysis and Reporting: To extract insights, you analyze your data through categorization, coding, and synthesis. You’ll need to be ready to report your findings clearly and actionably, with visual aids like charts and graphs if appropriate. 
• Creating Personas: These fictional characters represent different user segments based on real data. They’ll help you empathize with users and make design decisions aligned with their needs. 

Stage Two: Define – Clearly Outline the Problem You’re Trying to Solve

You’ll use the insights from the first stage to define the problem clearly. This is a pivotal phase where the groundwork for the entire project is laid. The findings from the first stage give crucial shape and direction to a product idea.

With strategic thinking, visual representation, a deep understanding of the customer journey, a compelling value proposition, and a clear product definition, stage two is a critical bridge between ideation and execution.

Defining normally includes some or all of the following inter-linked activities: 

• Product Definition and Strategy: This is about asking fundamental questions like:some text
  • What the product will be
  • Ots goals
  • Features and functionalities
  • how it aligns with broader business objectives

This definition serves as a guiding light for the development process. 

• Visual Thinking: Visual representations like diagrams, charts, and mind maps help you understand, conceptualize, refine, and communicate the product’s definition. 
• Customer Journey: This involves creating detailed maps that outline the entire user experience, from initial contact to final interaction. It helps identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. 
• Value Proposition: Defining the product also involves clarifying its unique value proposition. What sets it apart from competitors? What problems does it solve for your users? The answers to these questions help you create a compelling product proposition. 

Stage Three: Develop Potential Solutions – Explore Various Ways to Solve User Problems 

Now that you know more about your users and what they need, you can devise various ways to solve their problems.

Here are a few ideation techniques: 

• Mindmapping: Mindmaps visually connect ideas around a central theme. Start with your main idea in the middle, then create branches with related ideas. A mindmap can help large teams visualize and add to an idea. They keep everyone on the same page and allow for organized collaboration. 
• Brainstorming: Brainstorming is a timed group activity in which people generate as many ideas as possible. Teams should refrain from criticism and instead encourage free thinking during brainstorming sessions. 
• Storyboarding: Storyboarding involves creating a visual sequence, like a comic strip, of how you expect users to interact with your product. It can help teams envision potential pain points and issues and get a feel for the product experience. 
• Reverse Brainstorming: Reverse brainstorming is the opposite of brainstorming. Instead of finding ways to fix a problem, your team will brainstorm ways to make the problem worse. For example, a team trying to improve user signups might brainstorm ways to decrease user signups. This unconventional way of thinking often increases creativity and helps teams better grasp the issues users face.
  

SCAMPER is a checklist ideation technique that stands for:

• Substitute: identify what you can replace in your product, service, or solution. For example, replace a limited-time trial with a free forever plan. 
• Combine: Combine parts of your product, service, or solution to create something new. For example, say your product has AI capabilities. To meet user needs, look for ways to combine this AI with other product features. 
• Adapt: adjust parts of your product, service, or solution to meet a new need. For example, find complementary tools to integrate your software to make it easier. 
• Modify: enhance or minify elements of your product, service, or solution to work towards improvements. For example, tweak the user interface of your software to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. 
• Put to another use: find new ways to use your product, service, or solution. For example, say you offer cloud storage for users. Another use for cloud storage could be disaster recovery and backup services. 
• Eliminate: remove redundant features to simplify your product, service, or solution. For example, remove rarely-used features from your mobile app to improve the performance of your app’s core features. 
• Reverse: rearrange your product, service, or solution to find new outcomes. For example, explore what might happen if you replace free product trials with product demos. 

Stage Four: Prototype – Build Prototypes for Testing 

A prototype (or multiple prototypes) will be built for testing using the solutions from the ideation phase. Prototypes give you tangible evidence that you’re on track (or not) and can reveal new insights.

This is when abstract ideas and concepts are transformed into tangible, interactive representations of the final product. It’s when the design truly comes to life. Prototypes (scaled-down versions of the final product based on solutions identified in the ideate stage) are a critical bridge between design and development. They allow for user testing and refinement before building the final product.

Prototyping generally includes some or all of the following inter-linked activities: 

• UI Design: This is when you take the concepts and visual designs from the earlier stages and translate them into a fully-fledged user interface. This includes refining the layout and visual elements, ensuring consistency in design elements, and crafting a visually appealing and functional UI. 
• UX Writing: UX writers play a crucial role in the prototype stage by creating and refining the UI copy and microcopy. They create clear, concise, and user-friendly copy to guide through the product with intuitive messaging. 
• Responsive Web, Mobile, and Natural User Interface Design: Prototypes must be responsive, so make sure your product’s UX is consistent and optimized for responsive web design, mobile applications, and natural user interfaces like voice or gesture interactions. 
• Working with the Development Team: The prototype stage involves extensive collaboration between design and development. You’ll work closely with developers to ensure that the design vision is effectively translated into code. Expect discussions on technical feasibility, optimization, and potential challenges. 
• Rules, Practices, and Limitations of Implementation: This is related to the above. Designers and developers must follow specific implementation rules and stay on the right side of technological limitations. This includes platform-specific guidelines, coding standards, and the constraints of your chosen technologies. 

Prototypes may have different forms. It can be a drawing on a piece of paper or a complicated multi-page structure created in:

• Adobe XD
• Sketch
• Figma

All prototypes do the same job: they synchronize the client's and the implementor's ideas about how the design should look.

Here is a list of problems and tasks that the prototype helps to solve: 

• Visualization of the idea and understanding of how the product will look in the early stages
• The ability to make changes and refine the vision at a minimum cost
• The ability to more accurately estimate the timing and budget of the whole development process
• Understanding the direction for the future development of the product. 

When creating a prototype, it's very important to validate and refine it. 

Stage Five: Test – Evaluate Your Designs with Real Users 

Here’s when you refer back to the users to ensure your designs work the way they had planned. This leads back to the design and product refinement ideation phase until it is right.

As you’d expect, testing means evaluating your product designs. This is crucial for validating design decisions and ensuring the final product meets user needs and expectations. Evaluation can happen through usability testing, analytics, and quantitative metrics.

Testing generally includes some or all of the following inter-linked activities: 

• Usability Testing: Methods you employ might include moderated user testing, unmoderated remote testing, and guerrilla testing. All will help you evaluate how real users interact with the product. 
• Web and Mobile Analytics: Use analytics tools to collect data on user behavior within the product. This data can give you quantitative insights into user interactions, navigation patterns, and usage metrics, all of which can help you identify areas for improvement. 
• Quantitative UX Metrics: Quantitative UX metrics, such as conversion rates, bounce rates, and task completion times, are used to assess the product’s performance objectively. These metrics provide concrete data to evaluate the success of design iterations. 
• Data Analysis and Reporting: This includes identifying and synthesizing patterns, trends, and pain points from the data. Your analysis will inform design decisions and improvements, and you’ll have to report your findings to stakeholders.
  

As stated, the conclusion of the testing stage often leads back to the ideation stage or even earlier. It’s also sometimes the case that the steps aren't followed linearly depending on the organizational and team setup and working methods.

Why is The Product Design Process Crucial

Product design is crucial for both end-user satisfaction and business success. It helps businesses and brands to deliver a positive user experience and gain loyal customers. A key aspect of product design is understanding end-user needs and creating a product that meets those needs. This is essential for ensuring happy, satisfied customers who remain loyal.

Competitive Edge

Product design involves extensive market research, which helps to identify gaps in the market and determine how to position the product successfully within that particular market. This is critical for building brand awareness and outperforming competitors.

Improve Efficiency

Another important aspect of product design is developing design systems, processes, and documentation that help to streamline and optimize collaboration. As such, product design plays a crucial role in driving efficiency.

Track Product Performance

A good product design process includes setting a clear strategy for business goals. It allows businesses to continuously define and measure success metrics and monitor the product’s performance.

Related Reading

• Integration Design
• Collaboration Design
• Value of Design
• AI Product Design
  
• Product Engagement
  
• Product Redesign
• Design Brief Example
• Industrial Design vs Product Design
• Innovative Product Design
• Agile Product Design
• How to Design a Product
  
• Product Design Prototype
• Product Usage Metrics

3 Core Product Design Challenges And Solutions

1. Research Challenges

Research challenges often arise at the beginning of the product design process, where teams must understand their users and what they need from a product before design can begin. Given all the user data, channels, and tools, conducting thorough research about your users and translating that into actionable insights can be daunting for product designers and teams. Before you start, you need to have a research process to help you achieve product-market fit and user success. 

4 Steps to Overcome Research Challenges and Improve Your Research Process

• Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) based on their pain points, characteristics, purchasing behaviors, and demographics. Use it to determine their most-used channels and product preferences. 
• Use social listening tools like Hootsuite or Brandwatch to observe mentions of your brand or product on channels relevant to your target audience so you know what they’re talking about and what they need. For example, if you see people on social media responding positively to a competitor’s product feature, you can consider incorporating a similar feature. 
• Predict market demand with tools like Think With Google and see popular trends in product searches and their likelihood of success. Look at competitor reviews on:some text
  • G2
  • Capterra
  • Trustradius
  • Google
• Ask for feedback: Use polls on Instagram Stories or LinkedIn to poll your target audience about potential product ideas or features. Or, use unobtrusive feedback widgets and place them throughout critical touchpoints in the customer journey for key insights into product ideations and improvements. 

2. Design Process Challenges

A solid design process involves cross-functional collaboration, prioritizing your product roadmap, and leaving enough room for testing and tweaking. But, it can be hard to find (and stick to) a process that isn’t too complicated or costly. And you don’t want to risk a delay in rollout because your process was too lengthy. 

4 Ways to Overcome Design Challenges

• Unite teams on your main platforms to encourage cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder alignment. Ensure you use the same CRM, reporting tools, and dashboard for easy access to customer insights. Integrating your tools with Slack can also help keep customer insights readily accessible to your teams and keep everyone up to speed on where your product is headed. 
• Survey your team and users to understand better what you could streamline in your design and development process. Administer anonymous surveys to your product team for fresh ideas on improving your process, or survey your target market for early-stage product screening insights. 
• Iterate your product design testing methods: implement the feedback you’ve collected into your design process and explore tried-and-tested project management methods like Kanban or Scrum. 
• A/B test your prototype and see what your audience responds to or likes better. Then, use your findings to improve and streamline your product design process.

Pro tip: use Hotjar’s integration with Google Optimize or Optimizely to observe how users interact with each variant in your A/B tests. Use your most successful variant to inform your product roadmap. After watching recordings of users interacting with your prototype, you can filter Hotjar's Recordings to see how the product experience (PX) varies for different user personas so you know which features to prioritize.

3. Post-Launch Iteration Challenges

Once you’ve launched your product, you’ll need to closely monitor customer insights that will help you refine your product. Sometimes, product designers forget that post-launch product iteration is as important as early development and design. 

4 Ways to Make Sure You’re Continuously Refining and Improving Your Product

• Administer customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to gauge your customers' short-term satisfaction with your product. For example, after receiving a low CSAT score during a new product rollout, ask customers to provide a reason for their score to get direct insights into their experience. 
• Watch user sessions within your product for a firsthand view of the user experience. This will help you see exactly what blocks your customers in their journey or what keeps them exploring. 
• Ask for feedback throughout the customer journey, including during user onboarding, to get insights into what customers like or dislike about your product and optimize accordingly. 
• Conduct product-market fit surveys and ask your customers if they’ve adopted your product into their everyday lives or if they’d missed using it. Use your findings better to tailor your product to market and user needs. For example, after administering a product-market fit survey about my product, you might better understand the product roadmap and prioritize high-value initiatives. 

Related Reading

• Product Designer vs UX Designer
• MVP Development Cost
• MVP Development Companies
• Product Design Examples
• Design Discovery Process
• SaaS Product Design
• Product Design Principles
• Product Design Tools
• Best Product Design Companies
• Product Design vs Product Management
• Minimum Viable Product Examples
• Product Design Prototype

Subscribe to a Guild of World Class Framer Developers with Our Framer Web Design Agency Today

NUMI is a framer web design agency that world-class framer developers and product designers power. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup:

• Sourcing
• Vetting
• Hiring needs

Our fabuolous design team ensures all your design work is done well. 

NUMI helps with:

• Product design
• Web design
• Framer development
• Webflow development
• Mobile design
• Prototyping
• UX design
• All of your startup's design needs

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today. Schedule a call with us today to learn more!

‍