How to Move from Idea to Reality in Product Design

The joy of creators is to see what they have made, being used by people. This is why Product design encompasses a very large scale of design practice, as it's not just for creators in the tech space. There are product designers in the automobile industry, carpentry, architecture, electronics, etc. Far from the broad view, let's be a little more specific in explaining it in terms of building products to be used online as software, app or website.

Product design is the process of imagining and creating products that solve users problem. In this case, product design is the fusion of user interface design and user experience, information architecture, content creation, interaction design and user research to come up with products as solutions to the problems faced by everyday users. As a product designer (this could be, graphics, 3D designer, illustrator, user interface designer, user experience designer, interaction designer, etc) you are interested in doing just one thing - To build a product that would solve the user's problems.

An individual shouldn't be called a product designer because its a field that brings several skills into creating products. But then, if a product designer's goal is to build products that would solve the user's problems, then this leads us to ask the question, How?

First thing first, a product designer needs to understand the problem Just do it😂

One of the advice that I love so much is this - Always be excited about the problem, not the solution, why? times changes, technology improves but the most likely, would always remain the problem.

An example is Facebook, the problem was, how to bring people from all over the world to connect together, and one thing Mark Zuck did, was to just painstakingly solve that problem, that's why when Instagram came, and he saw the growth as they were still solving that same problem, he bought it. Same thing for WhatsApp.

We had 3 different platforms that connect people together, but they are unique in their own way.  Because while building products, things change, and if you are loving your initial solution than solving the problem, when things are changing, you are already attached to this, and you would find it hard to iterate and change with it.
One of the reason products fails

So understanding the problem

1. Perform user research,
2. Identify the key issues
3. Are there other products out there solving this same problem?
4. Study other products
 

The next thing is to understand the goals of the user for using the product
and also to understand what goals do the company or you have when designing the product, and how can you bridge them together. The key thing to build a product is to understand how you can bridge the goals of the stakeholders and also the user goals together. After going through these stages, understand the problem, understanding the goals of the users and the goals of the stakeholders

What you want to do next is to perform user interface designs. This stage is broken down into 3.

1. Wireframing
2. Mockups
3. High fidelity prototype

This does not necessarily have be to followed to the letter as there are times, where your brain already have things connected, and you can go ahead and start designing, but why this is important is, it helps you to easily craft out designs.

Then creating high fidelity prototype helps your stakeholders understand what the product would look like when it's done. A high fidelity prototype can be used to perform user research to better understand how the user would use the final product

At this stage, the designer goes into an iteration phase, where research are done with the user, and changes are made due to how the users interact with the high fidelity prototype. It's called Design testing phase. The methods of testing usability involves:

1. Observation of users
2. View of users
3. Measurement of benchmark
   

When this is done, you pass your designs to the team in charge of implementing, then they go into code mode (where they literally just type away on the keyboard). It is important to work closely with the developers too, as you want to make sure, proper interpretation of the designs are done.

As a designer, sometimes, these things can be overwhelming. There won't be pleasurable times often as pressure would come from different stakeholders and deadlines would also be there looking at you. This is why it's important you break things down in chunks and build them gradually. Remember to make your designs delightful, easy to use, and simple.

Design is not how it looks but how it works. 

Don't make your users think too hard. Stop coming up with over the earth designs as users are used to some certain things. Be consistent in your designs too. While doing this, always talk to stakeholders in your project. It's important since you don't want to spend weeks working, and when you think you are done, you are told that, "this is trash".

In summary

1. Understand the problem
2. Perform user research
3. Understand the goals of both the users and the stakeholders
4. Design the user interface
5. More research, this time making use of the results in number 4.
6. With the result in 5, create the ready to use designs, because design is never done

 

''I'm in the fashion industry and like many others, I rely on deep creativity. Do you think there's really a perfect design process that fits all?''

I don't think there is a perfect design process that fits all, but I want to believe each industry have their own process of doing things, but then, some things are constant everywhere, and they are

1. You want to understand that which you are designing - Why, What and How.
2. How can you go about designing this such that it solves the problem it sets out to achieve?

For instance, being in the fashion industry, probably one of your goals would be the comfort of your customers when they put on your clothing, so I want to believe your design process would be, understanding what comfort is to you, and what comfort is to your customers, and how to achieve this, what kind of materials to use, and how to go about it. Another is luxury, hope you get the point?

 

Juwon Daniel is a frontend developer, mobile application developer, and product designer. He currently works at klen.co as a frontend developer. You can reach him here