5 Important Things to Know About Product Design
What does it take to create a product design that works? From choosing the right colour scheme to enhancing its emotional value, there are many things to be incorporated into your product design.
Wikipedia defines digital product design as “an iterative design process to solve a functional problem with a formal solution.” And it defines a digital product designer as someone who “identifies a real problem, offers the best possible solution, and launches it to a market that is showing demand for that particular solution.”
Simply put, digital product design is a practice of creating the design that not only looks great but also serves a functional purpose. Digital product design is a field of design with its own methodologies, beliefs and semantics. It is more than creating an aesthetically pleasing design.
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A great product design helps companies get an edge over competitors. Whether you are a designer, project manager or a marketing executive, it is important to understand the principles of product design to come up with the best thing.
In this article, I’ve have listed the main concepts that I think could help you to deliver the customer centric/oriented product design.
Emotional Value
How will users feel when they look at your design? Do you want them to be optimistic? Do you want them to feel happy? Or they should feel disgusted?
A good product design always triggers emotions. Emotional responses help the users connect with your design or brand overall. Therefore, adding emotional value should be a key consideration while creating a product design.
Here are the things to work over to enhance the “emotional” value of your design:
- Colour Theory
- Contrast
- Vibrancy of Colors
- Complementation
(For example, Green can be both energizing and relaxing depending how much lighter it is.)
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Visual Appeal and Interface
The behaviour and appearance of your product design are important points to consider. These things will help bridge a gap between a business and its target audience.
To meet the best of both worlds, here are some points to work over…
- Visual Clarity
- Easy Navigation
- Layout
- Responsiveness
Storytelling
Storytelling is an important part of this field of design. The story should be appealing and resonates with user’s concerns as well.
Creating a killer story for your product design requires you to go through a user journey. A user journey is a series of steps a user interact with your products or website. From considering a product to make a buying decision, every step of a user journey can act as a reference for your story. For example, identify the concerns of your target audience and establish the characters. Then, set the emotional tone (optimistic or funny) for your story.
According to UXMagazine,
A good product storyteller asks questions, gives solutions and finds out how to incorporate a vision into a product story. They create the plot, determine the users and build the product design around the particular values it should give to the target audience.
Empathy Map
An empathy map is a visualization tool which helps you understand your user’s needs. It is divided into four quadrants: said, did, thought and felt.
To develop an effective empathy map for a product design, think about the people who will use or interact with your design. As your team understands the users and then places this information on the said quadrants, they get a more holistic view of the user’s and their concerns.
Visualization of Ideas
This is an important step where all the above-mentioned steps will be visualized to determine what the design will look like. From a simple sketching to wireframing, there are many ways to visualize the ideas you have jotted down so far. While drawing by hand is an easy way to visualize the concept, wireframes or digital illustrations are great to get organized and set up multiple iterations. Make sure to test it through prototyping.
The key takeaway is that you need to create the design that not only looks great but resonates with the user’s concerns and problems.
Want to ask anything else? Or you feel that I have hopped something important? Let me know by commenting below.
Originally published at www.savahapp.com on November 18, 2018.
