Product Design

Product Design

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.

What is product design?

Product design is the process of ideating, developing, and refining products that meet specific market needs and solve user problems.

Product design is typically handled by both product managers and product designers, where product managers will create a product development strategy and product designers will lead design teams to translate product features into great user experiences through testing and iterations.

This level of development, testing, and iteration helps create products that delight customers by defining product and business goals, and anticipating market opportunities and user needs.

You may also see product design called “industrial design. However, generally industrial design relates to physical products and product design relates to digital products like websites and apps.

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.

What does a strong product design process involve?

A strong product design process is based on the idea of design thinking. This is a technique to pragmatically resolve problems through human-centered design.

How does product design benefit your users and business?

Done right, product design helps attract more customers to your website or service—and increases brand awareness—giving your organization an advantage over its competitors.

Product design also helps you:

  • Build better products: constantly improving your product design based on user feedback helps you build more successful products that align better with user needs
  • Improve the user experience: smart product design lets your customers get the most out of your product, both in functionality and enjoyment—and achieve their jobs to be done, or goals
  • Track progress and measure success: product design lends itself to tracking product success and performance over time, so you can understand if your product is meeting user needs and learn what improvements to make
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