Introduction to Product Design
What is Product Design?
Definition and challenges of Product Design
Product Design is a discipline that involves building the best possible user experience with a product culture. It is based on design thinking methodologies to design a product from start to finish.
In product design, user needs take priority, but business, strategic and technological issues are also taken into account.
The objectives are:
- Identify the problems to be solved by gathering user needs. This involves user research using methods such as interviews, the creation of personas, audits, tests and quantitative and qualitative studies.
- Studying the market and understanding the business challenges (with benchmarks, market research, etc.).
- Collaborate in an agile way with the product team.
- Adoption of an MVP (minimum viable product) approach, i.e. not looking for a definitive perfect finished product with a high level of certainty, but working iteratively to get closer to this ideal.
- To create interfaces, and to give concrete form to ideas that can be rapidly tested.
What’s the difference between Product Design and UX?
Product Design is similar to UX/UI, with the difference that it looks at the product as a whole and is business-oriented as well as user-oriented.
It emphasises the user experience (UX) as a central pillar. A well-designed product must not only be functional, but also intuitive and pleasant to use. UX design aims to make the interaction between the user and the product fluid, immersive and frictionless. A positive experience strengthens customer loyalty and encourages existing users to recommend the product to other potential users.
The various Product Design roles
Product Designer
The Product Designer has a versatile role that is essential to the design of a digital product, and combines an in-depth understanding of the user experience (UX) and the user interface (UI). Product Designers work on the experience of a product as a whole. They have skills in facilitation, user research, design, art direction, system design, etc. They work closely with development and marketing teams to ensure that the website or mobile application achieves its business objectives, while also offering an exceptional user experience.
Art Director
The Art Director has a strategic role in the design of a product. They are responsible for the overall creative vision. They oversee aesthetics, visual identity and user experience to ensure consistency and aesthetic excellence throughout the design process. The art director develops the overall creative direction, defines the visual concepts, guides the creation of the visual identity and ensures artistic consistency with the brand.
UX Designer
The UX Designer focuses on designing an optimal online experience for users. UX designers are responsible for how visitors interact with a website, focusing on ergonomics, ease-of-use and user-friendliness.
UI Designer
The UI designer is responsible for designing the visual elements and user interface of a digital product to ensure an attractive and functional design. They create graphical elements such as logos, icons, buttons, images, layouts and graphics guidelines. They implement the creative vision of the project, ensuring that these elements fit harmoniously into the site as a whole, guaranteeing a fluid and intuitive user experience.
UX researcher
The UX researcher seeks to understand user needs and behaviours, through in-depth studies that gather qualitative and quantitative data on user preferences and expectations. In this way, they identify potential problems, find opportunities for improvement and guide design based on feedback.
UX writer
UX writers specialise in writing digital content that optimises the user experience. Their role is to create texts capable of guiding users through the website or mobile application, ensuring that every word and phrase contributes to understanding and frictionless interaction, adapting the content to the company’s challenges but also to the context of use (types of screen, mobility, etc.).
How to set up a Design Thinking approach
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a collaborative innovation method that enables a brand or company to respond to a clearly identified problem. In this method, people and their uses and needs are placed at the heart of the thinking process.
Collaboration means teamwork. We work in a co-design mode, in constant dialogue with different players who do not have the same expertise, habits or methods. Working in this way allows us to combine the skills and expertise of each person with the aim of finding an effective and innovative solution.
What are the key points in a Design Thinking approach?
1. Understand who the users are and what their environment is like in order to define their problems and select the Pain Points to be resolved.
The starting point for Design Thinking is understanding users’ needs and desires. A user-centred approach involves in-depth research, interviews and studies to understand their motivations, frustrations and expectations. This in-depth knowledge makes it possible to design products that truly respond to the user’s problems and fulfil their aspirations.
2. Produce animated prototypes of the first solutions for testing with the users, in order to validate or invalidate these hypotheses.
Creating animated, interactive prototypes will bring the idea to life and test the viability and usability of a digital product before it is fully developed. Feedback from users at this stage helps to validate or adjust assumptions, saving time and resources while ensuring a better end user experience.
How to integrate Product Design into your organisation
What is the difference between a project and a product?
- A project has a limited lifespan. It has a defined start and end date. A product is designed to last, to be improved and updated regularly to meet the changing needs of users and the market.
- The project has a predetermined budget. VS A product’s budget is allocated to the team and is open-ended, adjusted according to needs.
- A project is planned sequentially. It generally follows a cascade development process, where each stage must be completed before moving on to the next. VS A product is an infinite loop of continuous improvement. It follows an agile development process, where iterations and improvements are made throughout the product lifecycle.
- A project often has a fixed, upstream-defined scope. The priority is to respect the scope, cost and deadlines. VS A product has a long-term vision and evolving objectives. Its objectives are centred on the user and their needs, and consequently an evolving scope.
- A project often has a specific, temporary team. It is assembled to meet the requirements of the project. VS A product has a permanent team responsible for creating, developing and improving the product.
The place of Product Design in a Digital Factory
The Digital Factory is a concept that is undergoing a great deal of development in companies that have reached an advanced level of digital maturity and have decided to bring their teams (which until now have been organised based on their job function) together in a single autonomous entity in order to harness the complementary talents and collective intelligence needed to deliver digital products over shorter timescales that fulfil the needs of the users as closely as possible.
The Digital Factory is a company-wide move towards agility: the product and the value of what is produced are once more the centre of attention. Teams work based on their capacity and capabilities and according to value-based priorities. Teams communicate with each other and bounce ideas back and forth. The role of Product Design and Product Management is therefore a natural fit.
The importance of continuous improvement in Product Design
Product Design is an iterative process based on feedback from users and market results. Designers are constantly looking to improve their product, adjust functionality and optimise the user experience. This continuous improvement approach ensures the relevance and durability of the product in a constantly evolving environment. It also accelerates time-to-market.
How to design responsibly
Designing for mobile first
Making your UX/UI design mobile-first means anticipating the reduced and random quality of the connection, managing a smaller screen size, optimising for a potentially drastically short attention span and taking environmental nuisances into account.
To achieve this, it is important to optimise media, reduce the number of elements visible per page and remove superficial elements.
Propose accessible designs
By creating accessible designs, we ensure that they can be used fairly and inclusively by all people, whatever their hardware or software, their network infrastructure, their mother tongue, their culture, their geographical location, or their physical or mental abilities.
Inclusive design means thinking about the accessibility of your product throughout the design process. To achieve this, we work on:
- Perceptibility of the product: for example, having the right colour contrasts, or text alternatives for visual content.
- Usability: for example, by making navigation easier.
- Comprehensibility: for example, by ensuring that information is well structured.
- Robustness: for example, by anticipating compatibility with different devices or browsers.
How to design an environmentally responsible product
Refocus on the functional unit
The functional unit is the main use of a digital service and represents the task to be designed. For example, booking a train ticket or reading an article for information. To do this, we need to quantify the requirement precisely, eliminate non-essential functionalities, analyse user habits, adopt a mobile-first approach, and choose the most appropriate technologies and terminals.
Rethinking user paths
The time spent by the user on a website or online service is the most decisive factor in reducing or increasing the site’s environmental footprint. To achieve this, we can: respect the principle of rapid navigation, display the main functions/information on the home page, offer a customisable home page or create interfaces to match particular user profiles, limit the number of interruptions, replace consulting of the web interface by a user SMS or email alert and make the process more fluid.
Favour sober designs
Here are a few examples of good practice for creating sober designs:
- Favour static pages
- Avoid JavaScript / CSS animations
- Use standard fonts
- Limit the use of plugins / external content
- Use JPGs rather than PNGs
- Use CSS instead of images
- Vector rather than bitmap images
- Limit the number of effects
- Avoid full length
