11 Tips for Product Designers

Note: Product design used to mean designing physical products, but today it usually involves technology in some way, whether it’s designing an app, interface, or other service.

People underestimate the importance of good product design, because truly good design is invisible. Seamless, perfect, user-centred design fulfils all our needs without ever causing a problem. Bad design, on the other hand, is irritatingly memorable for all the wrong reasons.

The best product designers innovate, solve problems, and deliver the results of this to the user.

Good products are intuitive and easy-to-use. If you have an amazing idea, how can you get started?

Lean UX Design is a philosophy based on Toyota’s Lean Production technique. It approaches product design with a simple plan:

Understand the problem.
Brainstorm solutions.
Create something that can be tested.
Evaluate.

.. and go back to step 1 if needs be!

Let’s run through the steps and explore some tips to help you optimise your product design.

Step 1: Understand the problem.

Design is essentially problem solving. Ask yourself a lot of questions and design a product which answers them all.

Research the market.

You can’t have a business without a customer. Who is your target user? Research the market and see what your competitors are doing. Would you be able to sell this product?

See what opportunities exist (gaps in the market – is it growing? Or saturated?) as well as threats (similar products or changes in trends). Understand market trends and what’s already been done. Where is the industry going? Design a product to fill the gap.

Know your user and their needs.

The first thing to think about is what context the customer would use your product in. Will they be listening to your traffic-update app while driving? Better install voice commands and make it simple to use hands-free. Is your health tech product for doctors or for patients to use at home? How much knowledge can you assume the user has? Beware of this when writing the instructions.

It’s safe to assume your customer is in a hurry and wants to spend as little time figuring out your product as possible. List the main tasks they will use the product for and make sure there aren’t any obvious design flaws – the Carelman Teapot is famous for its terrible product design.

Offer something unique.

Constantly evaluate your product’s features and try to offer some value your competitors do not. One of the infinite ways to do this would be creating a more environmentally friendly product, saving people a lot of time, or introducing a concept which reduces the need for other products. Google CEO Larry Page coined the phrase “toothbrush test” – if your product is unique, useful and needed at least once a day, it’s worth pursuing. Are your competitors failing to provide in one key area, or for a particular type of customer?

2. Brainstorm

Keep it Simple.

Less is more. Simple, intuitive products can be used by people of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds. Avoid “over-designing” or using unnecessarily complicated features.

Prioritise “function over features”. For registration, sign-in or payment forms, make sure your format is at least as simple as that of your competitor. Keep questions clear and require minimal work on the user’s part. Resist the temptation to do something clever or avant-garde. There are plenty of awful interfaces out there. Just look at this extremely impractical volume change interface that no one would ever want to use in public.

List your WORST ideas.

Have you come up with dumb ideas in the past? Now is your time to shine! Interaction Design recommends starting your brainstorming session by listing out the worst possible ideas. This will help you identify what customers do NOT want and problems you could avoid. You may come up with a good idea by accident, or at least think of some product features you wouldn’t have otherwise! If you’re designing a website or user interface, take a look at UserInYerFace. This one-page website is deliberately designed in the most user unfriendly way possible, and should give you an idea what NOT to do.

Learn from the design pitfalls in your everyday life.

Some people are product designers, but we’re all users, and we’ve all had a frustrating experience with a product. Is there a service you closed your account with? Did you delete an app because it was so hard to navigate? What brands do you avoid? Why? When you’re researching or ordering a product online, evaluate the website’s ease-of-use. Make a list of all the frustrating or other off-putting experiences you encounter as a user, and learn from these designer’s mistakes. How will your product do better? This video from a disgruntled customer gives examples of poor design on well-known online services:

Broaden your perspective.

Read, research and upskill using books, podcasts, and blogs. Learn as much as you can about areas such as web design, psychology, business, engineering, graphic design, and related industries. Great ideas, or at least, new perspectives, should come naturally. This will also help you understand team members at other stages of the product life cycle. Learn to “design for manufacturing and assembly” – some amazing ideas are just not possible from an engineering point of view.

Collaborate.

People who work in different industries can have different ways of looking at the world and organising ideas. Diversity is an asset, so learn from other people’s perspectives. Hubspot actually launched a product in only 11 weeks thanks to collaborative, agile product design teams. Hubspot product designers are also “decentralized”, working as part of a team with non-designers. This encourages communication, and working together from the get-go helps avoid problems later on.

Get to work!

Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you have an idea, start small and put pen to paper. You can figure out the complicated aspects later on – just get to work and make something happen!

Use sketches, diagrams and blueprints to design your products. For user interfaces, use UXPin, which lets you easily create mockups. Draw wireframes (pictured below), and explore different ways of laying out your app. Early concepts are called “low fidelity designs” because they can easily be changed, built on, and developed. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and dive right in.

Step 3: Create something that can be tested

Bring your idea to life with a mockup or prototype. Testing it will help you avoid problems later on. Optimising for usability now will help users get the most out of your product design.

Understand how consumers perceive your product.

You can’t always predict what problems users will encounter. Understand the “User Mental Model” – the user’s perception of the product and what it’s used for. Show the product to someone who isn’t familiar with it. Ask them what words they associate with it, how they think it’s used (if they guess right, your design is intuitive!), and what they would use it for.

Invite target customers to test the product.

Conduct online surveys, interviews, or Beta Tests. Ask your target customer to do a task (i.e, find and purchase a product on the app) and note what difficulties they encounter. How long did they take? Would they recommend it to a friend?

Identify areas they might find frustrating. Think about what else they might try to do (save to a wishlist for later? Send to a friend? Read reviews) and aim to make this as easy as possible.

Interestingly, most men can’t guess what women’s beauty products are for. Choose testers who are prospective customers for optimum results.

4. Evaluate.

Pro-tip: It’s easier and cheaper to make changes early on. Avoid the “sunk cost fallacy” and don’t waste time finishing a flawed product design just because you’ve spent a lot of time on it. Instead…

Embrace Responsive Design and learn from ***constructive criticism***.

Stay humble, and as Don Norman says, “accept human behaviour the way it is”. A product idea could be amazing, but it will never be recognised as such if it’s so difficult to use that people don’t buy it.

If your target customer doesn’t understand something, take it as a sign that a lot of others won’t either. Even if you’re proud of your design, accept that because you created it, you automatically understand it. A survey by User Testing, a company offers live feedback from potential customers, found that while 75% of companies believe they’re customer centric, only 25% of customers agree!

The best piece of advice to take from this article is to keep an open mind and learn from your mistakes. Very few people create an amazing, world-changing product design on their first attempt. Where did you go wrong in the past? Don’t dwell on mistakes, just learn something that you can apply in the future. Once your product is launched, invite feedback, and make sure it’s easy for customers to get in touch in-app or online and communicate any problems they have.

Take all these into account for any future product design projects, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a great product designer.

Have you designed a product? What did you learn from the experience? What should first-time product designers keep in mind?

And.. what are the best and worst product designs or user interfaces you’ve seen?

Share your thoughts in the comments! 🙂