How to Develop a Solid Product Design Strategy for Your Startup?
As a startup owner, you may face many frustrations on your way to the market. Product design strategy may become one of the most challenging ones. More than having the most creative designers and innovative tools may be required as it can quickly become a trap. You would think that such a combo guarantees the product’s success, but actual users may not approve of any of the efforts leading to your product being useless for them and unprofitable for you.
Therefore, for a product to be lucrative and helpful, you should develop a consistent product design strategy covering visual appeal and business goals. Only combining these factors can bring the wanted results.
Follow this article to learn more about product design strategy, why a thorough understanding of design thinking is required, and get a step-by-step guide to the whole product design process — as we do it at Idealogic design.
What Is the Product Design Strategy
Product design strategy is a part of the whole business strategy. There is only one way design can truly make a change — if it combines business goals and customer needs to bring the result that would help the business evolve, generate revenue, and be appealing and understandable for users. There is no need to create something fancy or trendy for the sake of a beautiful picture. Product design has to correspond to specific users’ inconveniences and market challenges. Professionals often use design thinking while developing a product design strategy.
Design thinking is a practical approach applied to get the actual users to feel that the product is made precisely for them and solves all their problems. It mainly focuses on being user-centric and empathic, brainstorming ideas, prototyping, and a lot of testing to understand what works the best. Design thinking is also an iterative process, meaning there are never-ending assumptions later prototyped and thoroughly tested to try for a better product.
When the design team applies this concept, they don’t stop after the product launch. They monitor closely how the users respond to the product, whether they are satisfied, and whether there are any issues or inconveniences the design team can help to reduce. After the product goes to the market, all the initial processes, like generating ideas based on feedback, prototyping, and testing, are still running to make sure that the product is something to last. It is known that there is a decline at some point in the product development life cycle, and the goal is to observe how and where things can go wrong and how to avoid it by anticipating users’ problems and providing them with innovative solutions.
Certainly, design thinking as a concept also considers the team’s capabilities to measure and fix the features. Sometimes, both financial and human resources are limited, therefore, there is a need to get the priorities straight to achieve a solution that would still correspond well to the users' needs and business goals.
For example, for a startup in the initial stages with a limited budget, it may be hard to get a qualified in-house team of designers to work on the project, as the onboarding processes usually take a long time, and employers expect every kind of social benefits which startups might not be able to provide them with yet. The other thing is that a startup usually can’t afford a scaled product from the very beginning. In such cases, outsourcing the design team may be a solution, as it usually contains professionals with many cases in their portfolio who can start to work on your project almost immediately. They can make an MVP for a start and help scale the product later.
Therefore, product design strategy usually contains the design thinking approach to guarantee that people not just like the product’s amusing cover but also are going to use it and bring revenue. As this process is complex, it is better to look closer at all the stages step-by-step.
How to Develop a Solid Product Design Strategy
As a newbie in business development, you can get confused about how to make a good quality design and what type of professionals exactly make this happen. You’ll need different people in the course of product design. Let’s dive into the five main phases of it.
Research
There are several goals of this stage, including some of the following:
- getting to understand the end users of the product, their typical lifestyle, problems, and desires;
- defining whether there are already solutions for the problems you are trying to solve, whether people already use them;
- see if there is room for improvement and innovativeness in existing options to persuade people to switch to your product.
Answering these basic questions may help set the working process’s initial steps. They cover the customers’ needs as well as take business metrics seriously.
Moreover, it also helps if you specify business goals from the start, such as raising brand awareness, attracting a specific amount of users, or monetizing the app. The main thing is that the product has to be designed not for the product itself but rather for it to be a part of a wider business strategy. If there is no practical use of it either for you or for users, there is not so much sense in starting the whole product design process at all as it will not bring a real difference to the current state of affairs.
Again, product design should be empathic for end-users to like and use it. That is why you’d better build a roadmap where you can analyze all the touchpoints, think of possible errors, and try to avoid them. Also, concise communication decreases frustration when errors do happen. Such little details can be the thing that differentiates your products from others available on the market as it shows you care for customers’ experiences and emotions.
There are different ways to conduct market and user research. For example, first, you’d want to know more about the current state of the industry and what problems it faces every day. Then, you’ll want to see what is trending there and what solutions people approve of. Finally, you’d want to observe and analyze the similar products your competitors offer. There can be a way to learn something from their mistakes or winning strategies and present a product close to the ideal.
Once you have done your market and competitor research, you’ll need more details about your potential buyer persona. The crucial moment here is that you can’t build a product everyone would like to the same extent. That is why you should concentrate on the main consumer of your services. In addition to learning about their lifestyle and details like age, gender, income, marital status, region, work position, etc., you would also need to conduct interviews, contextual inquiries, and online polls to get as realistic a picture of their life as possible.
As soon as you get all this information, you are ready to go further and start forming a design hypothesis, prototyping, testing, and again analyzing and making the adjustments.
Prototyping
A prototype is the first intermediate result of the applied research. It has not to be final, and it rarely is. Its main goal is to test whether the whole idea is worth it, get a preview of the actual product's final result, and gather feedback from the target audience to continue working on it.
Wireframing allows designers to build a basic structure showing the screen layouts. In such a way, they can review the product's navigation, user interactions, and overall appearance. After that, they can concentrate on the page structure and navigation flow. This approach defines a prototype as a valuable tool that allows the design team to identify potential errors and avoid extensive future redesigns. It is helpful both for the business owners, which can save some additional expenses, and for the design team, as it is less frustrating and stressful to work on the project in the future when you have a clear vision of what will work properly and what will not.
Prototyping can take some time as there is no guarantee that the first applied design concept will be the best possible. There is no shame in changing the strategy and starting all over again. It is way better to redo everything at this stage than after the launch. Once the end-users form an impression about the brand, it will be much harder to sell them further versions of the products. They can be improved and beautiful, but consumers may be hard to convince. Moreover, in the case of apps, it takes a lot of work to get the approval of play stores, and the longer product is not working, the less money it is making.
As soon as the vision of the future product is clear, you can move to the next stage.
Production
It may seem that production is the final stage, as you already have all the technical requirements, the tasks are distributed through the team, the deadlines are set, and the budget is approved. At last, you can start designing the final variant of the project. In fact, production requires constant discussions as plans may change or something new may come to mind. And even after the product is finally done, other stages are always as essential as this one. This stage of pure design is surrounded by pre-designing and post-designing steps that assure the product is going to work correctly in all the possible pleasant and unpleasant scenarios, all the steps are communicated so users do not get confused, and all touchpoint is observed. So, as soon as everything is ready, it’s time for testing.
Testing
This phase of product design is crucial as the product is launched right after it. To achieve the perfect result, there should be a thorough testing of different scenarios to find and fix weak points. Testing also should be performed on different screen types to evaluate usability. The QA team also should check whether the final product works according to the initial technical requirements and compliances.
Testing is a never-ending process — from the initial prototyping to post-launch observations as it allows you to detect bugs and analyze what can be improved, what problems arise, what people expect to provide, etc. Real clients also may help with testing as they are the ones who would use the product, so their feedback is more honest and valuable.
Product launch is just a beginning for us
Congratulations! You’ve already made it this far in planning your product design strategy. You might have thought that after the launch, there would be no worries and you could finally relax. On the contrary, in the business world, checking how your product works and how the users feel about it is crucial. Then, you can analyze what it lacks to add this and make it your competitive advantage. There are often better solutions, so you can experiment and try them. For example, we run A/B testing to evaluate what users appreciate more. A/B test is a great way to choose the most suitable option that shows the best performance. The best part about it — you can test almost everything — headlines, fonts, call-to-actions, button size and placement, etc; and we do so at Idealogic design.
However, do not forget about your initial business strategy and comply with it. You need to differentiate design trends that may be unnecessary and wanted changes that users request.
Wrapping It Up
A solid product design strategy is built considering business objectives and users’ needs. It requires applying the design thinking concept to define the main pain points and determining the ways to eliminate them with design practices. For every business goal — be it app monetization, raising brand awareness, attracting more users, or working on retention — there are different design technics to apply to fulfill them all.
A solid design strategy is a complex process with at least five phases equally essential. Research allows the design team to define and learn the target audience as well as evaluate the market and competitors to come up with something revolutionary. Prototyping is necessary to test the design concept in practice and get a preview of the future product. If it is not what you expected, there is always a chance to try something different. Production is the main phase; as a result, you finally get the product. However, it must be tested to detect technical bugs and conceptual errors. Post-launch observation is crucial if you want to stay ahead of the competition and satisfy your clients.
There is a lot to unpack regarding product design strategy, and it may be overwhelming for a startup owner. The Idealogic design team can help you reach your business goals and create a pleasant product users will love. Reach out to us , and we will start working.
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