Design Strategy That’ll Make Your Product…Like…WOAHHH!
Digital product design is a process for creating great products that’ll satisfy your client’s business goals and the needs of their users.
Only the great will survive! It’s super important that the bones of your product are as strong as the aesthetic. In order to have an effective strategy there are some key things you need to consider during your design process:
- Understand the business, technical and domain opportunities, while working with the product requirements and constraints.
- Recognise the desires, motivations and needs of the people who will use these products.
- Design products that have useful forms, content and behaviour.
- Create products which are economically viable and technically feasible.
- Acknowledge your technical restrictions from the get-go, so the designs are not too time/money consuming during development.
Successful Product
The market is competitive, and you need a great digital product that is not just beautiful, but also provides a delightful experience for its users. This means the product should be easy to use, and add outstanding value to the users life.
Not to say that visual appeal isn’t important at all, but if we compare designing an app to…say…building a house, we need to ensure that we build a strong foundation. No matter how beautiful the house, it won’t stay standing with a weak foundation, nor will it be a functional space with a poor room layout. Same goes for building a great app that will endure. Designers need to make sure that the UX design is stable, so that the beautiful visuals are not just masking a dud.
Digital Product Design Strategy
The simplest way to discuss the digital product design strategy, would be to divide it into 3 sections; UX strategy, UX design and Visual Design. As mentioned above, we need a strong foundation before we can start making it look pretty, so we need to start with UX and then move our way into the Visual Design. This process needs to be worked in this precise order, because each relies on the previous step.
UX Strategy
The first portion of design strategy involves understanding the client’s business, and understanding it well! You need to familiarise yourself with all elements of their business that will relate to the success of the product. This includes doing in-depth user-research and analysing the performance of your user experience through UX evaluation. This portion of your strategy is key, because these details will help you to determine the market fit of the product.
It’s also necessary to perform a competitive analysis in your UX strategy. Take a look at what they are doing wrong, and what they are doing right. You can use this information to make sure that your product is solving the problems that other products may already have, but also incorporating their best qualities.
UX Design
Once you’ve determined your UX strategy, you can start your UX design, which is all about functionality. The user experience includes all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The building blocks for user experience are created through experience architecture — which needs to be designed with well thought-out layouts of specific screens and the intuitive navigation.
The next step would be to move to prototyping, using wireframes and interactive prototypes. Once prototypes are created, you need to perform usability testing, making sure that design decisions were valuable for real users. Here, you’re checking that you’re creating a relevant product that is enjoyable for its users.
Visual Design
Finally, once your UX strategy and design are completed, you can start on your UI design. UI design is the application of your clients brand, in a visual language, to the UX design already completed. Once the foundation is built, tested, and proves to be strong, you need to start designing the aesthetic elements of your products. The Visual Design is about making your product’s interface memorable and visually delightful. The stylistics that are proposed should be defined by decisions that were made in the UX strategy phase. The Visual Design phase is about making the client’s product stand out from the crowd, so you need to use your research to achieve success.
At this point you need to test the product again for usability, making sure that everything still functions well and that you’ve solved any issues that may have come up throughout the design process, with real users.
Your Product Should Reflect Client and User Needs
Your designing process should create a great product that will satisfy your client’s business goals and the needs of their users.
Understanding your client’s business is an integral part of this process, as well as recognising what technical restrictions you’ll need to overcome. Recognising the desires and motives will help you to create a viable product that is functional and visually appealing.
One cannot stand without the other, so make sure you’re utilising all of your UX strategy, UX design and Visual designs and that they all work together. Finally, test and test again, to ensure the best user-experience!
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About the Author
Sona Kerim is a Digital Marketing Specialist at EL Passion. You can find her on LinkedIn.
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