The product design process explained: a step-by-step guide

Almost anything you touch or use, whether physical or digital, has been designed. Everything—from the chair you’re sitting on, the phone you’re using, and the website where you’re reading this article—has all been designed for your benefit.

In product design, creating intuitive, user-friendly, and satisfying experiences can be the difference between attracting loyal customers and turning people to your competitors. Research from Formstack has shown that 57% of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. And 75% of users make judgments about an organization’s credibility based on their website design.

Good design can also have a big impact on the bottom line. For every $1 invested in UX design, research has shown a return of $100 or a return on investment of 9,900%.

How do you produce products that will meet customers’ expectations and fit a market need? Let’s take a look at the product design process. 

Product design is the process of bringing products—physical and digital—to life. The process involves developing solutions to problems and refining those solutions to meet the needs, demands, and wants of customers.

Product design requires a range of different skills and focus areas, including:

• Problem-solving

• Creativity

• Functionality

• Aesthetics

• User experience (UX)

Positive product design involves creating meaningful, useful, and satisfying products for customers and plays a role in every product we use in daily life.

In today’s fast-paced world of digital transformation, with ever-increasing customer demands, positive product design is critical. Take, for example, the rise of AI, which is causing radical changes across almost every industry. If you don’t keep up, you will be lost in the wake of those who do.

Following a product design best-practice process can help your organization:

• Meet customer expectations: Products that are designed to fit a market need, are intuitive to use, and address customers’ pain points are more likely to satisfy customers. This means meeting customer expectations through positive design.

• Increase competitiveness: If your organization can deliver satisfying design experiences, customers are likely to stay loyal to your brand. That means remaining competitive in an ever-changing marketplace.

• Shaping brand identity: Design is one essential way to communicate to your audience what your company is and what it stands for. Design can communicate things like quality, sector, and target market, and it helps differentiate your brand from the noise.

• Improving functionality: Adopting key design principles can help ensure that the functionality of your designs is thoughtful, relevant, and intuitive. This means more satisfying and useful experiences for your customers.

• Promoting accessibility: Accessible design will help your product appeal to a broad range of people. If your team designs with accessibility principles in mind, more users will benefit from your work, providing equal access and a wider customer base.

Creating aesthetically pleasing designs typically isn’t enough to drive customer satisfaction and provide satisfying experiences.

User-centered design is a core pillar of product design. It means deeply understanding customer preferences, wants, needs, and pain points to design meaningful, seamless, and intuitive experiences for them.

User-centered design can promote satisfying product experiences in several ways.

Design driven by empathy

For designers to create relevant and satisfying experiences, empathizing with customers is essential.

Empathy means stepping into the customer’s shoes, attempting to understand things from their perspective, and developing solutions with those insights in mind. This is an essential aspect of user-centered design.

Boosted usability

User-centered design helps designers create products that are broadly usable and accessible. This promotes:

• Ease of use

• Positive user experience

• Satisfying experiences

Personalization

Personalization is of increasing importance in today’s market. Research by McKinsey & Company, for example, shows that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from companies, and 76% are frustrated by a lack of personalization.

A user-centered approach to design enables your team to deeply understand customers and develop personalized and, therefore, more relevant experiences for them.

Building emotional connections

Building connections with customers that step beyond the transactional and become meaningful is a goal for many organizations.

Research that analyzed data from 100 retailers delivering products to 100,000 customers showed that 71% of customers who are emotionally connected to brands rate those organizations higher, and ​​they have 306% higher lifetime value.

User-centered design can play a crucial role in building those key emotional connections.

In the product design workflow, it’s helpful to have guiding methodologies to shore up your creativity and approach design with a structure in place.

Both design thinking and iterative processes help you design products that provide greater meaning and more relevance for your customers.

Using design thinking to ask the right questions 

Design thinking underpins the process of product design. The concept was coined by David Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO, and it’s a common way for designers to approach product design.

It focuses on human-centered problem-solving and isn’t limited to product development. It promotes empathizing with people, understanding their problems, and devising potential solutions to those problems.

Design thinking aims to create innovative solutions that address people's pain points and needs.

It helps designers pose questions such as:

• Who are our users?

• What do our users want and need from our products?

• What challenges do our users face?

• What assumptions might we be making?

• How can we use data to validate or invalidate our assumptions?

• What’s the ideal solution for our users?

Using design thinking principles can help you design solutions that hold greater weight and significance for the end user.

Adopting iterative processes for customer satisfaction

The iterative process methodology focuses on continuous improvement of products for the benefit of customers. This means that key steps of the design process are repeated in a cycle to keep the voice of the customer in the loop.

A typical iterative process for existing products has the following steps:

• Customer feedback is gathered

• Actionable insights are drawn from the data

• Improvements are made to optimize products

• Those improvements are tested in the market

• Feedback is gathered again to continue the cycle

This approach ensures flexibility in the design process and allows products to evolve as more insights and information are gathered, and as customer expectations grow.

An iterative process means embracing continual improvement so that products are not static. Products remain in a state of iteration and are more likely to meet the ever-changing needs of the market.

The product design workflow is a structured approach to creating products that are more likely to be meaningful and satisfying for customers and, therefore, more likely to succeed in the marketplace.

A best-practice product design process involves:

• Setting overall objectives

• Conducting extensive research

• Ideating and creating prototypes

• Testing prototypes with users

• Iterating based on feedback

• Continuing to iterate products once they launch

Let’s look at the key steps in the design process in more detail.

1. Set core goals

Before starting the design process, it’s essential to outline your team’s core goals. This ensures you have a common focus, you’ll perform the right research, and you’re more likely to develop relevant solutions.

Some examples of design goals include:

• Create a new pet-sitter app that’s intuitive and helps pet owners find sitters faster.

• Produce an accounting platform that helps sole traders complete their taxes with less heavy lifting.

• Design a virtual reality (VR) experience that immerses users in overseas locations.

Keep in mind that any goals you set should relate to your overall business objectives.

2. Discovery and research

Before getting started with any specific creative ideas, it’s essential to understand the market opportunity and perform detailed research on your potential customers.

This stage involves gathering information about your target market, exploring currently available solutions, accessing competitive products, being aware of trends, and performing detailed user research.

The core goal of the discovery stage is to not just deeply understand the current marketplace and what’s available, but also to deeply understand users, including their wants, needs, pain points, and preferences.

Research techniques can include:

• Focus groups

• Interviews

• Surveys

• A/B testing

• Analytics

Once the data is gathered, collate and analyze it to extract the most meaningful insights.

An all-in-one platform is essential at this stage to centralize the data and ensure your team doesn’t work in silos. Dovetail, for example, is a centralized customer insights hub that helps your team quickly turn calls, documents, and user feedback into insights. It also acts as a single source of truth for customer knowledge.

3. Solution ideation

Once your objectives are clear and you’ve performed research to understand the market opportunity, it’s time to ideate and brainstorm creative ideas. This can be a fun stage in the process. Your teams can perform blue-sky thinking to step beyond what’s already on the market.

The development of potential solutions involves innovation, creativity, and visualization. It also involves asking questions such as:

• Is there another way to do this?

• How might we solve this for customers?

• What hasn’t already been done in the market?

• What’s the best-case scenario?

• What’s something we haven’t thought of?

• What if users did X instead of Y?

Ideating solutions typically involves:

• Gaining inspiration from a broad range of sources

• Brainstorming potential solutions and ideas

• Problem-solving techniques

• Sketching out ideas and considering how solutions might appear in the real world

4. Prototyping

To test out your ideas, it’s important to create low-fidelity prototypes. This will help make your ideas more tangible. It’s also essential for gaining feedback from potential users.

A low-fidelity prototype is a simple, low-cost version of the potential product. This could be as simple as sketching out a proposed app on a series of pages or using a platform like Figma to create basic wireframes. These prototypes are simple to produce and essential for gaining quick feedback on ideas without much upfront investment.

Medium-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes are more detailed representations. They offer a greater likeness of a final product without the full functionality built in. Examples include:

• Clickable wireframes

• Design layouts

• Interactive visualizations

5. User testing

Once you’ve made the prototypes, user testing—which involves giving potential users a chance to interact with the designs—is essential for gaining feedback, spotting roadblocks, and improving the overall experience.

You may go through the user testing process several times as the prototypes become more advanced. This will ensure the voice of the customer is embedded throughout the entire product design workflow.

User testing is essential to:

• Promote customer-centricity

• Make gradual iterations and improvements

• Highlight key issues early on

• See whether the proposed solutions are solving the key pain points and challenges for customers

• Avoid overdesign—creating solutions that might be aesthetic or impressive, but don’t solve real user problems

• Avoid producing designs that fall short of customer expectations

6. Iteration

Once you’ve collected feedback, embed the most common and most important feedback insights into the designs to build more relevant, meaningful, and user-centric products.

Not all customer feedback will require action, but the issues that have a greater impact on the overall product experience should be prioritized.

If you noticed, for example, that users found it difficult to navigate your website design, consider ways to streamline the offering and simplify the website architecture. If users found it frustrating having to manually enter their contact details in a form, consider ways to simplify the form or enable automated field entering.

The iterations you choose to make will be dictated by the impact of the insights found, balanced with the timescale and budget of the project.

7. Design finalization and development

Once you have gathered sufficient feedback, you would usually create an alpha (and then beta) version of the product. This is a critical aspect of the product design process. It enables your team to gain further user feedback, usually from a limited number of external users.

You can use insights from this stage to fix bugs, iron out friction, and improve incomplete features.

The essential steps of finishing a typical digital product include:

• Design finalization: Designs are updated to reflect essential customer feedback. Detailed designs are completed and handed to the development team to be brought to life.

• Development: The developers translate the designs into code to create an interface and the back-end functionality.

• Quality assurance: This phase ensures bugs are resolved and the product functions as intended. Developers will resolve issues found at this stage of the process before the product launches.

8. Product launch

Once products have been sufficiently tested, they are released to the public.

This stage is usually accompanied by:

• Marketing activities to promote the product

• A pricing and sales strategy

• Monitoring for feedback and issues

• Providing support as needed to users

9. Continuous feedback

Once a product launches, your work is rarely finished. In the world of digital products, optimization is essential to continue improving your product for the benefit of your customers.

As technology advances and changes, so does customer demand. Salesforce research, which surveyed 14,300 people, showed that 65% of customers expect organizations to continually adapt to their changing preferences and needs.

To test the success of products, teams must continue to ask questions such as:

• How are customers reacting to our products? 

• What aspects are unsatisfying? 

• How can we design more seamless, meaningful, and useful experiences? 

It can be tempting to rush through the design process phases to bring products to life. This can cause teams to run into common pitfalls. This may mean key steps are overlooked or that the designs don’t fit a market need.

Focusing on aesthetics over function

As a designer, it’s tempting to create beautiful, aesthetically pleasing products while overlooking functionality. The reality is, regardless of how good a product looks, if it doesn’t meet a market need, it’s useless for customers and the product won’t succeed.

Designers need to balance aesthetics with functionality to create visually appealing products that solve customers’ key problems.

Falling into the overdesign trap

Adding a feature just because it’s interesting, or seems to enhance the offering, isn’t necessarily a good reason to do so. Too many bells and whistles on a product can force projects to run over time and budget, and endless features might not impress your customers if they don’t need them.

Instead, prioritize high-impact features and products that will have the most benefit for customers over “nice-to-have” features that won’t add value.

Additional features can always be added down the track when you have a solid offering in place.

Skipping prototyping

Creating prototypes can take time, but this is a critical part of the design process if you’re to create products that will provide value for your end user.

Prototypes allow you to bring your customer’s voice to every step of the design process.

If you create products in isolation and then release them to the market, you are doing so in the dark. Without customer feedback, you know little about how your target audience will react to your products, whether they will find them useful and satisfying, or whether you’re solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved.

Fortunately, prototyping can save significant time in reworking and investing in the wrong products or solving the wrong problems.

Overlooking accessibility and diversity

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people (16%) of the global population experience disability.

If you design without accessibility in mind, you’re overlooking a large percentage of people.

Beyond the ethical imperative of inclusion, diversity in background, education level, race, language, knowledge, and cultural context influence how people interact with your offering.

Thoughtful design considers these factors to make your products relevant and useful for a broader audience, ensuring no one is excluded.

Design is a critical component of every product we use—whether it’s an app, a website, our computer, or our car. Positive design can be invisible to users and result in intuitive, satisfying, and meaningful experiences without the user being consciously aware of the process behind the scenes.

Good design involves solving key problems for customers, promoting the customer voice at every stage, and avoiding common design pitfalls.

Applying design principles and following a best-practice design process can ensure you bring your customer into the process. You’ll understand what they want and need from your products, so you can provide the most meaningful and satisfying experiences.

Designers and engineers tend to closely collaborate throughout the product design process. Once a designer has finalized the look and feel of a product, including the architecture, user flow, and key design features, the next stage is usually development.

A developer, or engineer, will then work to bring the product to life. In the case of digital products, a developer will translate the design into code to create the front-end and back-end interface of the product.

Designers and developers will collaborate at various stages of the project to create products on time and within the project budget. These stages include:

• Working together on prototypes

• Problem-solving issues

• Testing and validation, continuous refinement

• Compromising on design features