Your Ultimate Guide to the Product Design Process

What is Product Design?

Product design is a process where business needs are balanced alongside the voice of the customer, and here at Byte Orbit, we view our product design process as our secret sauce. By using our unique recipe, which we adapt according to our customers' and clients' needs, we create digital products that solve business and user requirements. In this article, we give you a sneak peek into the frameworks we use when designing and building great user experiences.

Immersion and Scoping

The first step in the product design (PD) process is to understand what the client hopes to achieve with the project, where the idea originated from, or what the problem is that they need help to solve.

If there is an existing body of work (initial research, concepts, ideas, pain points, focus areas, opportunities identified, etc.) that has been completed by the client, then the PD team will prepare an immersion session to bring the client team and the PD team together to unpack the client’s initial ideas.

Scoping a project involves understanding the specific goals, timeframes, deliverables, and scale of work for the proposed project. This gives the client and our team the opportunity to establish a solid understanding of the expectations for the project and required deliverables.

The Discovery Phase

The discovery phase usually takes place in two parts; initially, with secondary research to understand the context of the problem we are aiming to solve, and secondly, with primary research in the form of user interviews, expert interviews and focus groups.

The discovery phase is an iterative process and is not linear. This phase consists of interviews, workshops, desktop research, field research, and prototyping. It is essentially a deep dive into the problem you aim to solve to understand the pain points and opportunity areas.

This is the ‘Empathise’ phase of the process, where our product designers gain an in-depth understanding of the user’s needs, pain points, and motivations. The research gathered from this phase will help to prove or disprove any initial assumptions and equip our team with the knowledge to write recommendations for the potential solution(s).

Ideation and Validation

The Ideate, Design, Validate and Test phase is an iterative process where each step can take place independently or in conjunction with the other steps.

The primary goal of this phase is to come up with the concepts (ideate), test these concepts through user testing (validate) and create prototypes of the concepts (design). And not to mention the ultimate goal of having a happy client with an approved concept and minimum viable product (MVP).

For better understanding, let’s take a look at the below diagram to understand each phase independently and see how they work in parallel to one another:

In the Ideation Phase, ‘blue sky’ ideas are conceived, tested and validated with users. This phase will involve internal ideation workshops and design sprints with the clients, and sometimes we will even host ideation sessions with users. A design sprint is a process of quickly solving complex problems and validating ideas through design, prototyping and testing. The ideation phase allows us to ‘think big’ without limits and to come up with our ideal solution for the problem.

Validation involves taking low-fidelity prototypes, or sometimes wireframes, to users to obtain feedback on the concept. (These prototypes are the first tangible elements of the proposed ideas or solutions. They are lean layouts or sketches of the concept and give teams an initial idea of how it will look.) We use this feedback to validate the concept, gain more feedback on the solution, and iterate on the designs. This ensures that the concept solves the initial problem identified in the scoping session and answers the project mandate. Once the concept has been approved and the MVP clearly defined and agreed upon, a high-fidelity prototype is then made and can be used for usability testing. Once we have completed user testing and design iterations based on the feedback, we are ready to build!

Build Phase

During our build phase, we start preparing our go-to-market strategy, where we use a series of in-house templates and methodologies to create a strategic plan for launch. This ensures that when the product is ready to hit the market, we are prepared with a killer launch plan.

Product Launch and Roadmap

During launch, we spend time creating and refining the user guides or system guides, as well as planning any analytics that need to be captured post-launch. This is also a good time to start planning the product roadmap and scoping new features with the client.

Iteration

Once the product is in the market and in the hands of our users, the magic happens. We begin gathering user insights through feedback sessions to understand if the product is solving the initial problem we identified and to understand how the user is ACTUALLY using the product versus what we initially suspected. All the feedback we gather during the launch of the product is then funnelled into our maintenance streams.

Product Maintenance

Product Maintenance takes place post-launch of a product. It is an ongoing process vital to the success of a product. When we launch a product, we usually launch an MVP to test the product in the market with the users. Based on how the users interact with the product, can we begin to learn how to improve the product for the users over a course of iterations.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed learning a little more about how we tackle product design here at Byte Orbit. These building blocks are truly brought to life through the strategic planning and implementation of our superstar product teams, who analyse each challenge and user type to best fit our process to specific needs.

To learn more about how we implement these steps in our projects, head over to our product design page where we further unpack our approach.