Product Design
The duties will change from project to project, and even the job title may differ. Product designers are sometimes known as Experience Designers, Information Architects, or UI or UX Designers. In many cases, product designers perform all these roles, all at the same time.
01. Empathy
To develop desirable products and services, you need to understand your users and what they want and need. We should take a moment to think about the expectations you have for this product. What roadblocks and pain-points do they face within this context?
02. Define
When all of your findings are gathered from the empathize phase, I'll piece them together. What patterns or common themes do you observe? In addition, what are the current challenges faced by the average user.
Once we’ve organized or findings, we’ll define the problem statement. A problem statement—sometimes called a point of view (POV) statement—outlines the issues or challenges that we need to address.
03. Ideate
After carefully thinking through the problem at hand and reviewing the needs of our target customers, we are clear on who will use the product and what we need to do in order to solve their problem. As we brainstorm solutions, more come to mind.
During ideation, the team is challenged to come up with big, creative ideas, as well as thinking of ways the product can work from all angles. We hold ideation sessions in order to generate as many ideas as possible—regardless of what the acoustical budget may be. For maximum creativity, ideation sessions are often held in Fig Jam.
04. Prototype
Prototyping is where we turn ideas into something tangible which can be tested on real users. It's vital to the success to make sure we maintain a user-centric approach, allowing us gather feedback before jump into developing the entire product. By doing this, we ensure that we are solving the users' problems before we move forward with the design process.
05. Test
Finally, we proceed to the testing phase. Here, we test our product and observe how it interacts with our users. This is a valuable way for us to gather feedback from your users and observe how they move through our product.
After reviewing and collaborating on our findings, we will go back and iterate on the design and resubmit it for testing once the improvements have been made. More often than not, testing tells us that the empathy stage is not accurate and that some more ideation needs to be done before the next stage of prototyping.