This comprehensive guide explores a wide array of product design methodologies and techniques. It serves as a valuable resource, offering an in-depth look at the various stages of the product design process. From understanding user needs to ideation and implementation, the article covers a range of tools and approaches used in modern product development.
Whether readers are looking to refresh their knowledge or learn new techniques, this guide provides a thorough overview of essential design concepts and practices.
Card sorting is a technique in user experience design in which a person tests a group of subject experts or users to generate a dendrogram or folksonomy. It is a useful approach for designing and evaluation of:
A market analysis is a quantitative and qualitative assessment of a market. It looks into:
A market analysis studies the attractiveness and the dynamics of a special market within a special industry. It is part of the industry analysis and thus in turn of the global environmental analysis. Through all of these analyses, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a company can be identified.
A data analyst is someone who collects, processes and performs statistical analyses of data. He or she can translate numbers and data into plain English in order to help organizations and companies understand how to make better business decisions.
Funnel analysis involves mapping and analyzing a series of events that lead towards a defined goal, like an advertisement-to-purchase journey in online advertising, or the flow that starts with user engagement in a mobile app and ends in a sale on an eCommerce platform.
Quantitative researchers seek to gain insights about the intent of people's product usage through patterns in the data they collected.
Quantitative survey research designs are procedures in quantitative research in which investigators administer a survey to a sample or to the entire population of people to describe the attitudes, opinions, behaviors, or characteristics of the population.
Setting the mood is a very important step for any design project. It helps designers and stakeholders get on the same page for the visual aspects of the project. In UX Design and product design, a mood board is a collage of images, fonts, interactions, features, icons, and UI elements to communicate the artistic direction of a project.
A mood board is a type of visual presentation or 'collage' consisting of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition. It can be based on a set topic or can be any material chosen at random. A mood board can be used to convey a general idea or feeling about a particular topic.
User interviews are typically performed with the potential users of a design, as part of an ideation phase or during early concept development. User interviews follow a structured methodology whereby the interviewer prepares a number of topics to cover, makes a record of what is said in the interview, and systematically analyzes the conversation after the interview.
User interviews are where a researcher asks questions of, and records responses from, users. They can be used to examine the user experience, the usability of the product or to flesh out demographic or ethnographic data (for input into user personas) among many other things.
User logs (diaries) of daily activities as they occur give contextual insights about real-time user behaviors and needs, helping define UX feature requirements.
A storyboard in UX is a tool that visually predicts and explores a user's experience with a product. It can help UX designers understand the flow of people's interaction with a product over time, giving the designers a clear sense of what's really important for users.
Definition: A UX story is an account of events from the user's perspective; the events in the story show the evolution of an experience. A successfully crafted story should be compelling and evoke emotion, transcending culture and expertise. It can describe a current, as-is situation, or be set in the future.
Traditional empathy maps are split into 4 quadrants (Says, Thinks, Does, and Feels), with the user or persona in the middle. Empathy maps provide a glance into who a user is as a whole and are not chronological or sequential.
An empathy map is a collaborative tool teams can use to gain a deeper insight into their customers. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment.
Empathy mapping is tool that really helps you get to to know your customers. By understanding what your customers think, feel, say and do you can develop rich insight which helps you to identify genuine issues, problems or concerns that your customer may have right now.
User feedback is information collected from users/customers about their reactions to a product, service, or website experience.
In usability engineering, a focus group is a survey method to collect the feedback of users on software or a website. This marketing method can be applied to computer products to better understand the motivations of users and their perception of the product.
A focus group is a group interview involving a small number of demographically similar people. Their reactions to specific researcher-posed questions are studied. Focus groups are used in market research and studies of people's political views. The discussions can be guided or open.
Customer journey mapping (also called user journey mapping) is the process of creating a customer journey map, a visual story of your customers' interactions with your digital product.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with your company. With the help of a customer journey map, you can get a sense of your customers' motivations — their needs and pain points.
This exercise helps businesses step into their customer's shoes and see their business from the customer's perspective.
An Ecosystem Map is the absolute best way to quickly understand a client's business environment. It shows all the high-level exchanges of value between the client and the groups with which it's interacting.
The ecosystem map is a synthetic representation capturing all the key roles that have an influence on the user, organization and service environment. The ecosystem map is built by first displaying all the entities, and then connecting them based on the type of value they exchange.
Service blueprints visualize organizational processes in order to optimize how a business delivers a user experience.
A service blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components — people, props (physical or digital evidence), and processes — that are directly tied to touchpoints in a specific customer journey. Think of service blueprints as a part two to customer journey maps.
A stakeholder is anyone within an organization who can offer useful advice about the product and ultimately help simplify the design process. Additionally, stakeholders rely on the product's success for their own gain, either personally or professionally. Although these are normally high-level employees, stakeholders can be lower-level employees or even prominent users.
Interviews with stakeholders are one-to-one conversations about a specific topic or issue. Stakeholder interviews provide a broad overview of the interviewees' opinions about a specific topic that may reveal hidden concerns or ideas that would not be expressed in response to a set number of specific questions.
In the context of UX design, a mental model is what the user believes about how user experience works. Mental models are built in a user's brain and are based on what they know from past interactions with websites, mobile phones, and other interactive products.
A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences.
A contextual task analysis, or contextual inquiry, is a user research method that applies ethnographic observation and one-on-one interviewing to understand the task procedures that users follow to reach their goals. The researcher silently observes the user at work in his or her natural work environment and notes any tools and people that support the user as they work toward task goals.
The 5 W's: Who, What, Where, When, Why. The Five Ws are questions whose answers are considered basic in information gathering or problem-solving.
SWOT analysis is a strategic planning technique used to help a person or organization identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to business competition or project planning.
A SWOT analysis gives you detailed insight into a company and its position in the market.
UX value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered, communicated, and acknowledged. It is also a belief from the customer about how value will be delivered, experienced and acquired.
The value proposition of a product provides one of the most important meeting points for user experience design and marketing. Although it deals mainly not with serving the customer but selling, it involves matching their needs with your product.
A UX roadmap is a high-level, strategic, living artifact that prioritizes and communicates a UX team's future work and problems to solve.
The UX design process can be divided into four key phases: user research, design, testing, and implementation. While the UX design process does typically take place in that order, it's important to note that UX is an iterative process.
A stakeholder meeting is a strategic event for introducing stakeholders to each other, gaining commitment to usability and defining usability objectives based on business objectives. Also known as a "Kick-Off meeting".
UX workshops are intensive collaborative sessions used to solve problems and enable progress on a particular challenge throughout the design timeline. Workshops enable participants to come together for a concentrated time of idea generation and hands-on activities that allow them to achieve an actionable goal.
A pain point is a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing. In other words, you can think of pain points as problems, plain and simple. Like any problem, customer pain points are as diverse and varied as your prospective customers themselves.
In UX, the method is used to organize research findings or to sort design ideas in ideation workshops.
The Affinity Diagram is a method which can help you gather large amounts of data and organise them into groups or themes based on their relationships. The affinity process is great for grouping data gathered during research or ideas generated during Brainstorms.
Task analysis is the analysis of how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task.
Task analysis is the process of learning about ordinary users by observing them in action to understand in detail how they perform their tasks and achieve their intended goals.
A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on your current (or ideal) customer. Personas can be created by talking to users and segmenting by various demographic and psychographic data to improve your product marketing.
A persona, in user-centered design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Marketers may use personas together with market segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments.
Five whys is an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question "Why?". Each answer forms the basis of the next question.
Product goals represent the crucial accomplishments needed to make your vision a reality. They highlight how the product is going to support the business and are often stepping stones to accelerating business growth. Goals should be easy to understand, actionable, and achievable.
A competitive audit helps you track where your competitors are and what makes them more visible online. The goal is to discover what is working for other people in your industry, so that you can make those strategies work for you, too, to gain a competitive advantage.
A competitive analysis is a strategy where you identify major competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you can create solid business strategies that improve upon your competitors. Competitive analysis helps you learn the ins and outs of how your competition works.
A competitive analysis identifies your competitors and evaluates their strategies to determine strengths and weaknesses relative to your brand. A competitive analysis often includes a SWOT analysis that helps the marketer define a competitive marketing plan.
A design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process that uses design thinking with the aim of reducing the risk when bringing a new product, service or a feature to the market.
A design sprint is a design thinking method used to solve complex problems throughout co-creation, rapid prototyping, and qualitative testing with targeted users.
Sketching is a very efficient way of communicating design while allowing designers to try out a multitude of ideas and iterate them before settling on one.
By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.
Dot-voting is an established facilitation method used to describe voting with dot stickers or marks with a marker pen. In dot-voting participants vote on their chosen options using a limited number of stickers or marks with pens — dot stickers being the most common.
Dot-voting (also known as dotmocracy or voting with dots) is an established facilitation method used to describe voting with dot stickers or marks with a marker pen. In dot-voting participants vote on their chosen options using a limited number of stickers or marks with pens — dot stickers being the most common.