The main goal for any organization is to create a product that receives wide acceptance in the market and yields maximum profitability. Huge financial investments and all sorts of technicalities implemented in the marketing of products cannot guarantee success until and unless a human-centered approach is adapted for designing the product. The product design element forms the most critical part of product development because, in an iterative process of developing any product, creativity in design thinking will lead to the product that the user seeks.
Product design is the aspect of manufacturing industries that have created fierce competition in the market. No wonder professional courses for designing products are witnessing an all-time high; design thinking is the ability or the idea that involves creating solutions to problems with technological feasibility and viability available today. Empathy is the essence of a design thinking approach because the makers and designers step into customers’ shoes to analyze the expectations and to comprehend their requirements for a particular product they seek.
Design thinking forms the framework of any product design, and apart from being an interactive learning process, it works in the backend to come up with solutions for real-world problems for real people. It provides clarity from the perspective of market research and also in understanding the defined needs of potential customers and how the product is valued in the marketplace. So, how exactly it works, and what are its tenets and principles? Let us dive deeper into these details:
There are four D’s to keep in mind when it comes to incorporating a design thinking skill. These acronyms are useful in keeping things generalized and helping the teams to focus on what they are trying to achieve.
Discover: This stage is about researching the potential problems encountered by the users in relevance to any product. To understand the product’s target audience, the UX (user experience) aspect of the design is used to receive bulk data which will help generate ideas.
Define: Clarity is of utmost importance before the development process begins, which means a proper definition of the associated problem and the solution that will be delivered in the form of products. Only after this the design team will be able to use a solution-based approach.
Develop: After all the elements are well defined, development begins for the final product, and prototyping and testing are also done at this stage only.
Deliver: The product is introduced among the users to see if it is adding some value to their lives or whether they can use the product to solve issues that existed earlier. That is also known as the testing phase because various other experimentations are conducted to analyze the product’s acceptance rate among its users.
The interesting part about the design approach is that we humans are at the forefront of any design creation process; our preferences, choices, needs, and fondness are the determining factors for designers to come up with the human-centered design. Suppose anyone is looking forward to building a career in this domain. In that case, multiple online design learning platforms are available, and some, like Domestika, are free for passive learners who cannot afford to enroll as registered students.
