What is product design?
Product design is the process designers use to blend user needs with business goals to help brands make consistently successful products. Product designers work to optimize the user experience in the solutions they make for their users—and help their brands by making products sustainable for longer-term business needs.
How can you create the best product or service for your users? Product design is the process of developing experiences to meet user needs and align with business goals and strategies. While UX design focuses on creating captivating user-centric experiences, product design involves navigating the broader roadmap that connects those experiences to your company’s objectives.
Navigating this roadmap can be tricky, but companies like Segment have shown that teamwork makes product design possible. In this guide, we’ll explore what product design is, dive into its biggest challenges, and highlight insights from the Diaxara design process to help you create a solid approach.
Product design process
While different companies may have unique tweaks to a product design workflow, the essentials often remain the same. At Diaxara, product designers collaborate with teams through five critical steps. Consider this product design process to help guide your team’s progress:
Set goals
Company leadership defines the long-term business goal with input from the product team. For example, a goal might be to optimize a marquee product within two years. Although identifying business goals may seem straightforward, it’s one of the most crucial steps. Using a framework like the SMART goal system ensures your product design objectives align with your organization’s mission.
Research
Product designers conduct strategic research or support researchers throughout the process. This phase focuses on gathering information and data-driven insights to help inform your design process. This phase might involve assessing the industry landscape with a SWOT analysis or conducting user interviews to gather additional data
Analyze
Working closely with cross-functional partners, product designers help distill research findings into actionable insights. By understanding user needs and the product’s potential, designers can sketch out approaches to address the user pain points identified during research. Designers
Strategize and plan
The product team proposes a strategy to achieve business goals. This process may include a detailed action plan for the first six months and longer-term goals. The planning stage can help align teams with company goals and customer needs from start to finish, increasing the chances of success.
Execute and launch
The team works together on the project, tracking progress toward bringing the product to market. At this point, the product designer often takes on a UX designer role, gathering user feedback and testing the product or service post-launch. Use a product launch plan template to make the process easier.
Top product design challenges
Every process has challenges, and product design is no exception. Here are the top five product design challenges you might face and how to overcome them to keep your team on track.
Balancing business and user needs
Striking the perfect balance between user and business needs is one of the biggest challenges in product design. Conflicting priorities and limited resources, such as budget and time, can sometimes lead to compromises that impact the user experience.
Designing for accessibility
Making your product accessible to everyone, including users with disabilities, is a critical challenge within the product development cycle. It may require additional design considerations—like color schemes to help with color vision deficiency or screen reader support (a feature FigJam added)—but it’s an investment that reflects your commitment to inclusivity.
Ensuring sufficient team communication
Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings, and delays, and even impact team morale. Improve the quality of your product by making sure efficient team communication is part of your product design process. For example, telecom company BT used FigJam to centralize communication and design systems, which improved business continuity and design consistency.
Navigating technological constraints
The technology available (or unavailable) to your team can impact the design process. Hardware limitations, software incompatibilities, or even storage issues can slow down progress and affect output quality.