Five Common Product Design Mistakes to Avoid
Product designing plays a critical role in determining the future and success of development, manufacturing, marketing, and functionality of any new product. The ripple effect of even an imperceptible mistake in the designing phase can create irrevocable flaws in any of the following stages culminating in product failure, market rejection, or heightened product risk.
Susceptibility to common product design mistakes emerges due to many causes like miscommunicated objectives, misunderstood standards, or disorganized planning. Setting an overarching goal that delves into small details is fundamental to creating a feasible product design.
Here are five common product design mistakes that you should avoid to develop a functional and marketable product:
● Failing to distribute appropriate weightage to the various objectives of the product design
For a product to excel in all regards, its design must find a balance between its quality, usability, and cost objectives. When one overrides the other, the final product will suffer deficiencies in other regards. For instance, if your design emphasizes the aesthetic appeal of the product without taking its usability and application into consideration, you could end up creating a product that doesn’t serve the intended purpose.
Finding a balance between cost, performance, and aesthetics with focused investment in usability is the first step to avoid product design mistakes and achieve good conversion rates.
● Lack of understanding of the target user
Thorough market research is essential to identify the requirements of your target users. By analyzing the user purchase paradigms and feedback reports on your competitors’ products, you can pitch the unique selling point that sets your product apart from others of the same kind.
A common mistake that inevitably arises in the product designing phase is your tenacity to design according to your personal preferences while pushing the intended users’ needs into the margins. A product designed with self-interest is more than likely to incur an unsatisfactory user experience (UX). An empathetic approach to product designing and development is necessary to create a product version that is closer to the user’s mental model. By adopting a user-centric approach, you can implement an iterative feedback channel with the users to analyze, grasp, and arrive at a conceptual intersection point.
● Overlooking the standards of product testing
Proper product designing is primordial to implementing the design in the development, manufacturing, and marketing phases. For a product to receive the nod from regulatory bodies, you must ensure that it meets the pertinent specifications and standards (quality and safety standards, etc) at the earliest phases of research and development. When your design fails to project the specifications that are particular to your product, the contract manufacturer will end up producing it to meet the existent standards for similar products; as a result, it will ultimately fail to meet the testing expectations set by you or your clients.
Product testing should also consider user-expectation models so that the design will be premised on the objectives of quality, usability, desirability, and user satisfaction.
● Ignorance about the market trends
Product designing and development must factor in the dynamic trends in the industry to achieve reasonable conversion rates. The influx of new products into the market leads to a rapid shift in user expectations and demand. If you don’t stay on the ball, the product design will not be able to incorporate revisions and updations that would satisfy the target users’ desires regarding the utility, performance, and usability of the product. The ability to adapt to changes and identify new opportunities contributes to the success of product design and development. Insights into the trend should be premised on a broad gamut of methodologies and techniques to determine the nature of the demand curve in various geographical and temporal settings. The data gathered through various means should be inclusive of your assumptions and predictions about the future trajectory of the curve.
● Overestimation of strengths and capacity
A typical product design mistake that leads to debilitating developmental delays and an unwarranted increase in cost is when you try to overreach towards objectives beyond your ability. Overestimation extends to ineffectual management of material and human resources and disorganized planning models, creating fluctuations in your investment-profit outlines.