The 5 phases for product design
This article is a translation of the following article published on our corporate website:
On today’s post we will be writing about product design process. Marko Vuletič wrote a few years ago an interesting article about the 5 phases of product development process.
He put aside together Design Thinking and Lean UX and got to this graphic that we are going to review :
Though his article is not available, we have our notes and will be sharing them with you.
Customer validation
It all starts with an idea (or a hypothesis) that we want to transform into a product. Hypothetically, our idea is a problem that a potential customer needs to address.
But before start building a solution, we need to verify that our potential user/customer/client actually exists. But instead of digging deeper into this, we will recommend you a book: Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win, where he develops his Customer Development methodology.
Problem validation
The main goal of customer validation is to find group of users who share the same pain point. And how can we achieve that? Using research.
Finding pain points through field observation will help us to get insights and analyze those data to find patterns. And, of course, we need to use empathy to better address customer’s issues.
Concept validation
As far as we know customer’s pain points and issues, we can start designing a concept to solve them.
Be careful: if you start designing without taking time to research, your project will most likely fail. Taking decisions based on biased assumptions is the best path to failure.
Experience validation
Once the concept is validated, it’s time to start building the final product. This is the key part of the whole process as this stage (along with the following one) will affect final quality if your product.
Bad execution can be solved later, with product iterations and new versions, but a bad designed solution can’t, as it will produce flaws difficult to solve and it will most likely force to start over again.
Technical validation
This is where you can release your final product and will run the final tests to fine-tune the product itself.
Beta testing can be best tool at this stage as it helps fine-tuning while avoiding user frustration, as you can get precious analytics data to check and re-check to improve the product.
Conclusions
Marko Vuletič’s approach puts together to work both Design Thinking (phases 1–3) and Lean UX (3–5), making Concept Validation a mixture of both of them.
Using this system, your product will have more chances to success as you will be discovering your customers’ needs and the issues they face. This is something that we have to insist, as not researching enough can result on a non-satisfactory user experience.
At Torresburriel Estudio, we work designing digital products, enhancing customer experience through research and user testing. If you are looking for help from UX professionals, contact us.
