Product Design Blogs

Design luminary Charles Eames once said: “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”

No matter their industry, designers take existing elements and combine them into tools and platforms that help people accomplish their goals.

It’s no accident that you can apply the same lens to thinking about product design.

Design facilitates

Product designers have the power to invent things no one’s ever seen before. New tools that make people’s lives easier, more comfortable, or enjoyable. But they rarely do it alone.

So while a good designer skillfully visualizes and verifies ideas in isolation, a truly great designer collaborates with others to bring ideas to life.

A great product designer positions himself to best facilitate the work of others.

Here’s how a product designer can facilitate teams in several different disciplines:

• Interface design: The product designer can take responsibility for preparing specifications, thinking through edge cases, building prototypes, and keeping an eye on details during incremental development
• Marketing: The designer can adjust product details that might not be vital for daily use, but play a key role in sales. This includes signature and micro- interactions, visualizing features that haven’t been built yet, and identifying functionality that sticks with users.
• Customer support: Through user research and support ticket review, the product designer can identify and address the most important problems users face. Open usability testing sessions and presentations on current research efforts can help immensely.

But today, we’ll focus on product development.

2. Providing expertise during research