Are you a web or mobile application creator who aspires to be successful with your product design? Are you struggling to understand what measures you should take to design an ideal mobile or web app that provides a great user experience? Then this article is just for you!
Designing and launching a new product, be it technical or non-technical, is just like creating a piece of art. It is an extremely tough and challenging task that requires a sufficient level of skills, practice, and intuition in order to make a certain product design stand out from the crowd.
The designers and developers must have great expertise and prowess in the field to achieve success with their products. They must also conduct in-depth market research to make the product meet the owners’ or customers’ expectations.
With this article, we will be providing you with the best possible ways in which you will be able to improve the design of your product, whether it is a mobile or web application. We will also mention the actions you need to take to furnish a great user experience by leveling up and enhancing the designs of your applications.
What is Product Design? (Overview)
Product Design is described as the method of involving knowledge, technicality, and innovation to imagine, analyze, create, and recapitulate the objects, ideas, or results intended for large marketing productions. This process requires a highly systemic approach with properly conceptualized, commercialized, and elevated planning schemes.
A product designer must keep in mind to make their products well-designed to thrive and succeed in the marketing competition. They must keep track of the current trends to regularly upgrade as well as enhance the display, originality, longevity, practicality, and functionality of their product.
The designers must also work in line with the product owner’s instructions and interact closely with the other development or design team members in order to consider and address the requirements or problems faced by the users or customers for whom the product has been made.
Also read: Top 10 Best Accessibility Tools For Designers
General Misunderstandings about Product Design
When it comes to product design, people tend to dwell on a few misunderstandings.
- Firstly, they think a great idea is enough to design an ideal product, which is certainly not the case. A majority of products start with a good idea but end up being utterly useless due to the lack of involvement of research data or professional design and development approaches.
- Secondly, it is mistakenly believed that a focus group is enough to collect informative data. Focus groups can only be beneficial if the product to be designed already exists. However, if the product is a non-existent one and is going to be brand new and innovative, you will require well-conducted research on the experience of potential users.
- Lastly, the general confusion between the features and advantages. While creating a product, the designer must explain the advantages the product is going to supply to its users. The product might contain loads of features, but if there aren’t any uses or benefits to the product, it is going to lose its reputation. An individual user is most likely to be convinced and impressed by a product that aims at improving the lifestyle of the user.
10 Ways You Can Elevate Your Product Design to Make It a Success
Designing a product is a challenging task. A product designer must keep a lot of things in mind while designing the ideal product in order to stand out from the other market competitors.
Here, we provide 10 different ways you may consider while trying to elevate your product design and make it a success.
Utility or Benefits
The first and foremost thing that needs to be considered before launching a product is to check its utility or benefits. It is the utmost requirement for a product designer to confirm the usefulness of the product to the users as well as the owner of the product. Otherwise, the essence of creating the product would be left with no value or reason.
Each and every aspect of the product features should serve a valid purpose. The product designer should prioritize product utility and adequately explain the intention or reason behind creating, designing, and launching an individual feature.
Functionality
Having a product design filled with loads of features or elements might seem beneficial from the outside. However, there is always the possibility of them hampering the product’s functioning ability. Adding many features, elements, components, words, texts, or colors might make running and operating the product challenge. Users will quickly abandon a product that does not work smoothly and lags constantly.
They tend to prefer a simple working product device with fewer features over a smart yet slow product with too many features. A product designer must be careful about reducing the number of features to make the product intuitive, functional, and easy to handle.
High Focus
Remaining highly focused on the popularity of your product is of utmost importance. A product designer must strictly target providing customers with the best possible way to satisfy their expected needs.
Proper research can also be conducted to get collective data on the company, competitors, and users to better understand what should and should not be included in the product. Designing a highly innovative and rare product will help it stand out from the crowd and become eligible to compete in the market.
Fixing Problems
The success of a product design is highly proportional to its ability to fix existing problems. Product designers and marketers must conduct thorough research on the day-to-day life problems that the general public face in the real world. This will pave the way for designing a product that corresponds well to solving various problems users face.
Customers are bound to be impressed by a product that convinces them of fixing their real-life problems and provides an addressable solution.
Appearance
The look and feel of a product design matter as much as its practicality, functionality, and performance. Appearance matters in both the case of software products and hardware products.
Sufficient knowledge of aesthetics, glamour, and elegance is a must requirement to be developed by any industrial product designer. The designer should pay close attention to the consumer’s interests in order to decide whether to make the product a simple one or an elegant one. A unique appearance quickly catches the interest of the users and provokes them to consider using it.
Close observation of details
It is imperative to note that customers tend to check the details of any product before deciding to buy it. For this reason, a designer must closely attend to every minor detail of an individual product.
Even the slightest imperfection might hamper the value of the product while competing with several other similar products. Getting the small details correct will attract the customer to buy the product.
Simplicity
When it comes to technical products, users tend to avoid complicated products. A highly complex and elaborate technical product will make it difficult for the users to operate it. Such an experience will make the customers feel frustrated. They will quickly lose interest in the product and won’t hesitate to shift to other handy products.
Designers must build their products in such a manner that both beginners and experts find them simple to handle, strictly avoiding complications.
Innovation
In the modern era of technology, where so many new mobile or web applications are built and launched every day, making your product highly innovative is essential. A majority of the products available are either copied, improved, or amalgamated versions of already existing products.
To make the product a success, designers must try to bring a new innovative approach to designing it and make the customers interested in buying it.
Longevity
A long-lasting product is highly valued by customers. Products that frequently lag or stop working in the middle of operating a task tend to receive unpleasant comments and customer feedback.
Thus, designers must build their products in such a way that they last for a longer period of time. A well-designed, good-quality, durable and long-lasting product never goes out of style in the eyes of the users.
Finalizing
A lot of time and effort is expected from product designers before deciding to finalize their products. The final product must be a satisfactory one.
Every minor detail should be worked out well, along with some finishing touches to set the product apart from other competitors in the market.
Also read: 6 Best Logo Design Software and Tools
How to Elevate Your App Design to Provide a Great User Experience?
As seen above, satisfying users is the utmost priority for product designers. Providing a standardized high level of user experience guarantees not only the success of the product in the competitive market but also the survival of the business.
The following are some of the methods which you can use in order to maintain an app design for a great user experience:
Error-Free Functionality
The first thing that application designers must focus on is perfecting the functioning ability of the applications for users. Users quickly abandon any individual application if it fails to deliver the required experience. A faulty product full of effort creates a lousy impression, and users shift to other better products.
An ideal application must function properly to assist the users with their tasks and produce the required results. This will encourage more and more users to install such a capable application.
Designers must prioritize the key features while building the product plan scheme and design a product that helps users quickly and easily finish their tasks. They must keep in mind to only design relevant functions required for mobile phones if they are designing a mobile app that will increase the number of users to download the application.
Efficient Onboarding
Proper onboarding helps in confirming the value of your application to the users. It displays to the users what they can achieve from the application quickly and efficiently. Users tend to abandon a product application if they face any problems within the first three trials. Due to this, the designers must focus on implementing an excellent onboarding experience to impress and retain the users.
Several strategies can be integrated into the course of onboarding to boost the mobile user experience (UX) to make them keep returning to use the application. The best and most common strategy is through tutorials which execute the method of operating the application. This is a developed way of onboarding, which is very useful in cases of acquainting yourself with hidden functionalities or complex functionalities that the users might not be aware of.
A substantial onboarding reduces the abandonment rates of the application modernization process. It helps retain the users and paves the way for increased, long-lived success. The number of steps required for setting up or logging into the account can be reduced by including several registration options.
Usability
The usability of the application is another requirement for providing a great user experience. It involves the layout of the product’s design, content, elements, and other information which permits the user to fulfill their objectives with the application. This is done by guiding the users with the icons that need to be tapped, clicked, swiped, or selected. The designer must confirm and maintain the consistency of the gestures in every part of the application.
For instance, if a swiping up feature deletes an object, it must remain the same for all the screens involved in the application. The size of links and buttons must also be taken into consideration. They must be designed in a well-spaced manner and easily clickable to keep away from any selection errors.
Reduce Search Effort
The application must be designed to let its users quickly search for what they are looking for. The searches must satisfy their requirements and manage the conversion rates.
There are several search strategies available out there, like keyword search and barcode scanning, to build into your application design. Giving several searching and filtering options guides users to seek out what they want directly. This process will significantly boost conversion rates. The designers must confirm that the search integration does not end up filtering down to nullified results.
Limit User Input
Another thing that designers must be careful about while building a product application is to limit the amount of user input. General user information requirements such as billing or credit card data should be minimal for the applications on mobile devices. Too many entries, registrations, or checkouts often make it difficult for users with a small mobile screen capacity and make them feel highly frustrated.
For this reason, the designer must limit the number of fields and include only the necessary user information requirements. With this, they may also add built-in features like auto-complete, autocorrect, spelling checkers, predictive test assistance, etc. All these will help to reduce the high drop-off rates among the users and maintain the value of the product.
Trust and Security Assurance
Since it is common for most applications to make users accept a long list of permissions, it is essential to build up trust and security assurance among the users. The mobile application must possess brand loyalty by making the users develop full faith and be comfortable using the product. The designers must confirm that they added transparent permission policies which let users manage their private data while sharing it with the mobile application.
For instance, providing applications requiring location sharing helps provide more accurate local information and weather reports for users. Using such clear business policies and practices makes your users feel more secure while accepting the permission.
For retail applications, direct links can be included in order to regulate privacy on a page. To add more trust, badges of credibility can be shown to make users feel secure while sharing their private and financial data within the application.
Integrated Behavioral Gesturization
Gesturization refers to the operations conducted by the users while using the application. Such behavioral gestures include scrolling, swiping, tapping, pinching, etc.
The designer must have a clear insight into how the users will behave and the gestures they are going to make while using the product application. Building an application more familiar with the common actions makes the users feel more comfortable while working on your application. This also helps the whole onboarding process be quicker and easier to handle.
Assistance Offer
A designer must definitely assist users with the created product application. This is done generally by providing various support options. Most users regularly search for the ‘Help’ option in an application’s tab bar or toolbar since it is a common habit of designing products similarly. There are several ways of supplying user support, including customer live support service, live chat service, click-to-call service, frequently asked questions or FAQs service, etc.
Also read: Top 10 Backend Frameworks For Web Development
UX Personalization
A Personalized User Experience (UX) is beneficial as it supplies users with a unique and relevant experience. A designer must try to support the user data whenever possible to show relevant materials and content within the application as well as personalize the user experience. The more the expertise streamlines with the preferences and requirements of the users, the greater the probability of them continuing to use the product application.
The designer could also add the user’s name to the screen to stimulate growth, making personalized testing more accessible and more effective. The design must be made in such a way that it strictly displays the hyper-relevant content for each and every individual user to get the best possible results. Applying a lot of push notifications or executing irrelevant content will only make the users feel annoyed with the product application.
Tactical UI Design
Last but not least, the main thing that can highly impact an application’s user experience (UX) is the quality of its user interface or UI. It is extremely difficult to separate the two disciplines as the user interface (UI) design counterparts to the combined tasks performed by the user experience (UX).
The UI’s focus on the looks, presentation, activity, and feel of the product generates the UX’s focus on optimizing the mobile product application for engaging and practical usability. The designer must tactfully confirm that the products are built in such a way that they provide easy and quick scanning as well as information conveying visual designs. The application must have thorough maintenance of visual consistency with all its design elements, like those of the topography and color palettes.
Building a flawless visual flow helps users easily understand the distinctive contrast between the initial and other design elements to easily meet their requirements. As a whole, it can be said that UI helps in creating a highly aesthetic, pleasing, and compelling design that paves the way for an interactive UX.
Final Verdict
A mobile or web application must be highly optimized to work systematically and satisfy the users. With every passing year comes an increase in the number of competitions in non-technical as well as technical fields, including those related to web or mobile app development. For this reason, it is indispensable to keep the designs of products highly innovative and up to the mark.
Thank you for reading this article! We hope that this detailed article meets your search requirements! All the best for the success of your new product design launch!
Leave a comment