The most crucial part of creating your invention is the product design process. Although an inventor may have a good idea of what they want to create, a lot of them fall short when it comes to execution and become frustrated when their ideas never come to the light of fruition.
Often this is because they are missing integral preparatory steps and a clear direction for their product vision. Having a well-developed and clear product design strategy is the best way to ensure that your ideas come to life and have the best possible chance of achieving success.
Drawing on our experience working with inventors and startups throughout North America, the MAKO Design + Invent team has detailed the core stepping stones you must courageously cross as an emerging inventor to realize your brilliant ideas and create a successful product.
Product Design Stepping Stones
The First Stepping Stone: Define the Problem
The first and most important step when developing a clear product design strategy is defining the problem that your product idea will solve. If you look at every product around you – you’ll notice that they all serve a purpose. Their purpose is to present a solution to an inconvenience that a large percentage of the population faces daily.
Since successful products essentially serve as solutions to problems that exist within society or a certain field of interest that niche audiences experience, the first thing you need to do is identify a problem that isn’t being solved effectively or at all with what is currently available on the market.
Once you’ve identified a pressing problem, you need to figure out who exactly experiences this problem – whether it be a mass audience or a niche group of people. Knowing who you want to make your product for is integral to the product design process and will make marketing easier further down the line.
One great way to identify and understand your target audience is to create persona charts that detail the characteristics, needs, and preferences of each prospective consumer your product may appeal to. This process will require research!
The Most Important Stepping Stone: Research
The product design process almost always necessitates extensive research if you want to create something truly great. This is an essential part of any product design strategy, as a variety of considerations need to be researched to ensure your product will resonate with your target audience, perform at its maximum capacity, and stand the test of time.
Once you understand what problem your product will set out to solve, it’s time to research who will benefit the most from its use – basically who encounters the problem the most frequently – and what already exists within the market to ease this pain point.
Looking at similar products that already exist in your targeted market will provide information on your direct competitors, including how they strategically market their products and any gaps they are failing to fill for consumers.
From researching your competition, you can get a good idea of the business models and strategies that your competition uses and what you can do differently to stand out, enabling you to create a strong business design model. Knowing who your competition is will also help with developing clear goals for what you want to achieve with your business.
The other area you need to research is your target audience. In addition to understanding who they are – their varying personas – it’s important to understand what they go through when they face the inconvenience your product aims to solve.
By empathizing with your target audience and placing yourself in the situation they experience, you can identify the primary functions your product should possess, as well as how to design your product to provide an optimal user experience. Understanding your audience’s experiences essentially gives you a clearer vision of how your product will work and what it should look like.
The Hardest Product Design Stepping Stone: Brainstorming
Once you have garnered an advanced understanding of who your audience is, the problem they face, and other options available in the market that attempt to solve it, you have reached the hardest stepping stone in product design: brainstorming your product design. This is when you pinpoint your product’s primary function(s) and purpose.
Brainstorming is by far one of the hardest parts of product design because, unlike researching and defining your product, you have to come up with the design largely using your own creativity. You’ve looked at your competition, so you already know what exists and what is currently working, but the tough part is brainstorming a new product that is unique and innovative.
Since a great amount of creativity is needed during this part of the design process, it’s best to surround yourself with inspiring and motivating content or settings. Additionally, it’s important to give yourself breaks during this step so you don’t burn yourself out or become frustrated and abandon your idea entirely.
Another way to brainstorm a great product design is to collaborate with others around you who have a similar vision and business acumen – perhaps a business partner or a family member who will be a part of your future small business.
You can also reach out to a professional product development firm like MAKO that has amassed a team of world-class designers and engineers with the requisite experience and knowledge to ideate a solution that fulfills your vision.
An Inventor’s Favorite Stepping Stone: Implementing Your Solution
Implementing the solution you’ve brainstormed to solve your target audience’s pressing problem is the main goal of product design. Now that you’ve researched your audience and target market, and ideated how your product will function and look – the next step is realizing your invention idea by finally creating your product!
There’s a variety of approaches you can take when developing your product, but what is most important is that you follow a strict product strategy so that your time, effort, and costs are all used efficiently, thus, ensuring nothing is wasted! The best way to do this is to create a prototype.
It’s important to keep in mind that at least a few different types of prototypes are typically built before you arrive at the pre-production version of your product. Essentially, the point of this step is to create the tangible version of your invention idea that you can use for testing, marketing, and securing investors.
Want to learn everything you need to know about prototypes? Check out this informative and in-depth blog that discusses prototypes and the different kinds here!
An Often-Missed Stepping Stone: Using Feedback
A mistake to avoid is thinking that once you have your first prototype, you are just about ready to mass produce your product for store shelves. Creating your first prototype is just another small step within the series of stepping stones that make up the product design process. However, it does give you the valuable opportunity to experiment and feel out how well your product will do in the market.
It’s in your best interest to meticulously analyze not only your first prototype but every prototype created during this stage. You want to ensure that any potential design flaws or inefficiencies are identified as early on as possible.
A great way to judge the performance and feel of your product is to ask for prospective customer feedback. Ideally, this would be done by sending a few mock prototypes to early fans or backers who have supported your funding efforts and are both interested and invested in your product idea.
Another way to gain feedback is to examine the economic viability of your product. A huge concern for upcoming business owners and inventors is the cost of building their products.
As such, it is best to explore different materials, vendors, and development methods for your product to identify the most cost-effective approach. Also, make sure to evaluate the market when considering your price point so it is fair to offer consumers and ensures profitability for yourself.
Finally, another important aspect of your product you will want to gain feedback on is its environmental impact. Try to make it as environmentally friendly and sustainable as possible! This will not only attract customers who are environmentally conscious of their carbon footprint – which is a rapidly growing market segment – but also contribute to the establishment of a healthier, resource-plentiful world.
The Final Stepping Stone: Improve/Redesign
The final step in the product design process, as well as the most anticipated, is accumulating all of the feedback you’ve collected on your first few prototypes and creating a new, improved version of your product.
Some factors to consider when improving upon or redesigning your product are:
- Cost-efficiency – making your product more affordable to produce and for your consumers
- Material – making a product that feels better and easier to use
- Aesthetics – fine-tuning any important details that’ll make your product look better and of higher quality
- Incorporating Branding – adding a logo, brand colors, a slogan, or a specific image to the product design
Don’t make the common mistake of sending your product to the production stage to debut in the market after one round of improvements. This stage should be completed a couple of times until you definitively feel confident that your product fulfills its function flawlessly, effectively solves the problem it was designed to, and is built in a way that is appealing and comfortable to use.
Having multiple prototypes is never bad for product strategy because it maximizes your product’s chances of success upon entering the market.
If you have a great new invention idea and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO today and visit our website to find out more. Or feel free to give us a call at 1-888-806-MAKO, and we can set you up on a call with our product strategist!
About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!
1-888-806-6256
info@makodesign.com