A complete guide to product design: definition, process, and challenges

Product design is a process that involves juggling several sets of considerations at the same time—creative and analytical, visual and logical. 

Whatever you design, your approach should balance your business's goals with an understanding of your prospective customers’ behaviors, needs, wants and frustrations—and mix these considerations with a little aesthetic know-how. 

This article offers an overview of the science and art of product design: what it is, why it's important, and how to do it—as well as 3 challenges to beware of along the way. 

What is product design? 

Product design is the process of imagining, creating, developing, and refining products that meet specific market needs and solve user problems. The process has the following characteristics. 

• It’s multi-step and multi-disciplinary, spanning research, analysis, prototyping, and testing 

• It’s user-centric, based around the needs of customers or would-be customers 

• It’s business-oriented since designs must align with the strategy and market position of your business 

• It’s never-ending since designers improve their products based on user feedback—a back-and-forth practice that can go on indefinitely 

Product design is typically handled by both product managers (PMs) and product designers, where PMs create a product development strategy and product designers lead design teams to translate product features into great user experiences through testing and iterations. 

You may also see product design called ‘industrial design.’ However, generally industrial design relates to physical products and product design relates to digital products like websites and apps.

What’s the difference between product design and UX design? 

UX design is a part of product design that centers on the product’s ease of use, attractiveness, and user experience (UX). Product design also involves improving the user experience, but in context—whilst also keeping in mind process, cost, and the brand’s position in the market.  To put that another way, a UX designer approaches designs by prioritizing the user's needs and experiences, while a product designer approaches designs by thinking holistically about all aspects of a business. 

Why is product design important? 

It’s fundamental for companies to invest energy and resources into product design. After all, what could be more central to a business than its product, its offer to the world? Product design is important because

• It ensures that customer needs are central to your business. When the product design process is well-executed, users’ needs are thoroughly understood, analyzed, and met. 

• Great product designs sell themselves. Designing your products well creates a virtuous circle: it makes it easier to attract customers and retain them. This translates to business success. 

• Great products support branding efforts. If your product is well-designed, it’ll be easier to sell the vision for your brand, and get your company name known for all the right reasons. 

What does a strong product design process involve?

A strong product design process is based on design thinking. Coined by Tim Brown and David Kelley of IDEO, design thinking is a technique for pragmatically resolving problems through human-centered design. 

It involves using what you know about your customers to invent a future for them—a future in which a new product solves one of their problems. Then, build and test prototypes of that hypothetical product to see what your customers respond well to and refine your design from there. 

“The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you’re trying to design for…the people that you’re entrusted to help. Once you understand what they really value, it’s easy because you can mostly give it to them.”

 David Kelley, Co-Founder, IDEO

In its simplest terms, the 2 main principles of strong product design are 

• Empathy: great product design is user-centric—it starts with investigating and deeply understanding your customers’ needs, drivers, and pain points

• Iteration: it’s crucial for product designers to constantly test and tweak their products to keep up with shifting market demand and customer needs 

Successful product design: a 5-step framework

Follow this methodical, 5-step process to design products that are likely to succeed with their target market. 

1. Conduct product research

Thorough research is an essential part of product design. You need to know not only who will be using your product, but also why and how they’ll be using it. To conduct this research, you should: 

• Create user personas—semi-fictional archetypes of your users—to understand who your users are and how they move through the buyer’s journey. This helps teams design products that meet user needs. 

• Perform market research. Investigate which products exist in your market. What features do they offer? What do they look like? How well do they address customer needs and problems?

Conduct interviews. Speak directly to people within your target audience to understand how they view you and your competitors. Ask questions to get a comprehensive understanding of how people actually use your competitors’ products. 

Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Interviews tool makes it far easier to schedule and conduct user interviews. Host, record and transcribe interviews with users in your network, or browse our diverse database of over 200,000 participants to find the right people to speak with.

2. Define the problem

Once you know the desires and pain points of your target audience, narrow down the problem(s) you’d like to solve for them. Ask yourself: “What does our product need to address?” and “How are my competitors addressing it?” 

Use your product research to find any gaps in the market and use them to your advantage. 

💡 Pro tip: users’ “why” for using your product is sometimes called a job to be done (JTBD)—which refers to the “job” someone uses (“hires”) your product to accomplish. The JTBD framework considers emotional as well as functional aspects of the problem you’re addressing for users. For example, if you’re a takeaway cafe selling milkshakes to commuters on their way to work, you might think the problem you’re solving is that commuters are thirsty or hungry. 

But, when you speak to your users, you might find out that they buy milkshakes when they’re bored, perhaps on days when they can’t find a good podcast for the drive. In that case, the JTBD users “hire” your product for is: “I’m bored and would like a little treat”—this would influence your design choices. Use the JTDB framework to refine the core problem your product will solve. 

3. Develop potential solutions

Ideate a variety of ways to solve your users' problems. Here are a few techniques to do so:

• Mindmapping—a visual way to connect ideas around a central theme. Start with your main idea in the middle and then create branches with related ideas.

• Brainstorming—a timed group activity where people come up with as many ideas around a theme as possible.  

• Storyboarding—creating a visual sequence of how you expect users to interact with your product, like a comic strip. It helps teams envision potential pain points, and issues, and get a feel for product experience.

• Reverse brainstorming—the opposite of brainstorming. Instead of coming up with ways to fix a problem, your team will brainstorm ways to make the problem worse. This unconventional way of thinking increases creativity and helps teams grasp the issues users face.

4. Create prototypes 

There’s no substitute for building a prototype to think through the practicalities of an idea. Once you’ve found a good solution to a real user problem, start designing a rough-and-ready minimum viable product (MVP) or prototype. 

This could mean wireframing, or building out pages with limited functionality. Set yourself a time limit for this step to avoid perfectionism—“good enough to test” is the name of the game here.  

5. Test your prototypes 

Test your prototypes out with potential users and see how they react. Remember that design is an iterative process, and every great product is the result of various rounds of user feedback. 

Use this product experimentation framework to make changes to your prototypes in a systematic way. 

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare offers a whole suite of tools for getting feedback and user insights on your prototypes. You could:

• Launch surveys on your prototype page, to capture users’ opinions in the moments they’re browsing it

• Watch session replays—video-style recordings of user sessions—that show how people click, scroll and hover on your prototype pages 

Run unmoderated user tests: set users a task to complete within your product prototype and watch how they go about completing it. This is useful for spotting any usability issues early on.

Session replays reveal real users’ experiences within your prototype

3 core product design challenges and solutions

There are several challenges that could prevent product designers from reaching their goals. Let’s take a look at what these challenges involve and how you can overcome them. 

1. Research challenges

There’s so much user data out there, via so many different channels and tools, that it would be understandable for product designers and their teams to get overwhelmed and fall into analysis paralysis.

If you’re unsure of which tools and processes to use, here are 4 that are time-tested, affordable, and provide great insights. 

4 time-tested research tools and processes

1. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) based on their pain points, characteristics, purchasing behaviors, and demographics. Use it to determine their most-used channels—and start your desk research there. For example, if you’re researching a horseriding app, you might look at horseriding magazines and forums. 

2. Use social listening tools like Hootsuite or Brandwatch to observe mentions of your brand or product on channels relevant to your target audience so you know what they’re talking about and what they need. For example, if you see people on social media responding positively to a competitor’s product feature, consider incorporating a similar feature. 

3. Predict market demand with Think With Google. It allows you to see popular trends in product searches and their likelihood of success. Then, look at competitor reviews on websites like G2, Capterra, Trustradius, and Google. 

4. Ask for feedback: poll your target audience about potential product ideas or features using polls on Instagram Stories or LinkedIn, or by placing surveys on your website 

2. Design process challenges

Crafting a solid design process involves cross-functional collaboration, prioritizing your product roadmap, and leaving enough room for testing and tweaking. But, it can be hard to find (and stick to) a process that isn’t too complicated or costly. And you don’t want to risk a delay in rollout because your process was too lengthy. 

3 ways to overcome design challenges

1. Encourage stakeholder alignment by ensuring everyone’s using the same tech stack, including your CRM, reporting and product analytics platforms. Integrating all your tools with a messaging tool like Slack also helps keep everyone up to speed on where your product’s headed. 

2. Administer anonymous surveys to your product team for fresh ideas on how to improve your process

3. Explore tried-and-tested project management methods like Kanban or Scrum 

Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Slack integration to keep the whole team abreast of the latest user behavior insights. This mitigates design process challenges by ensuring everyone has the same information about how users are responding to your prototypes. 

Launched a product research survey? Send responses directly to a Slack channel for everyone to browse at their convenience.

Recording session replays on a prototype? Share relevant replays to Slack so that everyone can see how users really behave on your site in real time.

Send Contentsquare’s insights to Slack to ensure your whole team keeps user experience data and feedback top of mind

3. Post-launch iteration challenges

Once you’ve launched your product, you’ll need to monitor customer behavior closely, which helps you refine it later. Sometimes, product designers forget that post-launch product iteration is as important as early development and design. 

3 ways to make sure you’re continuously refining and improving your product

1. Send out customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to gauge your customers' short-term satisfaction with your product. If you receive a low CSAT score, ask customers to provide a reason, so you can get direct insights into their experience. 

2. Watch session replays within your product for a firsthand view of the user experience to see exactly what blocks your customers in their journey or what keeps them exploring

3. Conduct product-market fit surveys, and use your findings to tailor your product to market and user needs, and learn what to prioritize in your product roadmap

Contentsquare’s CSAT Survey template

Take product design to the next level with experience intelligence 

The not-so-secret sauce of effective product design is user empathy. Your design process should start by investigating the needs of your would-be customers. Once your design is out in the world, keep empathizing with these customers, to understand which product improvements they’d like to see. Do this diligently, and your business targets will take care of themselves. 

An experience intelligence tool like Contentsquare helps you get a deeper understanding of customer needs throughout the whole design process—information any good designer needs in their back pocket.