Product Design 101

Mastering all the elements yourself would be inefficient and difficult at best, and that is exactly why communication skills are very important. Most commercial level product design will involve a team of people who specializes in different disciplines; the flow of information must be communicated clearly to avoid any complications that might cause irreconcilable delays or increased costs.

Usability is essential if you want good word-of-mouth and repeat customers. Even if you managed to get the product inside a household, a product that is not intuitive or comfortable to use will give it a bad reputation. Word-of-mouth is extremely powerful because a person would most likely trust their friends more than the words of a greasy salesman.

Mastering all the elements yourself would be inefficient and difficult at best, and that is exactly why communication skills are very important. Most commercial level product design will involve a team of people who specializes in different disciplines; the flow of information must be communicated clearly to avoid any complications that might cause irreconcilable delays or increased costs.

Materials, engineering and manufacturing. These are all very specialized fields where you want to get the best information and results on. Luckily at this day and age of the global workforce, highly educated specialists can be obtained at a fraction of a price than it did before. Googling design tutorials may be good for designing Marketing material, but when you want a world-class product, you need the right people.

A good product is important, but only if the consumer actually has a good impression of it. Planning the marketing aspects of product design involves in-depth research into the consumer’s taste and lifestyle. The branding of the product must also be innovative or insightful enough to provide a benefit that is desirable to the consumer. We certainly don’t need more useless junk to be used as landfill.

Being green is in fashion. It’s also a nice way to give back to the world. Is your product going to cause the planet to die quicker? Or is it designed to be sustainable? As more people are conscious of these worldly issues, anything that can be reused will not only appeal to consumers in terms of cost, but also a definite bonus for their feel-good factor. And you really do want them to feel good about using your product.

Product safety is very important, and it goes hand-in-hand with product testing. The initial design should have product safety as a high priority. That means no small parts falling out to choke a child or paint that is toxic to skin. With the media and watch-groups paying close attention to product safety recently, you certainly do not want to be treated as a public enemy with a dangerous product.

In product design, knowing how to use CAD software is important, but mastering every design discipline to a high-degree is time consuming and not very efficient. Learning how to encourage and recognize other people’s strengths will definite benefit yourself; it will also allow you to absorb enough of other design disciplines to know how to recognize quality and success. When in doubt, just ask yourself, what can I create to make my life more enjoyable? Answer that truthfully, and you’ll always be ahead of the game.