Every time that you look at top brands in the market, one common thing about them is their flawless products. With a carefully designed product, it becomes easy to market, increase sales, and profit. While every business targets to design a winning product, the truth is that this is not an easy task. Many businesses have stagnated or fallen by the way because of mistakes with product design. This post highlights the common product design mistakes and how to avoid them.
Not Understanding Your Product Design Goals
The best company products are crafted at the intersection of performance, aesthetics, and costs. Failing to understand the balance between these three parameters results in crafting products with one aspect superior to others and ultimate failure. For example, if you craft a product with high aesthetics and high price but poor in performance, it will ultimately fail.
In addition to the above three core parameters, it is also crucial to factor the market expectation, what competitors are doing, and intellectual property rights.
Failing to Target the Right Customers
If you fail to target the right clients, your product design is likely to fail. Many companies work on products based on their perceptions about the targeted market but end up failing for not taking a closer look at what clients actually need.
Your goal should be running a robust research unit to identify the market and establish what the target audience wants. Here, you need to aim at addressing clients’ concerns by ensuring your products articulately connect to them.
As mentioned here, it is also prudent to test the product yourself for assurance that it will deliver the expected impact. Then, make sure that your system is responsive so that it can easily modify the product design to cater to emerging consumer needs. This means that the product design should be considered a progressive thing as opposed to a one-time event.
Trying to Reinvent the Wheel
What products are you trying to introduce into the market? If you take a closer look at your product, the chances are that the technology you want to use is already available. Trying to reinvent the wheel can be a big mistake when designing a product. A lot of resources and time ends up being used to simply come up with the technology. This could make the time needed to break even run into years or even kill your business before taking off.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, it is advisable to work with partners who already have the technology and negotiate for a reasonable price. This means that you can start at a higher level and hit the market with a more superior product.
To be successful in your product design, it is prudent to look at it holistically. You need to be dynamic by understanding what the market wants and leave room for improvement. More importantly, you need to understand the above four mistakes and avoid them.
