Design Think

Techniques to Design Amazing Products and Services

The success of a company depends mainly upon the quality of the products it develops and sells in the market. A successful product needs to be unique and should be according to the requirements of the customers. A good product becomes its own marketer as every time it is used, it delights its users, which makes them the advocates of the product. We can observe this phenomenon in some of the winning products in the market. A winning product has great design, quality and gives satisfactory experiences to its users.

Few companies have mastered the art of product design and they are extremely successful in the market with high profitability and growth. These companies use the product design skills as their competitive advantage and protect it like trade secret. In fact, the process of creating great products is not complex. It is a set of tools and methods which, if used properly and sincerely, can support any design team to develop amazing products. We have tried to expose these methods and devices in this course.

Design as a subject seems to be a complex topic, reserved only for experts with huge budgets and expertise. This course will change everything through its simplicity, value, and strength. The objective of the course is to gift the power of design to every person who is interested in building great products and services. We will discuss a large number of techniques to develop design thinking and to utilize the specified devices to design winning products and services which will delight the customers.

The specified devices can be used by any sincere person looking to design products. The simplicity of the devices is evident from the fact that even a layperson, with no knowledge about product design, can understand and use these devices. A successful product needs to be holistic, equipped with innovative marketing, superior quality and emphatic support. An innovative design of a product with weak support cannot get success in the market. Also, common sense is a necessity to design products and services which the customers in the market will embrace.

The products are differentiated by their value proposition, quality and features. An excellent product has great design, which evolves from the culture of the company where everybody is serious about design and focuses on improving it consistently. A great design evolves mainly from the attitude rather than technical expertise.

It has always been difficult for companies to create great products. Some companies hire highly qualified technical experts to create the magic, while others outsource the product design process. Sometimes, the responsibilities of creating new ideas and products lie on few elite individuals, in other cases R&D department bears the complete responsibility of developing successful products. In most cases these efforts fail. The main reason for this failure is the wrong approach.

The most important aspect for developing new ideas about products and subsequently designing it requires a proper methodology, which is generally simple but effective. Every successful company has their set of method to design the products but the fundamental ideas remain same. This course tries to reveal the effective but simple methodology of designing the great products.

The methodology discussed in the course has four segments and is called READ Technique. READ stands for Research, Experience, Analyze and Discover. ‘Research segment’ focuses on capturing and analyzing the information available in the market, ‘Experience segment’ focuses on checking out the views and ideas generated, ‘Analyze Segment’ focuses on observing the aspects for product and ‘Discover Segment’ focuses on surveys and interviews to understand the market needs. Each of the four segments has several devices and methods specified in this course, which would help the professionals in designing a great and winning product.

To design a great product the designers need to focus on a specific area of the design process. The specified segments and devices in the course would serve the designers by focusing their attention to each area of the design process. Each device described in the course briefly describes it, specifies its importance & value, explain the way to use it and supported by an example to describe it.

The design devices list specified in this course is exhaustive and every device would not be suitable for your projects. Design team needs to identify and list the devices to be used for a specific project. These devices would motivate the design team in various ways by suggesting them relevant methods to solve the design problem. We need to remember that design is fun and it creates value.