Our Process
Product concept design: What does it consist of?
The digital product concept is the first stage in the concept development/concept design phase. It precedes user stories, use cases, user flow, information architecture, and wireframes. It aims to generate interesting and unique concepts for digital products.
The dictionary definition of a concept defines this term as an accurate, clever idea or design. This linguistic intuition captures the meaning of this term well in the context of user experience.
The digital product concept is often compared to a map that defines the way, distance, and extent of a territory.
This peculiar map also shows conditions, opportunities, risks, chances, resources, and deficits. And, even more importantly, ways to overcome distances and achieve goals.
A product idea is both a business idea and a way of achieving compatibility between a problem and its solution.
At the same time, the idea is to find the best solutions, not from a business point of view but from a user's point of view.
Business goals should be aligned with the users' goals because they determine the possibility of achieving them.
Are You Interested In The Product Concept?
What is the digital product concept?
According to Anu Kankainen's definition, published in the article "UCPCD: user-centered product concept design," a digital product concept created in a user-centered manner represents designers' hypotheses about the experience a future user of a web or mobile application needs. It allows you to adapt the product idea to the target audience.
In the article "What is Product Design?" the authors emphasize that conceptualizing a product combines and orchestrates business goals with user needs.
The goals of UI/UX designers and UX researchers usually have long-term consequences. They can sometimes cause problems in design, business, budget, usability, product, and competitiveness.
The importance of the concept phase is evident in the consistency of the product and the satisfaction it provides.
The goal of UX is to optimize the user experience so that it's possible to create user-friendly products in the long term.
Examining the details and specifics behind the work carried out during product conceptualization will help you understand its relevance. Moreover, the product concept will lay the foundation for creating a detailed design and innovative products.
The digital product concept stage determines the following:
- The functionality of a web or mobile application
- Its business model
- Its place in the market structure — product and brand positioning
Here, the team discusses how the product will look and work and how it will generate costs and profits. How will it compete with products that meet similar needs and similarly satisfy them?
A lot depends on correctly defining needs and how to meet them. At the same time, it's less about seeking functional or technological innovations. Instead, what is much more important is the experience that occurs when using a digital product.
In other words, user experience and usability thinking should lie at the heart of the design process, and their representation should be found as early as the digital product concept phase.
A late implementation will cause many problems — from purely project-based (e.g., it will affect consistency) to business-based (e.g., the product won't achieve the expected market success).
From a pure design standpoint, for which UI/UX designers are responsible, the lack of precise, concrete requirements, definitions, research basis, goals, and functions results in working in the dark. It's just like building sandcastles in the air.
It's a highly uncertain operation based on intuition, speculation, and unconsidered assumptions.
Key elements of the product concept design
You need to consider three elements to create effective and successful design concepts.
Identification of target audience
Before you bring potentially successful products to market, you need to identify the target users that will make these products successful. Digital products must answer users' needs to prove they have a desirable value for potential customers.
Different customer groups will desire various things. Adult customers' desires will be considerably different from children's needs. Trends analysis and user surveys can help you determine precisely what customers want and expect.
Analysis of the market and competition
Once you determine your target audience, you must analyze the market and competition. This will help you and your team determine how the product will differentiate itself from similar products. You can identify features that your product can improve upon.
Aligning users and the company's goals
As mentioned above, users and the company's goals should align. The offered product needs to be consistent with already established brand values. Moreover, it will simplify consistent marketing by keeping brand language and mission in check.
The alignment of these goals will ensure that your company will achieve them.
Digital product concept: Main problems
The digital product concept design always involves the need to determine and estimate the following:
- Market advantages
- Problems that it solves
- Values that it can bring to the lives of its users
- Functions that it offers
- Business goals that it will help achieve
Hence, it's vital to answer these questions comprehensively:
- What problem does the web or mobile application solve?
- Whose problem does it solve?
- What goals are to be achieved through it?
- Why would users want to use the product?
The digital product concept is also used to maintain the correct sequence. Solutions should be tailored to problems, never the other way around.
It's not uncommon for developers and designers to develop web or mobile applications using inverted logic. First, somebody creates functionalities and then looks for needs they can answer.
Startups, not all of them, of course, are often created in just such a way. Therefore, their short market life shouldn't surprise anyone.
A considerable advantage of the digital product concept is the inclusion of boundaries within its framework.
The concept primarily introduces all stakeholders to the product:
- Which you want to build.
- Which you don't want to build.
Identifying these two matters makes it possible to vividly and concretely indicate the scope, expectations, ideas, and patterns. This makes design and research work much simpler and more reasonable.
Benefits of product concept design
We already emphasized that concept design is a vital stage of the design process. This is primarily due to a few crucial benefits.
Clear vision
Working on a product concept allows team members to create a clear and consistent vision. Everyone is on the same page and tries to achieve the same goal, consequently leading to the creation of a successful digital product.
Better decision making
The conceptualization process enables your team to make informed decisions and plan for potential challenges and issues that may arise later in the development.
Efficient distribution of resources
When the project team creates the concept, they can accurately plan the distribution of resources. They can also determine the budget, development and design team size, and the time needed to complete the product.
Flexibility
The concept design phase allows you to make changes to the product at an early stage. Suppose the following situation has occurred: a company decided to change certain product features. Fortunately, the design hasn't left the concept phase, so the team could change and adapt it.
Why is user experience necessary in the digital product concept?
According to the definition proposed by the Interaction Design Foundation, user-centered design is an iterative process in which designers focus on users and their needs at every stage of the product development process.
The goal is to create products that are highly useful and accessible.
The product concept should focus on the experience generated by a user's interaction with a digital product. It's the most important factor in market success.
User experience provides methods, techniques, and research tools that help accurately and reliably diagnose needs and adapt the most appropriate solutions.
At the same time, it's worth remembering that UX operations are concerned with diagnosing problems (diagnostic function) and providing patterns of good design practices (optimization function).
With this knowledge, the user becomes the focal point of thinking about the product.
Considering UX already in conceptual work is not so much optional as necessary, not to say essential.
Thinking about user experience allows you to keep a user's perspective, expectations, and emotions in mind when planning functions and considering usability and value.
It's worth emphasizing that digital product concepts aren't mockups.
Usually, they're a collection of ideas and metaphors that help understand the operation of a future mobile or web application.
A product concept is usually a text document or simply a diagram.
It's also worth noting that another characteristic is significant from the point of view of user experience.
Users highly desire consistency in a mobile or web application. Applications created based on a concept that considers UX requirements are much more consistent products and are easier to develop in the future.
Usability should also be considered at an early stage of product development.
As Jakob Nielsen, one of the founders of the Nielsen Norman Group, defined it, usability has five basic dimensions.
The usability consists of the following:
- Learnability: The ease with which we learn to operate a product
- Efficiency: Performance, a subjective sense of the speed at which tasks are performed
- Memorability: Remembering how the product works
- Errors: The number of errors that users make and against which the product protects them
- Satisfaction: Describes the subjective feeling of satisfaction from the use of a product
An important aspect from the point of view of a design concept, a way of thinking about the product, which Jakob Nielsen also introduced, is to pay attention to its:
- Utility
- Usability
- Usefulness.
A product that has utility is a product that offers all the features that the user expects and needs.
The product has good usability when these functions are simple, fast, and trouble-free.
A product will be perceived as useful only if it has utility and good usability.
Some successful concept design examples regarding digital products include Netflix, Airbnb, Spotify, Duolingo, and more.