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We’ve seen it: startup teams with business people and engineers who value and care about design, but not a designer in sight. As resources are scarce for early startups, it is hard to find experienced designers who are willing to help launch a product on budget. Also, well-trained designers might also be hard to locate because design schools are often separate from regular universities with business, science and engineering departments all on one campus.
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Whatever the reason may be, you are someone who does not have a designer at the moment, but is trying to launch a hard-tech product. We definitely do not encourage developing a product without a designer on the team as you could miss out on:
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- Product market fit - without proper design research and planning, a project team might miss the right product features to effectively solve the key problem and achieve product objectives.
- Usability - good designers understand the utility value of a product and how certain design decisions can offer customers the greatest amount of benefits.
- Brand image - properly trained designers can easily apply their artistic intuitions into commercial contexts to help establish and refine a product brand image. Building an appealing product can be key to fundraising.
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Nevertheless, circumstances prevent many early startup teams from engaging a design professional. As designers who have helped numerous startups without a design team launch their products, we came up with three key suggestions for you to go about the product development process a bit more efficiently without a designer.
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1. Properly Identifying User Pain Points for Product Market Fit
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It is important to understand the competitor landscape not only from a business point of view but also from a design perspective. Pay attention to some of the common problems you see among the different competitor products. Get to know why and how your competitors are currently solving the problem that you are trying to solve by reading reviews and forums, testing their products and conducting user interviews to identify opportunities for improvement. Observe how different users interact with existing products to understand the potential steps or procedures that can be designed better. The enhancement in user experience allows your product to gain a competitive edge to engage more users.
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2. Test Usability To Create a Good User Experience
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Test as many design ideas and options on users as early as possible before you dive deep into engineering the product. This will prevent misdirected engineering efforts and give you better results in a shorter period of time. The most efficient and inexpensive way to test design options is to make a works-like model (Refer to our article on prototyping). The prototype model helps the product team understand basic utility and function and how users interact with the product.
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3. Create a Cohesive Brand Image to Connect With Your Customer
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Create a mood board of similar products that are in the competitor market. Are there different categories of shapes? Identify these common shapes (i,e., lots of edges vs limited/no edges, faceted edges, soft edges). Compile these details together in one page to create a form study mood board. You can take from these form details and translate them over to your product. This exercise helps you establish an overall aesthetics for the product. By evaluating existing products on the market, you are also making sure that your product’s form does not stray out of category to a point where users second-guess its usage.
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Of course, if there is no designer on your project team, ideally you should get one as soon as possible because it will save you a lot of effort in product development and help create a more successful product overall. However, we understand that startups are often working with limited resources and connections. If you have any questions about your hard-tech product, please feel free to reach out to our team in our contact sheet, or at contact@spatialdynamics.design.
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