Discover how today’s leading organisations use skilled designers to improve and accelerate the delivery of digital products and services – and how a product design consultancy can help you.
Today, bringing your organisation’s digital products and services from vision to reality requires the expertise of professional designers. Let’s explore how they help you deliver better digital products – and how working with a digital product consultancy such as London-based Elsewhen can ensure your organisation gets the most value from them.
Producing better digital products and services for your organisation
Digital design is a vital resource for your organisation’s ability to serve customers and employees with great digital products and services. Through highly complex and creative work, designers can drive improvement of your business processes and customer experiences. They do the work required to go from strategic thinking and planning – to bringing real digital empowerment for your employees and customers.
This enables a complete rethink of the products and services you offer to your customers – and the business processes and tools your employees use. A digital product design consultancy can help you bring out the best from your own designers – and provide experienced design personnel to work collaboratively with your existing teams.
Skilled and experienced designers of digital products will help your organisation by providing a fresh and pragmatic perspective on your digital offerings. They will work quickly and efficiently to design the best possible digital business tools, processes and products – and bring excellence to your digital delivery processes. The right designers can accelerate and elevate your product operations – whether focusing on a specific aspect, or driving end-to-end delivery.
Providing an outstanding customer experience (CX)
An expert product designer understands that, when it comes to providing great experiences, the demands on organisations are much higher today than ever before. The designer knows that customers and users expect high-quality, delightful experiences – whether they are doing business with you or working for you. For this reason, the product designer will work to help your customers enjoy seamless multi-channel engagements with you that deliver on your brand promise.
The product designer will also help you give your employees the digital products, tools and processes they need to be more productive, reduce stress – and work from anywhere. They will help you gain new clarity into the effectiveness of your organisation’s digital experiences – and the capability to continuously improve them.
Combining design expertise in UI and UX
A proficient digital product designer combines the skills of both user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. Understanding the objectives and desired functionalities for your product, they will research the needs and pain points of your customers or users, and find ways to address them. They map out user journeys and information architecture, determining how people will engage with your product.
Working within this UX framework, they develop the detailed ‘look and feel’ of the UI to create an intuitive brand experience. As digital products are dynamic rather than static, the product designer also thinks in terms of interaction and dynamic content. Having proficiency in both UI and UX enables the designer to move seamlessly between the broad overview and fine detail of your digital product.
An experienced designer will test and validate the product design approach before software engineering proceeds. They design the interface screens that your users or customers will move through to achieve their objectives – and ensure that the user journey is as intuitive and frictionless as possible.
Moving to an iterative design approach
Your digital product design consultancy can help you implement iterative design and rapid prototyping. As the name suggests, iterative design uses a sequence of iterations – incremental improvements based on feedback. Rather than being purely linear, the process moves forward as an agile series of iteration cycles. Each cycle involves design, prototyping and testing – with feedback and insights being incorporated in the next cycle.
Using iterative design and development, you can build better products with much less risk of failure. The approach optimises each part of the product design process and builds confidence for all participants.
Shifting from static wireframes to dynamic rapid prototyping
Modern product design methodology also discards the traditional use of wireframes to develop the product UI – replacing this with rapid prototyping.
Rapid prototyping uses realistic-looking digital mock-ups of pages and screens, rather than non-representative diagrams. These “high-fidelity” prototypes are built with the same digital technologies as the final product –HTML, CSS and JavaScript – so they can have clickable UI elements and accurately demonstrate how user interactions will work. From the start, stakeholders and testers are given a much clearer vision of how the final product will look and function.
Using these technologies means that moving from prototypes to usable products is a relatively seamless journey. Annotations from designers and developers can be included as comments within the actual HTML code during the process, rather than existing as separate and disconnected documentation.
The designer will create and test high-fidelity interactive prototypes with users to obtain their feedback. In this way, they shorten feedback loops and can iterate quickly and incrementally. Presenting even a small set of screen designs can make it easier for non-technical stakeholders to imagine a real working product – and provide valuable feedback. This prototyping is also a great vehicle for building positive momentum and buy-in across your organisation.
Collaborating closely with engineers in an agile manner
Experienced product designers work closely with engineering colleagues in integrated teams to enable end-to-end product delivery capabilities. They understand the fundamental principles and requirements of both design and engineering – so will never propose solutions that cannot be built.
The product designer’s technical understanding makes their team relationships and working processes more agile and efficient, so decisions and actions can be made quickly.
A product design consultancy will help you bring designers and engineers together on the same page, from the early stages of product creation. Getting engineers involved in the ideas from the beginning helps them to catch potential problems early – saving everyone time and stress later when it comes to handoffs.
When designers and engineers communicate and collaborate during the process more effectively, the handoff becomes a much simpler matter of checking what is already agreed and understood.
Applying the right tools for digital product design
Your product design consultancy can equip your teams with the best modern digital tools to support seamless handovers. These tools will translate designs into working code – such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Swift, or Android XML. These code elements can then be used by engineers as the starting point for developing the fully functional product.
Modern cloud-based collaborative design platforms such as Figma replace traditional design documentation with a single online source of truth. They enable designers to give engineers a URL link to everything they need to begin development.
Implementing design systems for consistency and speed
A product designer will help your organisation create and grow a high-quality design system. This comprehensive tool-set of design standards, assets and resources empowers your organisation to manage design efficiently and consistently, with reusable components and clear guidelines.
The design system enables your teams to become more collaborative and create more consistent products. It also accelerates your speed to market – saving money and time on your product development.
Design systems enable a two-way exchange of information and resources between designers and engineers. For example, engineers can provide technical specifications for asset formats and sizes, so designers can optimise their work for different channels and requirements.
Design systems encourage systematic thinking and methodical approaches for all team members. They enable faster design iteration, support scalability for teams and projects, encourage best practices, and ensure seamless design handoffs.
Take your digital products to the next level
In summary, by applying all these latest design methods, skills and tools with the help of an expert consultancy, your organisation will be well equipped to create world-class digital products and services that meet the high expectations of today’s users and customers.