If you are considering building a product, are wondering if your product follows good design practices, or you find yourself wondering “what is good product design”, then this blog is for you.

What is good product design?

By definition, good product design requires the following things:

1. Usefulness or utility: it has to solve a problem. If your product doesn’t solve a problem, then people will have no desire to use it no matter how pretty or usable it is.
2. Usability: how quickly or efficiently a person can complete a task (this can vary from “pain in the ass” to “I could do this in my sleep”.) Aim for the latter.
3. Pleasurability: Delight plays an important role in a person’s emotional experience using a product. In a competitive market, this can be a key differentiator. The aesthetic-usability effect states that users believe that beautiful products are more usable.
4. Desirability: this is the difference between a need and a want. A Ford Focus versus a Lamborghini. Few people dream of owning a Focus one day (no offense to Ford).
5. Reliability: your product can’t just work occasionally. It should work consistently. This consistency builds trust and improves engagement.

Great, but where do I start?

The first step to ensuring good product design is through a user-centered design process, or, directly involving users in the design process. You can’t design for people without people. If you have direct access to your target audience, you can better understand pain points, gain context around where and when someone will be tackling a tricky task, what their goals and motivations are, etc. It’s pivotal early on in the process to test out various solutions for a particular problem, iterate, and test again. The more problems you identify and fix during the design stage, where changes are cheap, the less you’ll face during development when changes become much more costly.

What we don’t do is hand them pencil and paper or the mouse and ask them to design the product themselves. The old saying “everyone is a designer” is (mostly) true, but not entirely. Yes, everyone can have an opinion on how a product should function. Not everyone should decide how those features work, where to find those features in an app, how they look or function, etc. There’s a reason we don’t hand people a blank sheet of paper and say “design your house” or “design a skyscraper”.

Okay, so what’s the opposite of good product design?

A great example of this can be found in a classic Simpsons episode where a car manufacturer hires Homer to design a car. But, Homer is not a designer. He has no idea how to design anything. He’s also designing a car specific to only his needs.

Most products are not built for a single person – they are built for people with similar goals or needs. Good product design is not about letting your users design your products for you — it’s about solving users problems and making their lives better.

Homer ends up designing really bad solutions to his problems. Of course he does. In Homer’s design, he includes everything from tail fins to shag carpeting to multiple horns located throughout the car – all for a reasonable, family-friendly price of $82,000. DOH. He can’t take sensible requirements and make them into good product design. Almost no user can. Don’t let users design your products for you, this is a job for UX and product design experts. If you want to achieve good product design, here are some useful guidelines:

1. Engage with users during the design process. It’s not user-centered design if there are no users involved in the process.
2. Design for goals, not individuals. People can vary immensely, but if you design around goals and outcomes, your solutions won’t be as narrow as designing for a single person’s opinion or needs.
3. Design for Flexibility. Your product should be flexible enough for people to interact with it in a multitude of contexts. Consider whether your product works when: it’s bright or dark outside, a person is in a noisy environment, can they interact with it one-handed, can they interact using their voice-only? (For more on how to make your product more inclusive, check out this blog.)
4. Do not require training. If your product requires training in order for people to use it, you likely have usability issues.
5. High degree of utility. Just because it’s usable doesn’t mean people will actually use it. It needs to be useful, not just usable.
6. Functional integrity. Your product should be largely free of defects or bugs.

Build the right thing the first time by hiring a professional product designer to help you design your product. This can be the difference between a successful product or the equivalent of the Homer Simpson car for the app store.