Mayowa Adegunwa: Analysing and Validating Your Product Ideas and Designs

Are you looking for a way to know if your product idea is worth pursuing? Or trying to figure out the best design decisions for it? Don’t worry, analyzing and validating ideas can be less overwhelming than expected! With some smart steps in place, assessing product potential and making informed decisions about designs can give you an edge.

However, creating a successful product requires more than just having innovative ideas and great designs. Analyzing and validating them is also essential in order to ensure that the final outcome aligns with customers’ needs, wants, and expectations. This guide will provide you with tips on how best to assess your product ideas from the concept stage through to launch. Let’s unpack how!

Understanding Customer Needs & Wants

Before designing anything for your customers, it’s important first to gain an understanding of what their needs are within the context of the particular product or service offering. Conduct interviews (either face-to-face or over Zoom) with potential users to learn about their pain points, questions they have related to your design ideas, any challenges they might be facing that could be solved through your solution(s), and design decisions.

Doing so can give you valuable insights into being able to answer “yes” when asked if there really is enough demand out there for such a product/service before investing time and resources into building it!

Prototyping

Once customer feedback has been gathered through surveys or interviews (or both!). Using simple but effective prototypes can help bring further clarity regarding whether people find these new solutions helpful as well as identify possible usability issues early on. This ultimately reduces design costs significantly down the road by avoiding drastic changes later after production starts.

Prototypes don’t necessarily need bells and whistles per se; even something put together quickly based solely on paper diagrams may already suffice quite nicely here depending on what type of testing one wishes to conduct alongside actual implementation.

Maintaining Momentum & Seeking Feedback

Design isn’t a static thing where everything stops once launch day arrives. Ensuring developers maintain momentum, allows smoother functionality, gives room for improvements plus increased efficiency across dashboard analysis, fine-tuning ideas,  forming insight, and gathering data that will help keep track of overall user experience.

Set Goals You Can Actually Measure Success Against

Once armed with these tests that measure customer sentiment against various objectives—stability, performance increases, etc., it’s important to set goals against which one can test even further within a feature release, then track results throughout production launches and verify these metrics for long-term application afterward.

Choose Platform(s) Wisely

The platform decides which features will perform well depending on user requirements regarding tenacity (standalone apps), within-browser technologies (dynamic web applications), etc.

Have clear goals laid down before selecting a suitable software language – HTML/CSS/Javascript structure comes along with server half setup through frameworks like Ruby+Rails / PHP + WordPress combo – accompanied by front-end rendering options like React JS library. Use analytical tools like Github, SAAS platforms, etc., in order to measure UX impact better before launch.

Test Thoroughly

Larger scale projects typically require observational metrics via A/B functional comparison tests, visual enhancements, colour combinations, etc.

During this phase, it’s crucial to track user experience and feedback, evaluate them, and make necessary adjustments to improve the overall product or service. It can last weeks, but well worth it. This will not only validate your ideas and design decisions, it will ensure they are tested live and provide you with comprehensive data for future reference.

Launch Strategically

Research competitor offerings to validate your ideas especially when niche markets may already possess similar concepts. However, cost analysis between other production costs gives a clearer picture of feasibility against its position amongst smaller market space vs target population size. This will determine whether more specialized ideas and designs need further tinkering.

In addition, roll out open Beta versions and soft launching and testing that will facilitate minor tweaks which would help win trust among customers. This will also build a strong support system for your ideas and design decisions.

Not all successes come automatically, nor right away though, patience and knowledge keeps efforts pointed toward positive returns; therefore tracking progress across Key Performance Indicators, and KPIs, helps validate whether such “tests” will remain productive.

When all the above assessments are taken into account, observed closely, analyzed, and validated properly, it greatly boosts leads and expands possible creative ways to explore better implementation techniques.

 ________________

Mayowa Adegunwa is a leading product designer with a great passion for analyzing and designing products that tackle real-life issues. She excels in divergent thinking and takes pride in delivering intuitive and user-centric products. Beyond this, Mayowa co-founded HotelO and has served many digital product-led companies with her exceptional skills.