A complete guide to product design: definition, process, and challenges

What is product design? 

Product design is the process of ideating, developing, and refining products that meet specific market needs and solve user problems. 

Product design is typically handled by both product managers and product designers, where product managers will create a product development strategy and product designers will lead design teams to translate product features into great user experiences through testing and iterations. 

This level of development, testing, and iteration helps create products that delight customers by defining product and business goals, and anticipating market opportunities and user needs. 

You may also see product design called “industrial design".” However, generally industrial design relates to physical products and product design relates to digital products like websites and apps.

Product design vs UX design

UX design fits into product design, but centers around the product’s usability, look, and user experience (UX). 

Product design also involves improving usability and the user experience, but in context—by focusing on big-picture implications like process, cost, and the brand’s overall position in the market.  

What does a strong product design process involve?

A strong product design process is based on the idea of design thinking. Coined by Tim Brown and David Kelley of IDEO, this is a technique to pragmatically resolve problems through human-centered design.

To break it down further, strong product design is made up of: 

• Empathy and user-centric design: you need to build empathy to create a user-centered product—by deeply understanding your customers’ needs, drivers, and pain points. Taking an empathetic approach to product design ensures you really listen to your users rather than only focusing on your bottom line. 

• Iterative design: it’s crucial for product designers to constantly test and tweak their products to keep up with shifting market demand and customer needs 

How does product design benefit your users and business?

Done right, product design helps attract more customers to your website or service—and increases brand awareness—giving your organization an advantage over its competitors. 

Product design also helps you: 

• Build better products: constantly improving your product design based on user feedback helps you build more successful products that align better with user needs

• Improve the user experience: smart product design lets your customers get the most out of your product, both in functionality and enjoyment—and achieve their jobs to be done (JTBD), or goals

• Track progress and measure success: product design lends itself to tracking product success and performance over time, so you can understand if your product is meeting user needs and learn what improvements to make

How to run successful product design: a 5-step framework

Follow our five-step roadmap to learn how to conduct a successful product design process.

Use these tips to inspire your own design process and ensure product-market fit:

1. Do product research

Conducting thorough product research is an essential part of product design. Not only do you need to know who will be using your product, but you also need to know enough to predict why and how they’ll be using it to ensure product adoption and success. 

Here are a few methods for conducting product research:

Create user personas

User personas—semi-fictional characters of your users—help you understand how your users move through the buyer’s journey. 

They also help teams design products that meet user needs, making them an essential component to good product design.

To create a user persona, conduct user research that answers these three questions:

1. Who are you? (i.e., their job title)

2. What’s your main goal?

3. What stops you from achieving this goal?

Customer-facing teams, like a sales team, can likely answer the above.

And tools like Hotjar’s Surveys let you create surveys to gather even more insight directly from your users.

Outline users’ jobs to be done

After learning about your users (and building your user persona) your team will have a better idea of why people use your product.

This “why” will help you outline your users’ jobs to be done (JTBD)—the goal, or “job” someone uses your product to accomplish.

Turn to customer interviews to get a comprehensive understanding of how people actually use your product. Ask questions like:

• What problem is [product] helping you solve?

• Describe how you felt before using [product]?

• How did you solve [problem] before finding [product]?

• What made you decide to use [product]?

Perform market research

Knowing which products exist in your market and how well they address customer needs and problems helps you stay competitive. 

And you can uncover this information through market research.

Start by identifying direct and indirect competitors along with the products they offer.

Then, speak directly to people within your target audience to understand how they view you and your competitors.  

Hotjar’s Engage lets you schedule and conduct user interviews. You can create interviews with people you know, or browse our diverse database of over 200,000 participants to find the right people to speak with.

2. Define the problem

Once you know the desires and pain points of your target audience, you can start problem-solving and find a way to better align your product around the user problem(s) you're trying to solve. 

Use your product research (from above) to find any gaps in the market and use them to your advantage. Ask yourself: “What does our product need to address?” and “How are my competitors addressing it?” 

At this stage, you’ll also want a deep understanding of how people use your product. Why? Because it helps you determine which product features you should optimize or tweak to fit users’ needs and their JTBD.

Session recording tools—like Recordings—can be a cost-effective way to conduct usability testing and see how people use your product. Recordings let you watch users move through your product in real-time so you can spot:

• Areas of frustration (i.e., where someone might be rage clicking—repeated clicks on a specific element);

• Bugs and broken elements;

• How users navigate your product;

• Where users get stuck;

so you know what the problem is, what to optimize, and can hypothesize potential solutions.

3. Develop potential solutions

Now that you know more about your users and what they need, you can  ideate a variety of ways to solve your users' problems. 

Here are a few ideation techniques:

Mindmapping

Mindmaps visually connect ideas around a central theme. Start with your main idea in the middle and then create branches with related ideas.

A mindmap can help large teams visualize—and add to—an idea. They keep everyone on the same page and allow for organized collaboration. 

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a timed group activity where people come up with as many ideas as possible. Teams should refrain from criticism and instead encourage free thinking during brainstorming sessions.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding involves creating a visual sequence of how you expect users to interact with your product. Kind of like a comic strip.

It can help teams envision potential pain points, issues, and get a feel for product experience.

Reverse brainstorming

Reverse brainstorming is the opposite of brainstorming, and instead of coming up with ways to fix a problem, your team will brainstorm ways to make the problem worse.

For example, a team trying to improve user signups might brainstorm ways to decrease user signups.

This unconventional way of thinking can often increase creativity and help teams get a better grasp on the issues users face.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is a checklist ideation technique that stands for:

• Substitute: identify what you can replace in your product, service, or solution. For example, replace a limited-time trial with a free forever plan.

• Combine: combine parts of your product, service, or solution to create something new. For example, say your product has AI capabilities. Look for ways you can combine this AI with other product features to meet user needs.

• Adapt: adjust parts of your product, service, or solution to meet a new need. For example, find complementary tools to integrate with your software to make a user’s process easier.

• Modify: enhance or minify elements of your product, service, or solution to work towards improvements. For example, tweak the user interface of your software to make it more intuitive and user-friendly.

• Put to another use: find new ways to use your product, service, or solution. For example, say you offer cloud storage for users. Another use for cloud storage could be disaster recovery and backup services.

• Eliminate: remove redundant features to simplify your product, service, or solution. For example, remove rarely-used features from your mobile app to improve performance for your app’s core features.

• Reverse: rearrange your product, service, or solution to find new outcomes. For example, explore what might happen if you replace free product trials with product demos.

4. Create prototypes 

Build a minimum viable product (MVP), or rough version, of your potential solutions. Creating a prototype gives you the ability to test your design with users and see if you’re on the right track—and sparks additional product ideas or versions you wouldn’t have had otherwise. 

For example, after creating a prototype, your team might encounter a design flaw that negatively impacts the user experience, even though it was built with the user in mind. This stage in the design process gives you the chance to fix problems before launch. 

5. Test and iterate 

Try your prototypes out with potential users and see how they react. Then, make changes based on user feedback.

3 core product design challenges and solutions

While product development and design is an ever-evolving process, there are still several challenges that could prevent product designers from reaching their product goals.

Let’s take a look at what these challenges involve and how you can overcome them—so you can validate your product design and meet user needs, fast. 

1. Research challenges

Given all the user data, channels, and tools out there, conducting thorough research about your users and translating that research into actionable insights can be daunting for product designers and teams. 

Before you start, you need to have a research process in place to help you achieve product-market fit and user success. 

4 steps to overcome research challenges and improve your research process

1. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) based on their pain points, characteristics, purchasing behaviors, and demographics. Use it to determine their most-used channels and product preferences. 

2. Use social listening tools like Hootsuite or Brandwatch to observe mentions of your brand or product on channels relevant to your target audience, so you know what they’re talking about and what they need. For example, if you see people on social media responding positively to a competitor’s product feature, you can think about incorporating a similar feature. 

3. Predict market demand with tools like Think With Google and see popular trends in product searches and their likelihood of success. Then, look at competitor reviews on websites like G2, Capterra, Trustradius, and Google. 

4. Ask for feedback: poll your target audience about potential product ideas or features using polls on Instagram Stories or LinkedIn. Or, use unobtrusive feedback widgets and place them throughout critical touchpoints in the customer journey for key insights into product ideations and improvements. 

For example, after placing a feedback widget on your homepage, you might discover that new visitors don’t understand what your product does or the problems it solves. This way, you can take steps to showcase your product’s features directly on your homepage to get users to understand your product's value, quicker.

2. Design process challenges

Crafting a solid design process involves cross-functional collaboration, prioritizing your product roadmap, and leaving enough room for testing and tweaking. But, it can be hard to find (and stick to) a process that isn’t too complicated or costly. And you don’t want to risk a delay in rollout because your process was too lengthy. 

4 ways to overcome design challenges

1. Encourage cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder alignment by uniting teams on your main platforms. Make sure you’re using the same CRM, reporting tools, and dashboard, for easy access to customer insights. Integrating your tools with Slack can also help keep customer insights readily accessible to your teams and keep everyone up to speed on where your product’s headed. 

2. Survey your team and users to better understand what you could streamline in your design and development process. Administer anonymous surveys to your product team for fresh ideas on how to improve your process, or survey your target market for early-stage product screening insights. 

3. Iterate your product design testing methods: implement the feedback you’ve collected into your design process and explore tried-and-tested project management methods like Kanban or Scrum. 

4. A/B test your prototype and see what your audience responds to or likes better. Then, use your findings to improve and streamline your product design process. 

Pro tip: use Hotjar’s integration with Google Optimize or Optimizely to observe how different users interact with each variant in your A/B tests. Use your most successful variant to inform your product roadmap. 

After watching recordings of users interacting with your prototype, you can filter Hotjar's Recordings to see how the product experience (PX) varies for different user personas, so you know which features to prioritize.

3. Post-launch iteration challenges

Once you’ve launched your product, you’ll need to keep a close eye on customer insights that will help you refine your product down the line. Sometimes, product designers forget that post-launch product iteration is as important as early development and design. 

4 ways to make sure you’re continuously refining and improving your product

1. Administer customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to gauge your customers' short-term satisfaction with your product. For example, after receiving a low CSAT score during a new product rollout, ask customers to provide a reason for their score to get direct insights into their experience. 

2. Watch user sessions within your product for a firsthand view of the user experience to see exactly what blocks your customers in their journey or what keeps them exploring. 

3. Ask for feedback throughout the customer journey, including during user onboarding, to get insights into what customers like or dislike about your product, and optimize accordingly. 

4. Conduct product-market fit surveys and ask your customers if they’ve adopted your product into their everyday lives, or if they’d miss using it. Use your findings to better tailor your product to market and user needs. For example, after administering a product-market fit survey about your product, you might get a clearer understanding of the product roadmap and better prioritize high-value initiatives.

Take product design to the next level with customer insights

Strong product design significantly improves your user's experience by closely aligning your product with their needs and goals.

Use our guide to build your design process, predict challenges and prevent pitfalls, and better spot and meet customer preferences and desires. Then, get an even deeper understanding of customer needs with product experience tools that tell you exactly what’s working in your product’s design.