The process of developing and launching a successful mobile product is not a cakewalk, with many phases of the process influencing the end result. And so the most significant aspect that leads to successful mobile app development is proper planning. If you don’t know your business plans, the purpose of why you want to launch a mobile product or your product’s importance, it will be very challenging to design and develop a useful product that marks both market and user demands.
The design thinking process benefits businesses to set product objectives, make a compelling business, and develop a solid knowledge of the product’s target users. By the end of the design thinking process, you will be able to stand tall with a precise product vision statement, user personas, user surveys, and a product road map that speaks small and large business goals with the technology solutions expected to achieve them.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is defined as a non-linear, iterative process that seeks to know users, test assumptions, redefine difficulties and build innovative solutions to prototype and test. Design thinking benefits to understand complicated problems with unfamiliar solutions.
Today, there isn’t a single business that continues untouched by the societal and economic change towards customer participation facilitated by technology. Now more than ever, modification, agility, and likely software delivery are all requirements for any business to remain in the digital economy. Design thinking gives the process and tools which enable businesses to recognize and act on rapid market changes and customer requests. The design thinking process reframes complex business problems in human-centric styles and lets product teams focus on what’s relevant for users. Design thinking is more than just a method, it’s a mindset and a way to problem-solving that allows businesses to discover innovative solutions to the problems their customers are overlooking.
Let me get you through more about the most important design thinking takeaways that strengthen the delivery of a successful mobile product.
Product Vision Statement
Design thinking encourages companies to think critically about business goals and whether or not they’re achievable. More importantly, design thinking helps business owners to examine their business strategy and how it will turn into a product strategy. A precise product concept statement is the result of this process and gives a sense of regulation towards the end goal of the mobile product.
- A vision statement explicitly describes who will be using the product.
- A vision statement reveals the answer to the problem those users are encountering.
- A vision statement distinguishes the product from what currently has in the market.
A product vision statement sets a definite area of focus for the mobile product, which supports businesses set particular criteria and clear aims to learn what emphasizes the product needs to be successful. The method of defining a product vision statement enables all of the project stakeholders to envision the product in the circumstances and not as a list of features and design applications.
To form a product vision statement, you begin with the end-user, then find and define the following:
- The current dilemma
- The end-users for whom the problems are getting solved
Alongside, you assess the particular job to be completed:
- The reason for preparing this project
- The strategy to complete this project
And finally, when you outline your final product asses these
- What are the purposes we are initiating, and what specifically will we achieve?
- What features will this product manifest as? What is needed to attain the ends?
Actually, drafting a product vision statement is a process for assessing and valuing every design decision in context with both the demands of the business and the end-user. It also makes out the association between user experience design and product management.
User Journeys
The idea of design thinking moves past the mobile product itself, and the overall aim is prepared towards building a solution for a particular set of users, so it is necessary to have audience insight.
We all know how many apps we download in our devices and how long we use them. Studies reveal that only 32% of users remain to engage with an app after three months and 21 % of users abandon an app after one-time use. And what is remarkable is that 65 % of mobile users say a bad user experience influences their impression of the brand. It’s very obvious that users have high expectations for the mobile products they pick, so if you want your product to have ongoing promise, it’s important that your product helps a purpose in the user’s life.
A focused objective of design thinking is discovering who your target users are, what they value, and the central pain point they feel that your product will address. A key deliverable from a design thinking session is the product’s user journeys, but before you can build user journeys, the first step is building detailed user personas. There can be many user groups for a mobile product and each user persona will have its own novel user journey.
Importance of User Personas in Creating User Journeys
A user persona is a somewhat untrue depiction of your typical user based on research, which helps as a representation of all the different user groups your product, brand, or service will target. User personas cover everything about a user’s background, demographics, interests, mobile preferences, and unique identifiers. User personas also address the central purposes of the user and the hurdles they face right away.
In-depth user personas form the basis for user journey design and assist you to customize every aspect of your mobile product to each of your users’ choices and requirements. Everything from features, platform choice, branding, and in-app content to functionality, and monetization need to resonate with your target user. By completely drafting your target viewers with user personas, you will answer primary questions that will guide your design and product strategy. or example, What is a central pain point this audience collectively experiences?, What mobile operating system does this audience use? iOS or Android?, What types of apps does this target audience frequently use? etc.
Using personas to clarify questions like these will help you organize design and business choices to bring the right audience to your product. If you haven’t correctly investigated your audience preferences, you won’t be able to deliver a product that is important to their needs.
Importance of User Journeys for Mobile App Development
User journeys are the framework of user experience design. A user journey is a set of procedures a user performs to attain a particular goal within the mobile product. User journeys are how your product will present user value by building an automatic direction towards resolving a pain point. Meanwhile, a user journey delivers business value by guiding users to the aspired conversion point.
Wireframes
Once you determine the goal and audience for your mobile product, you need to record the exact actions a user has to take to achieve the product goal. Not only does design thinking provide you with a prioritized list of product features, but the method also gives wireframed maps of how those features come together to create the whole user experience. Wireframes demonstrate step-by-step how a user will move through the app.
Importance of Wireframes for Mobile App Development
If you’re looking to win stake holder or investor to buy your product, it’s necessary to have a high-level visual solution that describes the product’s user experience. Wireframes are plans of what the mobile product will be without the granular details. They’re used to represent how the product’s primary functionality will play out on-screen before incorporating stylized visual elements. Through the process of building wireframes, you build a brief path towards the central action you want the user to take. This method helps keep the first version of your product strong and user-friendly.
Roadmap of a product
Finally, you want to create a product that is scalable. You need to be able to adjust to the altering requirements of your users. Design thinking will prioritize the most significant characteristics necessary to start a strong product, but also gives a summary that covers the product vision and the long-term direction of the product.
Product Roadmaps and Mobile App Development
A product roadmap addresses the ongoing and upcoming of your mobile product. A roadmap builds a common consensus for the direction of the product and benefits conclude the level of investment at each future stage of development.
The initial release of a product is supposed as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP includes only the characteristics required to take a product to market. MVPs support a build-measure-learn process, which enables you to discover how your target users reach and endure the product’s core functionality. From there, user research recognizes what highlights to incorporate to address unfolding user needs over time.
The jeopardy of developing extra (or limited) than you need is why validating your product assumptions with an MVP is so significant. Beginning with a core feature, learning how users respond to that trait and building in accordance with user feedback is crucial for deciding the suitable amount of functionality your product needs to get and retain users. When time passes, the learnings that come from an MVP set your product roadmap and manage the development of your app.
MVPs give instant value while reducing development expenses. Finally, an MVP enables you to create a product with minimal features and iteratively made it out to produce a better, more refined product while leveraging user intelligence to make the best conclusions possible. With all release versions, the product results to increase return on investment (ROI) and move towards a sophisticated application.
The next emphasis after the MVP covers features to support the pre-existing functionality of the mobile product, and any new features that can add different user value. The launched product should proceed to discuss all the business objectives and give insight into the success rate of the product roadmap. This phase also remains to collect data about user engagement patterns. Later, the product roadmap is for upcoming iterations of the product and incorporates new features to develop out the ideal functionality of the mobile product. This phase marks all the business goals and gives important insights to further guide product choices.
Design thinking catches your original idea and converts it into actionable deliverables, which you can use to verify your assumptions before development to investors and leads. By the end of the design thinking process, your product team will have user journeys, wireframes, a future-oriented product roadmap, mockups, and an app prototype that can be clicked. The whole process helps guide design, business, and development decisions so you can positively take a fully scalable mobile product to the ever-challenging big market.
At NdimensionZ, our mobile application developers take your concept regardless of how crazy or elite it is and build it into a remarkable mobile application that users will admire and continue using for a long-term.