Your audience plays a crucial role in product design. Among other things, it is your audience that’s going to use your product once it is built and released to the market. It is also your audience that gives you ideas of what product to develop and whether it is something they will spend money on.
When working on a project, the best industrial design studios usually spend ample time doing research. They study existing practices and technologies applicable to the product they are about to build. They get feedback from different stakeholders. Most importantly, they ask what the target market thinks about the product concept.
The best industrial design studios do this because it is these ideas that serve as the foundations in building a product. You as the client may have visualized it, but your vision remains a figment of imagination until it becomes an actual material. It will not transform into a marketable product without the inputs of your audience, otherwise they won’t be using it.
Listening to your audience when designing a product helps you in many ways, such as:
- You save time conceptualizing the product design.
When you listen to your audience, you get ideas that you can use to design your product. After all, you are creating a product for them to use, so it’s best to have its foundations from their feedback.
Today’s biggest brands usually hold surveys for their fans and users to answer. They use their global audience in improving their already existing products and develop new ones to be released after a matter of time.
With ideas coming from the audience, you have vital inputs in building a product, and not spend more time on theory and farfetched concepts. You get a product vision that is both progressive and practical, since its functions are based on what your audience said.
- You narrow your product design to specific features and functions.
One thing that makes product design challenging is when you have a lot of inputs that you want to include. There is only so much room for all the features and functions that you have in mind for your product. At the same time, your audience only cares about a few, if not just a single one, of the features and functions that you want to use.
Taking their feedback into consideration helps you narrow down your product design in terms of features and functions. You see which of them are truly useful for your product, and which of those are not necessary (even as add-ons). It is important that you come up with a product that your audience can actually use, even if it only has one or two functions. It is their usefulness that will make them sell.
- Your audience helps you strike a balance between product functionality and aesthetics.
Some of today’s consumer products sell like hotcakes because of their aesthetic appeal, even if they have no practical use. On the other hand, there are products that may look truly complicated in terms of visuals, but offer great service. Either way, these products won’t last in the market.
You need to strike a balance between visual appeal and functionality, and the best way to find this balance is by listening to your audience. They will tell you how they want your product to work, and also how they want it to look and feel like. This balance helps in increasing your product’s profitability once it is released to the market.