How to Choose a Digital Product Design Agency
Product designers are some of the most sought-after professionals in the tech industry. Whether you need to launch a new digital product or review the user experience of an existing product, they can help. More than just detecting problems, however, they are experts at finding opportunities and developing solutions. With tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook embracing design thinking and product design as part of their culture, it’s clearly a technique that delivers value. However, product design isn’t something anyone can do. It requires a unique and rare set of skills and knowledge. Moreover, it needs to be integrated into the whole design process, engaging every stakeholder involved in a project. This is where finding the right digital product design agency to partner with can make all the difference.
What is Digital Product Design Sydney
While most people have heard of digital product design, the concept is often one that is misunderstood. It’s easy to assume that design will always be purely aesthetic. However, while product design involves the visual side of things, it is so much more than that. It involves research, strategy, psychology and more. Product designers investigate all possible ways of enabling users to interact and explore a product.
Fundamentally, digital product design is all about problem-solving and ensuring that a product will meet human needs. Designers look to improve the experiences of digital products by solving real user problems. The first step towards this is identifying, investigating and evaluating the problem itself. They will then explore multiple solutions, using analytics and data and engaging people from across the business to reach the best possible answer. Only then can work begin on crafting, designing and testing a solution.
The industry and technology behind product design, like much of the tech industry, is fast-moving. New capabilities are integrated every day. So, it’s vital for product designers to keep up with the latest industry standards, technologies and tools. By incorporating new technologies, platforms and programming languages, they are able to create more complex and engaging experiences. Moreover, they are able to optimise the user experience; after all, their role is about so much more than making things pretty.
Product design is no longer at the end of the product development and design lifecycle. Instead, it belongs at the very forefront. As a digital product designer holds an integral part at every stage of the design process, they are critical to its success. The key, therefore, is to find a digital product design agency that has the right mix of technical, analytical and soft skills to ensure your next product hits the mark.
Why Opt For a Digital Product Design Consultant
Unless you have a huge recruitment budget, it can be pretty difficult to build your own in-house design team. After all, you need a team of specialists who have expert knowledge in multiple fields as well as technical know-how. What’s more, if you do manage to recruit the right person to join your team, you then have to try to hold on to them. Losing your digital product designer halfway through a project can put a huge spanner in the works. Not to mention that, when you work on things internally, you can get bogged down by internal procedures and company politics.
A digital product design agency can give you the experience you need and unbiased ideas and opinions from a fresh perspective. By doing this and outsourcing the process, you can become more efficient, build the competitive advantage you need and, in turn, boost profits.
Attributes of a Great Digital Production Design and Development Team
If you’re choosing between different digital production design and development teams, you want to know how to sort the good from the bad. But, more than that, you want to single out which agencies are great and will truly help you meet your business objectives. To be able to do that, you’ll need to look for the following attributes:
- Experience – you’ll want to look for an agency with a wide variety of experience with clients from various industries.
- Knowledge – with countless projects under their belt, a great product design and development team should have unrivalled experience and expertise to add to new projects.
- Passion – not happy with being great at what they do, the best digital product design teams will be constantly thirsty for more. With new tools and trends emerging daily, this is vital to any project.
- Technical Skills – it’s no good talking the talk if you can’t walk the walk. As well as knowledge, a development team needs practical skills in UX design, analytics and experience working with several different languages and frameworks.
- Communication – exceptional communication skills are critical to a successful project. A great team will work seamlessly together and will ensure their clients are fully involved and up to speed on their progress at all times.
- Culture – while this is a hard one to measure, it can be a real deal-breaker. A great agency will have a culture that is professional, creative and open-minded. They will be invested in the success of their clients and committed to every project.
- Efficiency- if your agency is knowledgeable, experienced and passionate about what they do, efficiency should be a by-product of that. They should be able to understand real-world problems, generate ideas on how to tackle challenges and deliver results quickly.
Benefits of Finding the Right Digital Product Design Agency
If you’re going to do product design right, it pays to have the best possible agency on board. And that means doing your homework. Make sure you look out for all the attributes above, and you’ll be off to a good start. A great digital product design agency will be able to help you extract hidden information from your data, identify your biggest challenges and brainstorm possible solutions. They’ll then be able to help guide you in the right direction, create solutions that solve your core user problems and then implement and measure the results.
Ultimately, when it comes to working with an agency on a digital product, you need to form a partnership. Find a company that understands your industry, is extremely knowledgeable and is invested in your success, and the sky’s the limit.