User centred design means involving users at every stage of the product development process. This methodology is used to gain insight into products and how users interpret them, which helps to turn issues or haps into solutions.

It involves putting the user at the centre of the development process and helps designers and other team members to understand user needs, issues and concerns around a product. This may lead businesses to look into other ways they can manufacture a product, e.g. using HDPE resin molds if they are focused on creating durable plastic goods.

We’ve highlighted how user centred design produces better products.

User centred design means the focus remains on the end user

Designers can easily find themselves falling into the trap of designing products for themselves or their client and lose sight of the end user and the issues that they may need solving.

By involving the target audience of a product from the very start, designers and researchers can have an ongoing and open discussion with them which will make it easier to develop the product as time goes on. Taking the user’s perspective may be necessary to reach your goal of user centered design. As a result, you can focus on solving their challenges instead of launching a product that might be easy for you to get to the market. An organization can, therefore, get an almost completely right product the first time it is launched, instead of waiting until it is released and having to make significant changes.

To grasp the needs and requirements of users for a product, a team can gather qualitative data through focus groups and user interviews with the target market. For instance, if you operate a medical device manufacturing unit, conducting user interviews and market research surveys can reveal customer preferences. This gathered data becomes valuable for making well-informed decisions regarding product design, pricing, and marketing strategies. If you’re interested, you can Click here to explore market research in healthcare and its impact on medical device product design. Similarly, if your focus is on smartphone manufacturing, user interviews can be conducted to understand the features and functions customers are seeking. This information can then be utilized to make informed decisions about product design and pricing.

Your manufacturing and design team can use this valuable information to modify the existing product in order to address market demands. Furthermore, GD&T (Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing) can be used to ensure that products are manufactured according to their design specifications. In order to manufacture a product, you will need to take into account tolerances, surface finishes, and other technical specifications. You can define them using GD&T symbols like a circularity symbol.

If you get your target audience to try a product, you will better be able to see first hand the struggles they have or listen as they discuss a product and ask questions. What do they want? What do they actually need? Do they want cheap? Do they want something that simply fulfils a basic task or something that is intuitive and high-tech?

Understanding what users want will mean you are likely to succeed even more from a commercial point of view. So whilst hitting a brief is obviously great, there is more to the design and production process than ticking boxes of a brief.

When doing focus groups or interviews, you might consider filming these so that you can watch sessions back and remind yourself points where a user struggled or found something particularly pleasing. Following feedback, you can then create more prototypes that build on the insights gathered in sessions, meaning you are constantly improving your product until it ticks both design brief boxes and user experience boxes.

For many businesses, a user centred approach may not seem like the most commercial choice. However, in the long run this method will help you to avoid potential bad reviews or bad sales that might happen as a result of the product not being anything like what a user needs or expects. User centred design allows you to pinpoint exactly what you need to provide for your customers and what they will pay for.