What Separates Great Products From Just Pretty Ones
Sustainable brands focus on all three aspects of design.
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Introduction
The difference between a product that the consumer likes vs. a product that the consumer loves often comes down to the intangible aspects of the experience.
These aspects are felt on such an intrinsic level, that many a times even when you ask the customer what makes them choose one product over the other their answer would be vague, or confusing at best.
However, if you want to create a product that’s loved by your customer, make sure you read this post till the end to know how the design of your product is the intangible factor that makes your customers fall in love with your brand.
The best part, you will learn how to design your products in three steps.
The 3 Aspects of design
If I were to ask you to describe how you design the product/ service/ the entire customer journey for your brand, I’m almost certain I might not get a clear answer for the same.
I happened to watch a podcast episode wherein one of the subjects that was discussed was the three aspects of design.
The link to the episode is shared at the end of this note for your reference.
However, for now, let’s decode the three aspects of great design of any product/ service.
01 - Aesthetics
The most obvious suspect. Want to create a product that gets termed as a “well designed” product by industry and customer alike, make sure it’s aesthetically pleasing to look at, hold and use.
An aesthetically pleasing product will make customers pick up your product from the shelf intuitively, so it’s obvious to put in necessary efforts towards creating an aesthetically pleasing product.
02 - Utility
Imagine you’re designing desks and benches for a school.
Now imagine there’s a company that has designed a desk & bench set for an educational institute, which has multiple features, comes in colours of your choice, is aesthetically pleasing, fits in your budget, but has just one drawback.
The end product is really heavy. Considering the desks/ benches are being purchased for a school, a heavy piece of equipment fails in the utility department, because if the children can’t use the product effortlessly, a product that checks all the other boxes in the checklist still fails.
Hence, never compromise on the utility value of your product (for the target audience), ever. In fact, it's advisable to create a product that’s great at utility and then make it aesthetically pleasing.
03 - Quality
This is the factor that becomes the final deal breaker in many cases.
In fact, can you think of a country that’s (in)famous for producing goods that look great, are jam packed with utility and features, but their products can’t be trusted when it comes to the quality department?
That’s the long term impact of infusing/ ignoring quality in the design stage of your product.
Quality of any product can be maximised on optimising various aspects like the materials used, longevity of the product, packaging, etc.
Conclusion
I have never come across any other holistic explanation about design that decodes the concept with this level of sophistication and/ or clarity.
Hope you found just as much value in this note, as I did when I saw the episode (link shared below) and made a note to share the same with you and all the other members of MrEmogical Notes.
If you’re a business owner that sells digital products, the concept of design remains the same, but implementation of these principles in your business could become an uphill task. If you’d like to make the process easier for your business, I would like to inform you that I offer 1:1 consultations to digital businesses and I can help you apply these design principles to your business. Interested to know more? Feel free to reach out to me and let’s connect.Your Thoughts!
If you’ve reached till this point of the post, I’m sure you must have some thoughts/ feelings/ opinions about what you’ve just read.
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Link to the episode:
As mentioned earlier, the idea for this post was found in a podcast episode. Here’s the link to the episode for your reference.
Prompt used to create the image for the note
P.S.: Image made on Meta AI using the prompt, “Imagine a business owner sitting with a design expert working on the next iteration of their hero product”