What Are the Most Important Factors in Conceptual Design?
Most Important Factors in Conceptual Design
Designing a product that is useful and desirable to customers requires the designers to consider many factors. The design concept is a key step in the design process and helps designers communicate with stakeholders to define the product and its goals. It is also a tool that helps them stay on track throughout the creative process, ensuring they bring a well-defined product to market with value to users.
One of the biggest challenges in conceptual design is communicating the vision to a team that may include designers, product managers, developers, QA testers, and clients (if working on a project for an external client). With so many voices and varying levels of expertise, it can be challenging to maintain consistent communication and a clear vision.
Typically, design concepts are created through mood boards or wireframes, and both methods help to establish a visual framework that guides the rest of the design process. These frameworks can be used to identify an aesthetic style, define user needs and how they will interact with the product, or to show how the product will fit into a customer’s lifestyle.
What Are the Most Important Factors in Conceptual Design?
To be effective, a design concept should clearly describe the problem and solution. This includes any new features that will be added to the product and how they will work, as well as any other details that will make it unique. It should also be accompanied by a prototype or mock-up of the product to allow stakeholders to review and provide feedback.
A common mistake that designers often make is not spending enough time on the design concept stage. This can result in dead ends being encountered once the product is in development, as well as the risk of wasted time and money. Investing the necessary time in creating a solid design concept will ensure that the final product is on target with the intended design intentions and users’ needs.
Conventional design methods focus mainly on functional reasoning, but they seldom take into consideration the hedonic aspect of product quality. In this regard, few studies have explored methods to support aesthetic information analysis and hedonic evaluation during the product conceptual design phase.
In the current paper, a new method is proposed to improve the quality of conceptual designs by integrating function and form. In the process of evaluating a product’s form, the design specification of each supported function is evaluated based on the hedonic values of its corresponding hedonic attributes.
The hedonic attribute of the product form is evaluated in terms of the satisfaction level of seven psychological needs regarding the pragmatic and hedonic aspects of the product. The evaluation results are converted into the values of the hedonic indicators and can be used as the basis for product conceptual design specification.
In addition, the proposed method integrates UX and functional design, resulting in a user-driven methodology that can be applied to improve the quality of conceptual designs. Future research should continue to explore ways to integrate and evaluate the impact of UX on conceptual designs.