Hustler Series: Initial Design Phase
07: Initial Design Phase
Once you make up your mind and decide to take the risk, it’s time to start designing. For the initial design phase you want to begin by sketching out your product concept as best you can. Try to turn your abstract thought into tangible images. It’s totally okay if you’re not an artist, the point of this stage is getting your idea on paper so you can work out the key needs of the product.
Sketching out your idea will allow you to better see your vision and identify any potential problems. Sometimes we have the most amazing ideas in our head but, once we try to sketch them out, we realize they aren’t feasible. This is why you’ll want to try sketching out every aspect of your product and double check that you aren’t overlooking something. Remember that you are about to spend a lot of time and money developing your product so you’ll want to figure out any potential problems now to avoid unnecessary stress in the future.
Be sure to evaluate the various user needs of your product early on. You should be designing everything with the end user in mind so you need to be aware of what their needs are. It’s helpful to actually write down all the user needs you think your product must have. This makes it easier to evaluate which features are critical and which are just nice to have. Product design is essentially a massive optimization puzzle so it’s helpful to know where each feature fits into that optimization.
Once you have your basic concept sketched out you’re ready to begin iterating upon it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your first idea is good enough to move forward with, but, coming from experience, this is rarely the case. There’s always another way to look at the constraints and come up with a new way of attacking the problem. I encourage you to repeatedly question your assumptions during this early design exploration. Are certain features truly important and useful? Is anything unnecessarily redundant? Will the user find the product intuitive? Have you considered alternative materials? What about alternative manufacturing techniques? The goal of this stage is to be broad in your design exploration so you can hone in on a thorough product solution.
Keep in mind that this is just the initial design phase and you’re not going to figure everything out in extreme detail. This is just a first attempt at optimizing the constraints of your product. You still have prototyping, engineering, and validation phases ahead of you where you’ll make further refinements and fill in the finer details. This is also the time to hire a designer if you think you’ll need one. You can, and should, go through the initial design phase yourself so you become familiar with all the constraints. But, if you need expert opinions on aesthetics and user experience, you should hire a designer to help you further refine your concept. As long as you can give the designer a general sense of your concept and decision-making thought process, they’ll be able to take it to the next level for you. A good designer will add another perspective, increase the breadth of your initial design phase, and help you hone in on a thoroughly refined concept. It’s better to spend a little more money early on to hire a good designer instead of spending a lot of money further down the line to make drastic changes to your product.
For Hez Cases the initial design phase began with a two-piece, slider style concept. My idea was to mold the two parts out of a hard plastic material and give it a glass-like finish to compliment the iPhone X. However, when I began considering the manufacturability of this design, it became clear that my vision wasn’t viable. The rounded sides of the iPhone X made molding this design very difficult. In order to achieve an understated aesthetic I would have to significantly sacrifice drop protection. And in order to improve drop protection I would have to sacrifice the understated aesthetic. Unfortunately these two features directly compete with each other in a slider style case. This presented three potential paths forward: sacrifice protection for a more understated aesthetic, sacrifice the understated aesthetic for more protection, or find a different design and manufacturing technique where neither had to be sacrificed. After iterating through more concepts I honed in on a new design and manufacturing technique. By making the case one piece and using a technique called overmolding, the aesthetics and drop protection were no longer competing constraints. The product could look and feel better than the slider design while also having superior drop protection. This concept is a much better product that the initial concept and was worth the lengthy exploration. It really does pay to go broad in your initial design phase and question each assumption guiding your product.
So there you have the initial design phase. Put together a list of user needs and ideal features, sketch out ways to fulfill these needs, and iterate through your product concepts. Once you’re satisfied that you’ve honed in on your concept, you’re ready to start prototyping.
