Product experience refers to the overall value that a product or service provides to customers based on their perceptions as they use the product or service in different contexts. It is a key component of customer experience, which encompasses all interactions between a company and its customers.

Design and quality control are crucial factors in determining the product experience. A well-designed product that functions effectively and meets the needs of the user will result in a positive product experience. On the other hand, a poorly designed product with low quality can lead to a negative product experience, which can lead to customer dissatisfaction and even loss of business.

In order to optimize product experience, it is important for companies to understand the needs and preferences of their target audience. This can be achieved through market research and customer feedback. Companies can also involve customers in the design process, as their input can provide valuable insights into what features and functionality are most important to them.

In addition to design and quality control, the packaging and branding of a product can also impact the product experience. Packaging that is attractive and easy to use can enhance the overall product experience, while poor packaging can detract from it. Similarly, strong branding can create a positive association with the product, while weak branding can lead to confusion or a lack of recognition.

Product experience is a vital consideration for companies in order to provide value to their customers and maintain a competitive edge in the market. By understanding the needs and preferences of their target audience and implementing effective design, quality control, packaging, and branding, companies can create a positive product experience that leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty.The following are common types of product experience.

Fit For Purpose
The product or service has the functions you need without bloated features getting in the way.

Sensory Design
Visual appeal and pleasing taste, smell, touch and sound.

Sensations
Sensations generated by the product such as temperature, light intensity and haptics.

Usability
A product that is pleasing to use.

Learnability
A product that feels intuitive that is easy to learn with a little trial and error.

Undo
The product provides a safe environment where actions can be undone.

Control
The product lets you control it. Automations and suggestions feel useful and are easily overridden.

Personalization
The product makes reasonably useful assumptions about your preferences.

Customization
You can easily customize the product to the way you want it.

Stability
User interfaces are predicable. Dynamic elements such as context menus feel intuitive.

Speed
The product feels fast and responsive.

Performance
The product meets your performance expectations such as a snowboard that is just bendy enough.

Productivity
The product allows you to complete your goals quickly.

Information Density
The product gives you the amount of information you need to achieve your goals without overwhelming you or making you look too hard.

Information Scent
Clear visual cues and structure that make information and functions easy to find.

Layout & Composition
The product has a pleasing layout and feels balanced and organized.

Unity
Different elements of the product look like they belong together.

Shape & Form
A pleasing shape and form. For example, a device that fits in your hand comfortably.

Convenience
The product is convenient to use. For example, a device the fits in your pocket or a meal that is easy to prepare.

Accessibility
The product is designed to be useful to a broad range of people including people with disabilities.

Durability & Resilience
The product doesn’t easily break and continues to operate under a wide range of real world conditions.

Transitions
Change to the product such as upgrades and expansions go well and aren’t detrimental to your use of the product.

Risk
The product is safe to use. For example, software that is reasonably secure from information security threats.

Health
A product that feels healthy.

Values
Customer perceptions regarding the impact of the product on the environment and people. For example, a product that is manufactured locally according to environmentally responsible methods.

Terms
The product or service has fair terms of service.

Product Identity
People often describe products and brands with the same words they might use to describe a person. For example, a product that you trust.

Social, Culture & Lifestyle
A customer who sees a product as a part of their social status, culture or lifestyle. For example, snowboarding goggles that all the cool snowboarders wear on a particular mountain.

Meaning
Customers may attach personal meaning to a product. For example, a toy that reminds a parent of their youth.

Refinement
The product looks highly refined such that it is was obviously designed and built by people who are diligent in their work.

Designing for sustainability involves creating products, services, and processes that minimize environmental impact and enhance quality of life for the communities they impact throughout their entire lifecycle. This is achieved through the practice of sustainable design. The following are practices, principles and techniques that are commonly used to create sustainable designs.

Aesthetics
Aesthetics greatly impacts quality of life and is often considered of importance to sustainable design. For example, people typically find parkland crossed with bicycle and walking paths to be more aesthetically pleasing than a highway.

Appropriate Technology
A design approach that calls for small-scale solutions that suit circumstances and context. For example, a technology for growing a particular crop in a particular climate. Appropriate technology may consider factors such as the local culture, economy and ecology. Associated with inexpensive and practical approaches.

Biomimetics
Designs modeled on natural materials, mechanisms and processes.

Conviviality
The idea that designs be friendly to people. In other words, people don’t need to bend to the technology, the technology bends to people. Associated with designs that suit human cognition, physical characteristics and culture.

Deconstruction
Things that are build to be deconstructed for reuse or recycling. For example, some buildings can be deconstructed for reuse as opposed to demolished.

Downcycling
Recycling that results in products of lesser value. Often results in materials becoming waste eventually.

Durability
High quality products that resist wear and damage can reduce resource consumption as products don’t need to be replaced, returned or repaired.

Efficiency
Designs that are energy and resource efficient over their entire lifecycle from production to recycling.

Emotional Attachment
The observation that people grow emotional attachments to certain items while other items are viewed with indifference. Emotional attachment can work as a sustainable design goal because it greatly encourages reuse. For example, tea cups that are designed to develop an aesthetically pleasing pattern as they stain over the course of years might achieve far greater reuse than a plastic cup.

Human Scale
Human scale is the practice of designing things at an appropriate size, weight, speed, distance, temperature, pressure, force and energy level for humans. For example, designing urban environments so that people can reach the services they need with a reasonable distance.

Interdisciplinary Design
Interdisciplinary design is the practice of forming design teams with diverse backgrounds, skills, abilities and knowledge. Sustainable design considers a large number of factors spanning technical, environmental and cultural areas and typically requires a diverse set of skills and viewpoints.

Low Impact Materials
Materials that are both free of harmful substances and resource efficient.

Marketability
Sustainable design found its beginnings in grassroots projects that occasionally produced idealistic and impractical designs. As such, a rule of thumb developed that valuable sustainable designs are marketable. In other words, they can easily be sold at a profit. This doesn’t imply that designs produced by non-profits need to be sold or commercialized. It is simply an observation that if a sustainable design is truly valuable that people would be willing to buy it. Applies to areas such as architecture and product design.

Mixed Use Design
A particularly important concept in sustainable architecture and urban planning that calls for neighborhoods and large buildings to include a blend of residential, commercial, community and cultural features. For example, a neighborhood might have a variety of housing, schools, medical services, offices, museums, parks, shopping and facilities such as sports venues. It is a model that minimizes the impact of transportation on quality of life and the environment. It may also create a sense of community similar to that found in a village.

Narrative
In many cases, a sustainable design has an interesting story behind it that tends to add to its value.

Organic Materials
The use of materials from organic sources or materials synthesized to be identical to organic material. Generally useful because organic materials are often known to be biodegradable and low impact. Avoids introducing novel chemicals into the environment.

Passive Design
A design technique used primarily by architects to automatically benefit from the environment. For example, passive solar heating may use windows that let light in when its cold inside and shut light out when its hot. The term passive implies an extremely lightweight solution that achieves significant gains.

Proximity Of Design
A design goal that places things close together to improve efficiency or quality of life.

Quiet Design
Products and services designed to minimize noise pollution such as electronics that don’t beep.

Recover
Recovery of materials or energy that had been discarded or abandoned. For example, renovating an abandoned warehouse to make an attractive office space.

Recycle
Designing things from materials that can be easily recycled in the communities where they are sold.

Reduce
Eliminating waste from products, services and processes to reduce the use of resources.

Regenerative Design
Designs that restore their own energy or resources such as brakes on a train or car that generate electricity.

Renewable Resources
Use of natural resources that can be replenished via natural processes. Solar power is a classic example.

Reuse
Designing products to be reused eliminates waste and tends to reduce consumption of resources. Reuse is related to other design goals such as durability and emotional attachment.

Safety By Design
Designs that reduce health and safety risks such as a vehicle with an automated accident avoidance system that applies brakes if you’re about to hit something.

Self Reliance
Self reliance is a common theme of sustainable design. For example, buildings that produce their own energy with solar technologies or a community designed to grow its own fresh vegetables.

Slow Design
A design principle that slows things down to human speed to improve quality of life. Runs contrary to the notion that faster is always better. For example, a well paced meal at a restaurant may span several small courses that take several hours in total. This arguably has a more sustainable feel than a fast food meal that is served and consumed within minutes. Slowness may have a tendency to reduce overall resource consumption. It can also increase perceived value and satisfaction with a product or service.

Small Is Beautiful
A design principle that aims for small scale solutions often at the local level. Runs contrary to the common notion that bigger is better. Small is beautiful also represents an alternative to the industrial model that relies on economies of scale such as mass production or cloud computing.

Social Design
The practice of considering the social impact of your designs.

Strategic Design
The practice of looking at design from a big-picture and long-term viewpoint.

Transition Design
A design approach that takes practical steps towards solving complex problems.

Upcycling
Recycling that results in goods of equal or greater value. Tends to avoid waste more effectively than downcycling.

Waste Is Food
The principle that all waste products should be a nutritious food for at least one plant, animal, fungi, protist, archaea or bacteria.

A prototype is a preliminary version of something that is used to test and refine an idea, design, process, technology, product, service, or creative work. It serves as a tool for gathering requirements, developing and planning strategies, and evaluating the feasibility of a concept. Prototypes are often used to explore and validate the potential of a new idea or to identify areas for improvement before committing to a full-scale implementation. The following are common types of prototype.

Architectural Animation
A movie that walks through the proposed 3D space of a building or structure.

Concept Art
Illustrations that capture an aspect of design such as an idea, layout, form, aesthetic, architecture or sequence.

Demo
A short, unpolished version of a work such as a song, film, visual design, game or business application.

Evolutionary Prototype
A prototype that is extended over a considerable period of time that represents a future version of something. For example, a concept car that is developed as a potential future production model.

Form Study
An object or animation that explores size, shape, form and appearance.

Functional Prototype
A prototype that is close to the end result in functionality. For example, a user interface that works with test data but isn’t properly developed as an well designed and integrated system.

Horizontal Prototype
A prototype that shows a complete user interface without the ability to drill down.

Low Fidelity
A prototype that is less detailed or lower quality than the intended end result.

Minimum Viable Product
A product that’s complete enough to put in front of customers as tool of market research or as a beta release.

Mockup
A broad category of prototype that looks like the finished product but is completely lacking functionality. For example, a webpage depicted as an image or a car without an engine for use in wind tunnel testing.

Paper Prototype
Illustrations and primitive cardboard models of design ideas.

Proof Of Concept
An implementation of a method or design to prove that it can work.

Proof Of Principle
A test of a foundational idea.

Rapid Prototyping
Techniques such as 3D printing that produce a physical object from a computer aided design.

Scale Model
A smaller, typically non-functional, model. Commonly used for large things such as buildings, automobiles or aircraft.

Simulations
Software visualizations of physical things.

Sports Prototype
An advanced automobile that is only used for racing. Often used as a prototype for advanced technologies that may be used in future production models.

Static Prototype
A prototype that appears to be functional but is in fact hardcoded. For example, software that fakes its data as opposed to integrating with data repositories.

Storyboard
A series of graphics that visualize a sequence such as a user interaction or a scene in a film.

Throwaway Prototype
A low cost prototype that is quickly developed with limited quality and functionality. Essentially the opposite of an evolutionary prototype that represents a state of the art design.

Vertical Prototype
A user interface mockup with drill down capabilities.

Wireframes
An illustration of a skeletal framework that serves as a blueprint for a design.

Product innovation refers to the development and introduction of a product or service that significantly improves upon existing offerings, often by a factor of 10x or more. While many products are developed to stand out in a crowded market, product innovation may aim to completely disrupt the market and replace existing products with something new. This type of innovation is rare and can be challenging to achieve, as it requires a significant level of creativity and innovation. The following are common types of product innovation.

Time
Reducing time consumption including things that improve productivity or represent a customer convenience. For example, software that reduces the time for an interior decorator to produce a floor plan.

Efficiency
Reducing the inputs required to achieve a goal. For example, it currently costs around $50,000 a pound to launch things into orbit. It is believed that this can be reduced considerably.

Cost
Reducing the cost of products and services. For example, the cost per watt of solar panel modules dropped from around $75 in 1974 to less than $0.50 by 2020.

Performance
The performance of products and services as measured by a figure of merit. For example, the speed of computers has roughly doubled every two years since 1975.

Quality
Leaps forward in the quality of products in areas such as availability, durability and reliability.

Experience
The product experience including intangible elements such as concepts, feelings, taste, sight, sound, touch and smell.

Risk
Reducing risks such as improving the safety or sustainability of products.

Design-driven development is a product development approach that places a strong emphasis on design, with a focus on form, function, and user experience. Rather than seeing a product as a collection of features, this approach aims to create products that are useful and meaningful to customers. By considering the needs and preferences of customers from the beginning of the development process, design-driven development can help companies create products that are more likely to be successful in the market. The following are illustrative examples.

Form

Creating user interfaces, environments and physical things that have an attractive form. This involves viewing form as a primary business concern as opposed to an afterthought. In many cases, a design driven team might spend as much time on form as function.

Function

Incorporating features that integrate well with the rest of the design and are truly something customers find useful. Design driven development considers the possibility that a function will subtract from a design as opposed to add value.

Quality

Full consideration of non-functional requirements in areas such as speed, reliability and usability.

Experience

Thinking of products and services as an end-to-end experience. This requires connecting with customers to understand perceptions. For example, a banking website that requires 5 slow screens to get to a tool that customers most commonly use may find that customers perceive the site as an annoyance as opposed to a friendly tool.

Identity

In many cases, a firm spends a great deal of time communicating a brand identity but does little to incorporate that identity in products. Design-driven development has potential to give products an identity that reflects your brand. For example, if your brand identity embraces safety, make your products the safest on the market.

Adoption rate refers to the speed at which users begin to utilize a new product, service, or feature. It is often used to predict and evaluate the effectiveness of marketing efforts and internal changes. The following are illustrative examples of an adoption rate.

Innovation

Adoption rate is associated with innovation. In some cases, a leap forward in value isn’t immediately appreciated. An innovation that is destined to change the world may suffer from slow sales and a lack of interest for years or even decades. The reason for this is that innovation may require customers to change their way of thinking, modify their routines and learn things. People don’t easily change for a new product, even if it is valuable to them.

Early Adopters

Early adopters are people who are open to your innovation. This is often because they are enthusiasts, advanced users or generally open minded. Early marketing for an innovative product usually focuses on early adopters. If you get enough early adopters using a valuable new product, service, process, technique or idea it can quickly snowball to the rest of your target market.

Invitation Only

One way to engage early adopters is to launch early versions of your product or service on an invitation-only basis. This makes those you invite feel good and can trigger a fear of missing out that generates more demand. This works best if your product has significant publicity or status amongst likely early adopters. If you are unknown an “invitation” just looks like a marketing gimmick.

Unsought Products

An unsought product is a product that generates no desire in people. This has several variations including products associated with misfortune such as fire extinguishers and funeral services. It is often possible to sell unsought products if people feel they need them. However, the adoption rate is slow at best and you shouldn’t expect a sudden jump in adoption.

Failed Products

Products may lack adoption simply because they aren’t valuable to customers. This includes products that fail to appeal to customer needs and preferences. Pricing, distribution and promotion can also be factors in product failure. For example, a product that is too expensive for the value offered.

Early & Late Majority

Products can hit an extremely high adoption rate on the back of word of mouth and social status. This can occur because a product is innovative, fashionable or interesting in some way. It can also occur due to the brute force marketing efforts of a large firm. When the majority start adopting something it tends to happen quickly because the majority copy one another with enthusiasm.

Laggards

Laggards are independent thinkers or people who are simply out of touch with social trends or your market. A product that has been adopted by the majority will once again have a slow adoption rate as the last 20% of a market are laggards.

Internal Adoption

Beyond product development, it is common to track the adoption rate for internal changes. For example, a project that launches a new technology tool may target an internal adoption rate of 2000 users / month. If there is no mandate to use the tool, this may require internal communications such as presentations to generate demand.

Functions & Features

Product development teams may also track the adoption rate of new functions and features. For example, a photo editing platform might track how many users try a new filter. This information is used to tune product strategy.

The adoption lifecycle refers to the process by which customers adopt and become familiar with a new product or technology. It outlines the stages that an individual or organization goes through as they become aware of, evaluate, and ultimately decide to use a new product or technology. The adoption lifecycle helps companies understand how to best market and sell their products to potential customers, and it can also help customers understand their own decision-making process when considering the adoption of a new product or technology.

1. Loyal Customers & Innovators

The initial phase of adoption is often characterized by a company’s most loyal customers and fans of their products. In the technology sector, these early adopters are often referred to as “innovators.” However, it could be argued that purchasing a new technology does not necessarily constitute innovation, and the term “enthusiasts” may be more accurate. During this phase, companies with a strong market position often employ a pricing strategy called price skimming, which involves charging high prices to quickly recover investments in research and development.

2. Early Adopters

Early adopters are customers who may be influenced by the first customers to adopt a new product. If a product is truly innovative and represents a significant advancement, it may attract early adopters through word of mouth. On the other hand, a product that is not particularly innovative may still achieve early adoption through targeted marketing efforts.

3. Early Majority & Late Majority

The majority of customers tend to adopt a new product or technology once it becomes widely recognized and understood. At this point, the product or technology may experience a significant increase in sales. By this stage, economies of scale and competition have often resulted in a lower price, which further drives sales momentum.

4. Laggards

Laggards are customers who are the last to adopt a new product or technology. There can be various reasons for this. Some customers may not be interested in innovation and prefer to stick with what they are familiar with. Others may not have a pressing need for a particular product or technology, such as a customer who does not watch television often not having a need for the latest model.