Sometimes the barriers to the success of your business or dream are external: a difficult economy, trouble securing the needed funding, or other headaches. But sometimes what’s holding your product back is something much simpler: bad design. Industrial design services ensure that the shape and function of your product are impeccably matched with its human users, who ultimately determine your success.
Be Cool: Differentiate
The first value great design can deliver? Differentiation. On a simplistic level, we all understand how this works. Why is a customer willing to pay much more for a pair of name-brand sneakers than for an off-brand, when many of them are manufactured in the same factories with the same materials? The name-brand sneakers often have the advantage of better design, which often leads to increased customer loyalty. This can also be thought of as the “coolness” factor. While “cool” is often perceived as effortless or a lucky accident, it is, in fact, created through great design.
Be Efficient: Integrate
Excellent design can reduce production costs through integration, for example by building manufacturing considerations into the product from the beginning and improving the speed of product development. Much like the “cool” factor of a product, efficiency that maintains flexibility and responsiveness to market changes are advantages whose importance is difficult to overstate.
Be Customer Oriented
With the proliferation of products in the market today, it’s not enough for an item to be functionally superior. Users expect their interactions with products to be both functionally immaculate and aesthetically pleasing. In many areas where a product has only narrow functional differences with a competitor, its design can be a deciding factor that leads a customer to choose or reject the product. Quality industrial design can make a product much more pleasant to use, creating not just first-time but repeat customers, and encouraging great word of mouth.
Be Successful
While it’s easy to see how industrial design can improve your product, it can actually deliver an advantage to your business in multiple arenas, from advertising, to production, to adaptation and tolerance for change. The question isn’t whether your business can afford to utilize quality industrial design services–it’s whether, in this cutthroat market environment, it can afford not to.
Sources:
The Industrial Design Advantage – www.designdirective.com
Improving Competitive Advantage Through Industrial Design – www.mddionline.com