6 common myths about digital product design

To get much more bang for your buck, consider these common misconceptions and harness the power of design.

01: Design is a “nice-to-have”

Not true. The best product designers focus on business metrics like bounce rates, traction, and retention.

The way we improve these metrics is by optimising the connection between the interface and the customer.

Making sure the value you create, connects with the people you are trying to reach is essential for any successful business.

02: Design can be added at the end

The best physical world analogy for a digital product designer is an architect. The sooner you involve the architect, the less work you’ll end up discarding, and the less time you’ll have wasted.

Or worse still, if you’re not prepared to redesign from scratch, they’ll inherit the constraints of any poor decisions. This can lead to dead-ends and capped potential.

Great designers reduce opportunity costs. The sooner you involve us, the more effective we can be.

03: I want a designer familiar with my industry

It can seem strange to non-designers, but we work at many layers of abstraction deeper than industry-specific challenges.

What to a founder, might be a contact list with friends’ faces, is to us, an unordered list with text and image objects. If you know your industry and your users, we know how to organise your product most effectively so it will resonate with them.

We’re master problem solvers. If you can accurately frame your problem, we can take you to the solution.

04: Junior designers take longer, but they get the same results

Not true. Senior designers will see and avoid strategic and structural issues. By leveraging their experience, they can avoid the plethora of common mistakes re-made by juniors every day.

In addition, experts can conceptualise better solutions. By drawing from a wider range of influences, and a deeper understanding of the complexities involved, experts can produce more elegant and outstanding solutions.

05: Senior designers are expensive

Just because the hourly rate is higher, doesn’t mean they cost more. A junior designer that is half the price, might (and often does) take four times as long to reach an average result.

But far more important than rates, is the quality of the outcome. By considering founder-level concerns like the go-to-market strategy, and the scalability of v1, experienced designers reduce the risk of building something that fizzles and crashes immediately after launch.

06: We don’t need to invest in design, we’re ‘agile’

This might be the most dangerous misconception of all. Being ‘agile’ is absolutely no substitute for looking ahead.

A great product vision can—and absolutely should—involve iterative development. Getting the balance between transformation and iteration right is exactly what an experienced product designer enables.

You get the best of both worlds (excellence & adaptability) without the negatives of either.