Mendix: A Guide to Product Development Design

Product development design is a comprehensive process. It involves several moving pieces, be it features, people, or the customer’s dreams and hopes. Before launching any final products, much work is done on that particular product. Also, there are various steps in the product development cycle.

Mendix expert has achieved significant success in product development design in its projects. Therefore, we will learn the secrets to preparing for a successful first sprint with Mendix. But first, let’s explore product development design in detail.

What is Product Development Design?

Product development design defines the process of visualizing, fabricating, and iterating products. It involves agile procedures that assist organizational teams create products that deliver the best user experiences. The product development design aims to cater to specific needs or solve users’ problems.

The primary aspect is understanding the end-user, business goals, and the purpose of the product. Fundamentally, product development design with Mendix entails answering these questions:

• Why do we need to build this application?
• Who are our target users?
• What are the needs of users?
• How will our product meet the user’s needs?
• What are our organizational goals while meeting those needs?

Do you need a streamlined product development design using Mendix? Reach out to us – we got your back.

7 Stages of Product Development Design

Product development design is a process that involves logical steps. From just a mere vision to product creation, each step leads the way for the other. Here is a chronological guide for your product development design:

1. Product’s Name and Vision

A product vision is like a summary of the entire product development design. It is the stage where you generate ideas about the product. Here, you analyze and filter ideas. Keep the finest ideas and discard the others. At this point, the most preferred thing to do is think about how to recount the most significant segments of your vision in simple words.

Often, the name of an application is the most underappreciated aspect of any development design process. It is very rare to begin the first step of a project where there is already a good application name. Nevertheless, formulating a good product name requires diligence. It must be captivating and, at the same time, have a powerful connection with the real application. It can be a daunting task.

The most important thing is conceptualizing a good name. It always has a positive impact on all individuals engaged in the project. Individuals will start having an emotional bond with the application they are helping to create.

2. Building Personas

Before thinking of how you will construct functionalities, it is crucial to know why and for whom you are creating them. Usually, this involves conducting user research on personas. Essentially, persona scales down to user-based research that satisfies scientific research in the effectiveness of usage and content. Hence, it is a proven research that can help communicate and form consensus in the project team. It helps provide focus, build empathy, and formulate and support decisions.

The research in this stage allows you to validate all assumptions made during the project vision. Provisional personas provide solutions when we are handling a snappy Mendix project. These personals need a few days to be created and necessitate limited interviews during research, making them more enticing for Mendix projects.

3. Developing User Journeys

In this stage, you are well informed on your users, their needs, and what they envision accomplishing with the product you are building. You must bridge the gap between how the application will work, the persona’s tasks, and the personas themselves. The most suitable way to do that is through user journeys.

Here are the various common user journey levels:

Customer Journeys: Involves plotting out the whole experience where the application has a distinct part but is integral to the entire journey. Common in the marketing sector.

User Flows: This is a systematic map depicting the flow a user can employ in task accomplishment.

Storyboards: A resemblance of movie storyboards or graphic novels. It adds context and outlines how a user can interact with the application.

4. Defining Constraints

The exact moment of building constraints might vary. You need to keep in mind that user journeys can be affected by some constraints. Therefore, they need to be created parallel with or before user journeys.

The secret of defining constraints is maintaining their relevance. But you can skip a long list of restrictions for preparation. You will have sufficient time to deal with and define the constraints during the real sprint.

5. Design

This stage is the first step in the user journey’s translation to the application in the creation process. The exact activities at this stage widely vary concerning the customer and application type. Also, the capabilities of the customer in employing the Mendix low-code platform matter. Some tools, such as sitemaps, wireframes, style tiles, and corporate identity guidelines, have proven effective.

6. Formulating Epics

You know your users well and what they intend to achieve at this stage. You have created a way to achieve this through the application and have built a design framework. You now have all the necessary details to formulate epics.

First, you need to translate the application design to user stories. This helps divide the epics into sections to realize it. Note that epics are a good idea as they help save time and improve focus on the project.

7. Building Ready Stories

The last stage in product development design is building ready user stories that cover at least two sprints. A ready user story implies that it complies with the definition of the term ready. This is the first time a ready-user story will be offered. Therefore, it is crucial to involve the whole team at this stage.

Conclusion

A product goes through various steps that involve its development life-cycle. Product development design is an essential part of any low-code application development with Mendix. This is because mendix developers can test their ideas and understand the users’ needs. Eventually, reach out to the product users and deliver a product that best suits their needs. Moreover, one can assess the product during development design and improve its features.