Business Process: The Other Very Important Consideration A Designer Has To

Business process: the other very important consideration a designer has to go through is the business process both from company perspective and user perspective. The over all price of the product may depend on the design and considering this is a very important thing. The best examples are the products from Microsoft, take for example PowerPoint, though costing only 50-100 dollars, its over all revenue may be grater than some very big software companies whose products cost millions of dollars. Why? The design was so done that there are millions of satisfied customers to PowerPoint or excel who can afford it easily than to products that cost millions of dollars.
Manufacturing overview: it is also very important for a designer to be thoroughly aware of what exactly his company is capable of and at what capacity. I can design a magnificent product in a technology that my company is not even aware of, there is no use to it. A designer should be completely knowledgeable in the manufacturing processes and principles of his company so that what ever he does is not counter to the existing mechanism, but only increase its productivity by using it in a better way.
Now that we considered the basic aspects of design, let us now look at the design process. Being a designer is not such a simple job, you will have to consider so many discrete and varied things, a small list of which was provided above. There is a lot of trial and error involved. Till you get the right one, there could be thousand rejected designs. Though most of the design process is done by designers, there is a lot of contribution from most of the other departments involved in getting that product out like manufacturing people, engineers, business analysts, managers etc. The following are the basic but general steps I mentioned earlier that any designer follows:
Understanding and evaluating Requirements: The very first step involved in design process is to understand and evaluate the user requirements. This involves defining the objectives, setting deadlines, targets and parameters. The design team is involved right from the beginning to the end as they have to understand the business process both from the company's point of view and the customer's point of view. The idea being creating an ideal project which will satisfy both the business processes and optimize them. A very important question to answer at this level is why are we creating / modifying this product? Once this question is properly answered, the rest of the process becomes simpler and logical.
Research: Research is one of the most important aspects of the whole process. This is an ever going process, especially in the case of a longer project. Research typically includes a variety of areas like Technology, Economy, User Satisfaction, Competitor products, trends, risks etc.