Conceptual Design: How to Wrap Your Mind Around Ideation

Conceptual Design is a process of roughly researching, thinking, and prototyping solutions for any feature or product. It is own of the best ways to start out any product designing and perform ideation. In this article we are going to discuss Conceptual design, what is Ideation? how can we create Conceptual designs for a better ideation process? and also some best practices to keep in mind while creating Conceptual Designs.

Conceptual Design

What is Conceptual Design?

In terms of industrial design, Conceptual Design is a part of product designing where you start thinking about ideas of how the design of the product should be. It is a process of roughly researching, thinking, and prototyping solutions for any feature or product. Rather than the design itself, Conceptual designing is more about creative solutions, ideas, and research for a feature or a product.

Conceptual design can go all the way from simple Figma files to very sophisticated 3D files with color applications but the basic idea of conceptual design is that it is a basic design that can be handed off to people (designers) to design it. The more precise we are with the conceptual design the better results will come out in the final design.

What is Ideation?

Ideation is a part of design thinking process where we brainstorm and come up with ideas and solutions to users problems. Ideation helps you take your research from synthesis to actions. It precedes doing any design work that means ideation is not about starting the actual designs of features and screens.

Ideation is a five step process:

1. Empathizing with our users.
2. Defining our user’s goals, needs and pain points.
3. Ideating by creating ideas for innovative solutions.
4. Prototyping those potential solutions.
5. Testing those prototypes.

Benefits of Conceptual Design

Having Conceptual Design as a part of your workflow can immensely helps you as a designer, the major benefits of creating a Conceptual design are:

• You get a better overview of the final product and it’s features.
• Conceptual designs helps you create something that can be then taken to the business team or the research team. This something could be a rough prototype, a report or even just an idea.
• Conceptual design helps the designers and developers create a story around the product.
• During Conceptual design, people from different background, form creatives to developers to designers come together to work on an idea.
• The more precise we are with the conceptual design the better results will come out in the final design.
• Conceptual design takes you from 0 to 1. It ensures that the end of it we will have something solid. This makes it a great way to begin designing any product.

Best Practices

Here are a few best practices for creating Conceptual designs that may help you in your ideation process:

• Provide a space for fostering creativity: It is extremely important to create a safe space for designers and any type of creatives in the room to put down ideas without hesitating. The concept designing team should not feel ashamed of things that sound completely crazy but might have a small nugget of reality.
• Conceptual design must communicate something: The ideas in Conceptual design should always communicate something, they should be communicating an idea, a process or a thought but there must be something at the end once we are done with Conceptual design, we must have something to hand over to the business team or the research team.
• Conceptual design is all about storytelling: In Conceptual Design, the designers must work on developing a very loose story that gets more fine-tuned as we get closer to final product that is to be released on the market. You can do this by putting yourself in the shoes of a company that hires designers to come up with conceptual ideas, you must take care of these points – They do not want something that is already out there, not something boring, they want something that is going to inspire them to do more, they want ideas that are patentable and that are at the forefront of their industry. These points might vary as per business or team you are designing for.
• Don’t limit to just to an interface: Conceptual design should be just be limited to a basic User Interface. Conceptual design also includes the core functionality of a product so make sure to add features to the design that are core to the Product.
• Conceptual design must have a goal: You must have a goal for your design as soon as you complete your Conceptual design. Conceptual design is all about from getting 0 to 1 in terms of ideas, create a Conceptual design that provides a goal to the UI/UX designing team to work towards.
• Keep in mind these points: When creating a Conceptual design, we do it keeping in mind the usability, we think about the market conditions, sales, stakeholders, and people who would want to buy it.
• Collaboration is the key: Conceptual Design is about asking questions surrounding yourself with the right people and collaborating. Designers cannot create wonderful ideas that become reality by themselves they need other people to turn these into reality. Therefore, Conceptual design team should not only contain designers, but also people with technical skills, researching abilities, creatives etc.

Conclusion

All the points we discussed in the article brings us to the conclusion that Conceptual design is one of the best ways to take a step towards converting our ideas into products. It is a great way for ideation in the design thinking process as well. Make sure to keep in mind the points we discussed in the article before creating a new design, designing your next project or working on your next design thinking process.