Releasing a digital product may be a long and tedious journey with uncertain results, if any at all. What if you could launch your product faster, easier, and with tangible results? These are but a few benefits of Product Design Sprint.

The key to success in today’s increasingly competitive business environment is making your company as agile and flexible as possible, and spotting opportunities and pain points in the market and reacting to them before your rivals. But how do you achieve that, especially as your business grows?

A prototype ready and tested in five days? Now it is possible thanks to design sprints. The idea behind them is to connect business strategy, research, design thinking, effective collaboration, and innovation to solve complex challenges with a fraction of the resources. There are countless benefits that Netguru’s Product Design Sprint can bring to your digital product and business.

Back in the old days, people needed to come up with ways how to communicate with computers in order to use their magnificent power and make the most of it to serve user needs. The way the interfaces worked was dictated by limitations of the computers’ capacity to behave like humans. Therefore, we needed to adjust our behaviour to line up with technology. And so, we learned to bend our natural style of communication and type in lines of commands easily recognized by machines but not so easy to memorise for a human being.

When I think of Italy, there are plenty of images that come to my mind. However, apart from such obvious things like the Colosseum, the Grand Canal in Venice or Tuscan hills, there’s one thing without which this south European country wouldn’t be the same – industrial design from the early 70s.

Products need to serve a purpose. Everything we do as designers, developers, managers, and founders should have clear objectives and aim to be useful and valuable for recipients and customers. It’s fair to say that one of the main goals of product design is to ensure the right product-market fit. And one of the best ways to verify a product’s usefulness is to conduct user testing sessions.

You have an idea for a product. Excitement is going through the roof, you have all the ideas in your head, and you’re ready to start assembling the team. The business plan is flawless, all features are well described, and you even know the approximate date of releasing the product. But wait… aren’t you missing something? Are you sure that your potential clients will love your product? Is your solution going to fulfill their real needs just as you’ve imagined? Are you positive that it will be useful? If you don’t show your product to your potential clients, you can’t be 100 percent sure you will succeed. That’s why you should validate your idea by creating a prototype of your solution. In this way you can make necessary changes before spending money on developing a product that simply won’t work the way you’ve imagined.

If you want to build a product, you can’t do it by yourself. You need a hard-working and fully devoted team. Unfortunately, sometimes there are tensions and misunderstandings between members. It’s important to know how to deal with them and help people with their workflow. I will look closer at the relationship between UX designers and developers. What can we do to improve this cooperation, how can we build understanding, and what are the profits for business and product?

Conversion rate is usually the main metric that entrepreneurs use to measure the success of their business. Companies invest a lot to increase their conversion rates and to improve sales as a result. However, they often underestimate how UX design influences this really important metric. With some simple tricks and UX methods you can significantly raise your conversion rate.

Some time ago I talked with my colleague Mateusz Jankowski, who is a Senior UI designer. I was telling him that I’m going to write a post about the truth of working as UI designer. The deeper you dig, the darker it gets, but maybe there’s one specific term that describes your daily duties? - I asked. His answer made me cry with laughter - sure, it’s like a visual OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Well, it’s hard to disagree. But it’s just the tip of an iceberg.