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Concept Development
Turning Opportunity Into Reality
Concept development is a crucial phase in the new product development process that involves transforming customer insights, market research, and creative ideation into viable and compelling product concepts. During this stage, ideas are explored, refined, expanded, and evaluated to determine their feasibility, market potential, and alignment with the company's strategic goals. Concept exploration and ideation entails considering factors such as appropriate visual messaging, brand alignment, competitive landscape, technological feasibility, and cost implications. These exploration and development efforts help identify the most promising ideas that have the potential to address customer pain points, differentiate from competitors, and generate valuable strategic advantages in the marketplace setting the foundation for subsequent engineering and marketing efforts that will ultimately bring the concept to life as a successful new product.
Below are some of the techniques and practices we deploy at Sophic Design throughout this phase of development.
Concepting Tools
Visual Positioning
By identifying and implementing strategic visual elements, products can communicate their brand personality, values, and intuitive use to consumers. Using image boards and design frameworks, Sophic charts a course and outlines a project’s strategic design intent to help focus concept ideation efforts and effectively utilize a project’s allocated time and resources.
Exploration & Sketching
In this stage of the development process our teams brainstorm, experiment, sketch, and iterate new ideas that allow designers to explore innovative solutions, uncover new perspectives, and discover breakthrough concepts that align with the previously-performed strategic design intent and visual positioning efforts and address user-centered design challenges and problems.
Refinement
Refinement focuses on identifying the most promising ideas from the concept exploration efforts and fine-tuning the form, details, and product features as well as identifying materialization and manufacturing strategies that align with project constraints and pricing targets ultimately shaping them into more robust, viable, and market-ready solutions.
Building
Here teams can transform concepts into tangible, interactive representations by creating volume studies, mockups, and rough prototypes that allow them to validate ideas, test assumptions, gather user feedback, identify design flaws and potentially costly errors, and make necessary iterations that help ensure the concept solutions meet customer needs, enhance usability, and minimize risk.
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