NPD, or new product development, is a complex undertaking with one purpose in mind: transforming an idea into a market-ready product. It’s a systematic process that involves in-depth market research, design and engineering, iterative prototyping, testing and validation, and commercialization. There is no single correct formula for new product development. Every company can implement its own unique approach and strategy as it sees fit. In the vast majority of cases, however, an NPD starts with concept design services.

Think of a concept design as the earliest version of a product that represents the big picture of what you’re trying to build. It’s meant to show what problems the product will solve and how it should achieve that objective. Generating a concept design might actually be the most creative stage of a product development process; this is where you make notes and drawings on napkins and scrapbooks, then slap them on the wall and whiteboards. Only when all possibilities are explored, and every idea from varying perspectives is taken into consideration, can a concept design generation lead to innovation. In other words, the task runs in its most effective fashion as a team effort – preferably a team populated by professionals experienced in hardware product development.

Finding and hiring design professionals isn’t necessarily difficult. Freelancing platforms make it easy for you to discover and connect with talented product designers, fabricators, PCB makers, firmware developers, and engineers. Cad Crowd, a platform that specializes in product design and development, is always a safe bet. It’s home to a vast network of industrial designers from all over the world, ready to take on your NPD project at every stage of the process, be it concept generation or the entirety of the workflow. Having professionals with the right credentials and track record on your side means you have a much higher chance of formulating a proper concept – a design that you can plausibly develop into a working prototype in a cost-efficient manner.

Cad Crowd can connect you with pre-vetted experts capable of delving deep into hardware design research for products of any category, from fully mechanical tools and equipment to sophisticated electronics. They help you experiment with components, assemblies, fabrication techniques, PCB layouts, and all possibilities within DFM (design for manufacturability) services. While there’s always a degree of uncertainty with every concept design, the talents at Cad Crowd strive to eliminate the risk from the get-go, allowing you to focus on what’s technically feasible rather than trying to fix mistakes as the project moves along.

---

🚀 Table of contents

---

Ideation and concept design

When you come up with an idea for a hardware product, whether home appliances, power tools, medical devices, peripherals, toys, gadgets, or anything else in between, almost immediately, your mind ventures into the “concept design” territory, chances are, you visualize the product in your mind and wonder if the design makes sense or is at least possible. The notion that you have to separate ideation and concept design generation isn’t as clear-cut as it may seem.

They’re usually considered separate stages in an NPD process, but a concept design is, in essence, an idea waiting to be materialized all the same. A concept design is somewhat more tangible than an idea, but not quite tangible enough that you can call it a PoC (Proof of Concept). It’s somewhere between the two, and its main purpose is to point you in the right direction before you go too far ahead. You need a feasible concept to form the foundation of a prototype, which eventually becomes the ultimate reference point for the final production version.

RELATED: How innovative product design simplicity and honesty help your brand grow

CAD for concept design

For a lot of product designers, a concept design is where they make rough sketches sprinkled with symbols and handwritten notes. It shouldn’t be too elaborate because the important point here is to entertain the ideas with only some basic visualizations. Pencils and paper are the best tools, allowing the designers to quickly generate a concept every time they have a brain wave. There’s no need to overthink every single design that comes to mind, considering how everything still has to go through a screening process later on.

Detailed design, on the other hand, is often viewed as a phase that requires CAD tools. It’s a phase that immediately follows the screening process, where only the most plausible concepts are shortlisted for further development. Product design experts will probably discard dozens of concepts generated during the previous phase for the sake of effective resource allocation. If every concept must be drawn using CAD software, it’s going to take too much time before they can move on to the next phase.

The thing is that just because someone mentions CAD, it doesn’t necessarily mean the time has come for you to worry about such technical matters as clearances, material selections, simulations, electrical engineering, or manufacturability. If the development team has just one person familiar enough with 3D CAD modeling, creating a basic concept of a simple hardware product will probably take anywhere from 4 to 8 hours (especially when using digital sculpting software like ZBrush, Blender, Mudbox, or the alternatives). The model will be pretty basic without texturing, detailed specifications, and the like, but then again, one concept per day is a respectably productive pace in an NPD process.

The road to concept designs for hardware products

A concept design isn’t a development phase reserved only for complex products like cars, humanoid robots, medical equipment, or any high-dollar machinery. Every product worth developing needs to (or at least should) go through some form of concept design phase.

Much like the entire NPD process, there’s no one best formula for an effective conceptual design. If you ask a dozen industrial designers about it, you’ll end up even more confused by their varying explanations. There’s nothing wrong with the different answers, and confusion isn’t always unexpected, either. After all, concept generation is inherently an exercise of creativity, and your method of crafting a solution might be different from the others’. Although variations are nothing unusual, the path leading toward a hardware concept design tends to include the following major steps.

Define the design requirements

In the countless guides you’ve come across all over the Internet about product development for product design firms, you’ll often see that market research is also listed as its own separate phase, rather than a subcategory of concept generation. Most of these guides mention “research” in the broadest sense of the term, including the business sides of NPD such as profitability, IP protection, target demographics, and so forth.

Concept generation also needs market research, at least the part where it digs into unsolved problems, unmet demands, and user preferences. You want to develop a concept design based on valid research, so that every design decision you make actually addresses real needs rather than an assumed necessity. Assumptions have their uses, for example, when you try to form a hypothesis about how a product fails or why consumers choose a particular brand over others. But these assumptions mean very little unless they’re validated by findings from thorough research. A concept design with no solid foundation in market research is prone to common blunders, such as the lack of desired features, terrible ergonomics, outdated functionality, poor user interface, or compatibility issues.

A market research of the sort might involve interviewing a lot of people, or a survey if you’d like – about the problems they have with the existing products, the solutions they want, what features they need, what kind of activities they do with the products, frequent pain points, and prices.

Let’s say you’re developing a concept design of a modern lawnmower led by new invention development design services. The research can cover a lot of topics, from the size of the motor and horsepower to app connectivity and remote monitoring. They’re all broad questions, but you might want to be very specific about every topic, because the best answers/responses are supposed to be narrow-focused as well, for instance:

• “A power-reserve gauge will be great, even a light indicator is good enough to tell me exactly when to recharge.”
• “My partner is much taller than I, so an adjustable handle would be helpful.”
• “Why isn’t there any affordable hybrid lawnmower I can buy already?”
• “I don’t mind a gas-powered lawnmower, if only the fuel doesn’t spill so easily.”
• “Fancy mowers aren’t for me. An old-school heavy-duty hardware is still best, perhaps with a little bit of battery goodness.”
• “So long as it’s durable and easy to repair, I will buy it.”

As casual as the answers might sound, they offer true insight into users’ viewpoints and can lead you to some market differentiators. The answers touch on a lot of issues, and you should be able to formulate a coherent design intent from the information you gather. Here’s just an example:

A lawnmower, even if it comes with various modern features like Bluetooth and a solar panel, should strive to preserve ergonomics and ease-of-use. Convenient features are always welcome additions, whether a pair of cupholders, an included second mulch attachment, or a foldable design for easy storage. Durability and repairability remain two major issues to address, regardless of design and powertrain configuration.

The more users involved in the survey, the more specific the design intent you get. And everything that you come across while specifying the design intent ends up as design requirements, which can be defined as specific criteria derived from end-user research and meant to guide the development of the product’s features and intended use cases.

RELATED: How to reduce costs on 3D product development with remote CAD experts for companies

Product benchmarking

With only a few exceptions, most hardware products developed by electronic device design services in the last several decades or so aren’t exactly brand-new innovations. Some of them use novel technologies like 5G connectivity (IoT or smartphones), electromechanical biosensors (wearable devices), an assortment of exotic metals (heavy-duty vehicles), and high-performance semiconductors (medical and industrial robots), but much of their shape and form is built on existing products.

For example, the basic form of a car has been pretty much the same for decades, down to the pedal arrangement and drivetrain. The same thing applies to many smartphones and laptops, which still take design cues from their earliest generations. Consumer medical devices like pacemakers, hearing aids, fitness trackers, pulse oximeters, thermometers, and blood pressure monitors haven’t changed as drastically as you might expect, either.

This doesn’t mean copying the look and feel of an existing product is the right way to generate a concept design. A unique product stands out from the crowd. On a store shelf filled with similar-looking products from various brands, a distinctive design gets all the attention from consumers. At the same time, straying too far from the “recognizability” factor comes with the inherent risk of people avoiding it altogether. Imagine a scenario where a company makes bicycles that use steering wheels as opposed to the conventional handlebars; a high point for uniqueness, but minus one for familiarity.

A few people probably buy it just for its peculiarity value, while most end-users take a second glance, and that’s about it. Having a unique design is commendable, but sticking to what’s already been proven effective and marketable is always a wise decision. It’s probably why nobody has successfully reinvented the wheel. A balance between uniqueness and familiarity in hardware design is the safe bet, and this is where product benchmarking comes in. To do that, you have to examine the competition. Benchmarking allows you to assess competitors’ product designs and understand why consumers prefer certain brands over alternatives.

There are times during the design development where you may have to isolate yourself from external influences and focus on putting bits of ideas together to build a coherent concept. It enables you to filter the noise more easily and come up with a truly unique design of your own. At other times, studying competitors’ designs would also be beneficial as they provide an insight into the good, the bad, and the ugly. Benchmarking opens the door to a better view of the market landscape and trends, which hopefully reveal or present clear pathways to design differentiation and product innovation.

Attributes to benchmark

For most consumer hardware products, whether mechanical or electronic (or a combination of both), the idea behind benchmarking is to figure out the best and the worst popular design elements and features of the existing products. There are plenty of design attributes to focus on. Among the obvious ones for consumer product design companies are as follows:

Physical characteristics	Style/visual appeal	User interface	Convenient factors
Material Shape Form Size Durability	Color Finishes Packaging	Display (if any) Controls/buttons Feedback	Ease of use Ergonomics Portability Safety features Power efficiency Repairability Compatibility Instructions

Remember that you’re not in the process of creating imitations of all those features. The point is that no matter what concept design you come up with, at the end of the day, it has to be an improvement over the existing designs or at least perform just as well. Anything subpar defeats the purpose of a concept design.

About the user interface

Assuming the product being developed is an electronic, it probably has some kind of digital control for the user to operate the device. Modern electronics like home appliances or consumer-grade medical devices often have a screen to display status indicators (battery power, speed, timer, heat, and so on), data received from the built-in or attached sensors, and error information, to name a few. In case the product isn’t meant to have a screen, it probably has a few buttons or switches to activate certain features or initiate operation in the first place. Even a mechanical alarm clock has a few knobs to adjust the time, a trigger ice cream scoop has a lever, and a basic computer mouse has two buttons and a scroll wheel. Physical controls are fundamental parts of the user interface.

Complex hardware products like smart thermostats, car infotainment systems, digital cameras, handheld GPS, laser distance meters, and, of course, smartphones have much more sophisticated user interface designs from the embedded software. The good thing is that creating a concept design of a digital user interface doesn’t require tinkering with software development for concept design experts. During the concept phase, you can sketch a simple version of a UI on a whiteboard or paper. Although it won’t work (because you can’t actually operate it anyway), the drawing gives you an idea of the display layout and how to position the physical buttons accordingly.

Vision statement

Out of the design requirements and benchmarking results comes a better understanding of the market opportunity. At this point, you’ve already learned about the range of problems typical users have and have had a reasonable grasp of how the existing products failed to deliver effective solutions. However, it’s important to remember that every product is usually a result of a design compromise. For example, a company probably has what it takes to build an exceptionally good digital audio player (DAP) equipped with sophisticated software and a high-grade metal enclosure.

But a premium product isn’t cheap. Given the substantial resources spent on research and development and manufacturing, the price tag must reflect production costs if the company wants to make a profit on every sale. Some compromises are necessary to keep the price down to a reasonable level for the target market. The metal enclosure might use a less-durable alloy, the touchscreen is resistive instead of capacitive, the battery has a smaller capacity, or the storage device is built-in rather than removable. Every downgrade means lower development cost, and therefore friendlier retail price.

A vision statement has no regard for such compromises. Unlike a design intent, where you tend to delve into specific features and functionality, a vision statement speaks only in generalities. This is how you describe a perfect concept. Take a look at the following excerpt of a hypothetical lawnmower concept design: The lawnmower must be optimized for compatibility with modern technologies, in terms of connectivity and sustainability. Control via smartphone, the use of eco-friendly energy sources, and automation within the IoT framework allow for simplified and more practical operation in both residential and commercial settings.

All the hardware parts and assemblies, including the self-sharpening blade, are replaceable for easy maintenance and repair by design for manufacturing and assembly services. A vision statement is supposed to be a general description, albeit with a clear focus on durability and ease of use. Don’t overthink about what to put into the statement; the eventual product will most likely end up with a design compromise or two, and the vision statement simply acts as a guardrail to prevent you from straying too far off the objectives and a reminder to keep you striving for improvement.

Concept generation

Backed by a combination of detailed user research, benchmarking results, and the vision statement, you’re now ready to enter the actual phase of concept generation. The goal is to come up with as many concepts as possible to be evaluated during the next stage of product development. With every concept, there’s no need to get bogged down with technical feasibilities, engineering constraints, potential for profits, and overall manufacturability. Many of your concepts may be closer to being imaginary than they are to feasibility, some could be pretty convincing, and a select few might fall just right under the umbrella of real market opportunity. Although you will eventually discard most of those concepts, never prejudge any of them.

RELATED: 13 reasons why companies outsource IoT design & development to product design firms

Concept assessment

Generating concept designs should be an entirely creative, if not imaginative, phase where you enjoy exploring ideas. Putting all those concepts into assessment, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. You need to narrow the selection down, for example, from a list of 20 concept designs to only 5, based on various factors such as technical or engineering feasibility, budget, time-to-market, and conformity with the vision statement. Use the attributes you observed during the benchmarking phase as the assessment criteria. Because it’s never a good idea to evaluate your own work, make the effort to assemble a small team of professionals consisting of at least one industrial design expert and one engineer.

Suppose the product is an electronic device with a digital user interface; a firmware/software developer should be involved as well. It’s not uncommon for companies to hire some “representatives” of the target demographics to take part in the assessment process. For instance, if the product is a medical device, the team includes a primary care physician, a specialist, or a nurse; if it’s sports equipment, you need an athlete or a coach; if it’s a home appliance, include a technician or an electrician, and so forth.

Having an industry-specific professional in the team is advisable, especially when your product has to meet strict standards and regulations. As the assessment concludes, you’ll end up with two – perhaps three – concepts that warrant further analysis and testing to determine if they can plausibly satisfy user needs and meet the design requirements while maintaining conformity with standards.

Takeaway

Concept generation is often listed as its own phase in an NPD process. In reality, this phase alone comprises multiple steps to ensure that the resulting concepts are grounded in sound analysis of market opportunities, research on the target demographics, and a well-founded understanding of existing products.

At every step of the concept generation phase, from defining design requirements and benchmarking to formulating the vision statement and conducting assessments, you have a much better chance of producing valid results and development-worthy concepts by bringing professionals on board. Industry-specific expertise and experience in NPD go a long way to transform your concept design generation into a systematic plan of action without all the guesswork.

How Cad Crowd can help

With Cad Crowd around, hiring the right professionals for the job doesn’t have to be an expensive hurdle. You can find thousands of industrial designers, engineers, market analysts, and even turnkey NPD professionals on the platform with just a few clicks of a button. More importantly, Cad Crowd has pre-vetted all the freelancers beforehand, leaving only the most talented and best qualified partners for you to collaborate with. Request a quote today.