What’s functional design?

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Design involves planning and balancing different components. Functional design focuses on the product’s functionality and considers both end users and customers. The process starts with a clear goal and requires imagining the user’s responses and feedback system. Similarity of design and well-done documentation can enhance the user experience.

Design refers to the planning that is the foundation of making things. There are different philosophies, approaches and design methods. The design strikes a balance between a number of different components and, depending on the situation, may give more weight to one or the other. For example, one could focus on the materials and ask what could be made with a certain collection of objects, or one could concentrate on the aesthetics and try to imagine the most beautiful object to place in a given environment. Functional design can refer to a focus on function rather than aesthetics, a concern with goals rather than components, or it can refer to the use of a comprehensive requirements document to guide development and testing, or a computer modeling technique. Furthermore, functional design is an integral part of the functional design specification.

Most often, functional design is used to mean that the functionality of the product is taken into account in important ways as it is imagined and manufactured. For a product to be functional, both the end user and the customer must be considered throughout the design process. It may take some work to accurately describe your target audience.

The functional design process begins with the product’s goal: a clear statement of what it should do. That doesn’t mean that what the client wants it to do is the only thing the user will do with it. It has to do well what it was created to do.

The end user is usually not represented directly in the functional design process, so their responses must be imagined. Designers also need to envision his ability to learn to use the product, integrate it with other products he already has, or adapt it to his unique circumstances, if that’s the type of product that’s meant to be customized. Similarity of design to existing products and well done documentation can contribute to the end user experience; that is, thoughts about things that are not intrinsic to the product itself can help the product be more functional to the user than it otherwise would be.

With any product that needs to be linked, a feedback system must be established. People are used to the light telling them the vacuum cleaner is plugged in and the funny sound in their word processing software telling them they’ve been trying to do something that didn’t have a reasonable result. Part of functional design is letting the user know whether or not the product works. Also, if something doesn’t work or the user has attempted something that failed, a well-designed product will help the user get things back on track.




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