Industrial Design Firm: When to Bring in a Design Partner

Industrial design experts are called in to help with a wide array of product development requests. Here are three of the most common reasons why product developers may consider hiring an industrial design firm.

Industrial design is a practice that encompasses designing products, systems, and even end-to-end services. Industrial design firms bring a broad range of skillsets to the table, from product ideation to visual brand languages to human factors engineering.

At Goddard, our industrial designers are often asked to help product development teams boost product usability and improve a brand’s ability to meet the needs of their target market.

Whether your team is working on developing a new product or already has one on the market, it could be time to bring an industrial design company onboard. Let’s explore three reasons why you might think about partnering with an industrial design expert:

Three Reasons To Partner with an Industrial Design Firm

1. Your product’s design is outdated and falling behind competitors.

Markets are constantly evolving. Products that were designed years ago may no longer meet the needs of the marketplace. Industrial design firms are skilled at evaluating user needs, as well as the competitive landscape, to help companies recapture market share with updated legacy products.

This process involves market research, an analysis of competitive products, and user feedback to identify design features that will help elevate a legacy product above the rest. If you notice an existing product in your portfolio is beginning to lag behind in sales and you haven’t yet considered updating the product’s design, it may be time to chat with an industrial design firm.

Learn More: Phase One: Why Industrial Design & Engineering Teams Need to Work Together

2. Your technical team needs help designing for the marketplace, the user, or the user’s environment.

Industrial design firms are especially skilled at creating products that meet the needs of the user and the marketplace. In the product development process, an experienced team of engineers tends to focus on ensuring functionality, but it’s the job of the industrial designer to ensure usability. It’s not enough for the product to simply function – it has to be designed with the user and the user’s environment in mind.

We believe that the most successful products emerge from teams where engineers and designers work side-by-side. If you have an experienced, skillful technical team of engineers but are stumped when it comes to market research and design, consider adding an industrial designer to your team.

3. Your product is difficult to use or is failing unexpectedly.

If you’re receiving feedback from customers that your product is hard to use or, even worse, failing in the field – it’s time to call in an industrial design firm. At Goddard, our industrial designers are rooted in the principles of human factors engineering – a practice that centers product development around how human beings interact with the products around them.

Human factors activities – like user surveys and product mock-ups – provide data that designers can use to root out and mitigate problems within a product’s design.

Evaluating how a product’s features meet the user’s needs is critical work and theoretically, this should be done before you release a product into the market. But sometimes it needs to be done retroactively to uncover why a product is failing – and that’s when it may be helpful to bring in an industrial design firm.

Choosing Goddard As Your Industrial Design Firm

At Goddard, our highly experienced industrial designers have contributed to projects ranging from the entire product development spectrum – from conception to production.

If you’re looking for a skillful, reliable design partner to help get your next project started, be sure to check out our Product Development Process to learn more about how we approach industrial design.

We would love to hear about what you’re working on.

Tell us about your project and let’s begin a conversation about creating products with technical precision and elegant design.