Desirability Across the Product Development Lifecycle

Desirability is a multidimensional tool that can be leveraged to effectively guide a product towards – and beyond – a successful launch. That’s why we’ve mapped it onto the product development lifecycle (PDLC) so that you can see how it can be used to reduce spin, grow concept confidence and enhance team efficiencies, ensuring you’re building the right thing the right way.

In the world of product, desirability can be reduced to two key questions:

1. Does the product solve a problem for an end user? 
2. How is the user’s preference (or desire) for this product shaped?  

But that is only scratching the surface of its potential. 

Desirability is a multidimensional tool that can be leveraged to effectively guide a product towards – and beyond – a successful launch. That’s why we’ve mapped it onto the product development lifecycle (PDLC) so that you can see how it can be used to reduce spin, grow concept confidence and enhance team efficiencies, ensuring you’re building the right thing the right way.

Desirability helps you generate opportunities

The closer you are getting to the iconic idea on a napkin, the more desirability should be used as a generative tool. Your idea can go in many directions. The scope of possibilities at stage 0 is still very wide and broad. From 0-0.5, a product still needs much definition, and it’s open to evolution and growth. Pivoting a product or feature has low switching costs, because investments in code – or even emotional attachment to an idea – haven’t become (too) entrenched.

Desirability is a tool that illuminates and broadens the horizon so that you can see the multiple directions a concept could go. It can help to generate hypotheses about the wealth of ways that you can solve user needs, so that you can identify and eliminate expensive iterations before you do the heavy lifting.

The key outcomes of this 0-0.5 stage would include product directions, design implications and strategic recommendations focused on the problem you’re solving for an end user. These directions, implications, and recommendations form the broad foundation for the later stages of the PDLC and may be captured in lo-fi concepts. You’re likely going to derive qualitative data about what your user needs from you; data that will help you address key hypotheses guiding product development.

Taking a generative approach to desirability early in the PDLC is meant to help guide (but not unduly restrict) an early build. As the fidelity of your product grows, desirability can then be used as a tool to validate that a build maximizes user preference and should continue moving in its current form toward launch.

… and desirability helps you hone in on success

Ideally, products and features in Stage 0.5-1 undergo fewer, less radical transformations. You’ve moved past rapid iterations and have made investments in code, marketing, and maybe even some usability testing. Increased product and feature fidelity create a stable environment to start gathering summative assessments about user experience and preference. In Stage 0.5-1, desirability becomes a validation tool.

You can use a high-fidelity prototype to create tests that generate data that capture user attitudes and behaviours. Given the level of functionality and proximity to a real context of use, you are better able to answer the question, “Is the thing we’ve built desirable?”

Understanding what desirability looks like and how to leverage it at different stages of the PDLC helps you to keep the value you’re offering to your end user close at hand through every stage of the development process.

Conclusion: How to test desirability throughout the PDLC

Using desirability to guide product development is about reducing the risk that you build something people don’t need to or don’t want to use. Knowing that your product solves a genuine user need and elicits the right emotional response from them increases the confidence that you invested resources in the right product. Knowing what desirability looks like at different stages of the PDLC, you can now flesh out what kinds of testing you can put against it and understand the results you might generate. Testing for desirability is as important as testing for usability, quantifying viability, or determining feasibility.

But how do you test for desirability across the PDLC? Stay tuned for our next article to find out!