The Study Of Product Conceptual Design Process And Methods Based On The UCD Method

Contemporarily, the competition among enterprises is essentially acompetition of new product development. Conceptual design determinesmore than80%of the value of products, which makes it the key to thesuccess of new product development. After all, product conceptual designis the most basic and most complex phase of product design process, butalso the most active and creative stage.The generalized conceptual design refers to the creative ideas andsolutions to problems of industrial design explored in the early period ofproduct development. The narrow definition of conceptual design is thedesign progress between requirement analysis phrase and detailed designphase. Because the product conceptual design trends to embody the needsof users to the greatest extent, more and more people believe that thegeneralized definition is the genuine meaning of the conceptual design.As our existing product conceptual design is not entirelyuser-centered, most of the laboratory type of product development mightultimately make them less competitive. The unstable factors in productconceptual design such as: technology orientation, target audienceunclarity, the absence of needs analysis and the in-depth user researchwill all lead to product development failure. The user-centered design(UCD), is able to resolve the uncertainty in the conceptual design, UCD,providing the appropriate guidelines and design methods that can helpproduct developers and designers to solve the relevant design problems,are all based on user-centered consideration.This paper will firstly introduce product conceptual design’s concept,importance and characteristics, and UCD’s concepts, the developmentprocess related to design methods. After studying the National University of Singapore Mixed Virtual Lab’s actual design projects and the theoriesrelated to the product conceptual design, the paper tried to introduce theprocess of product concept based on the UCD ideas, eventually resultingin the methodology diagram of product conceptual design process basedon the UCD. Finally, based on this process and methods writer designed aprinter for HP to verify the rationality and feasibility of the process.