Have you ever wandered what are the key steps to accelerate digital product innovation? As experts in helping customers create superior user experiences for their products and services, we spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to turn an innovation from a good idea into a great digital product. This does not happen by chance: it requires a measured and disciplined approach to the entire process. Here are some of our thoughts on what it takes to accelerate digital product innovation.

Innovation starts with the right people. The first step on the road to success is to involve all the right people early on in the process. Ideas developed in silos with little (or no) input from others are rarely successful. Even great innovators like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs did not work isolated.
Innovation is taking an idea and exploring all its facets to determine what is possible, desirable and profitable. This requires input from product, design and technology experts – each bringing its own knowledge and experience to the conversation and ensuring the user remains at the center of the discussion.

Also, it is important to slow down to speed up. We live in a busy world, where the expectation is that everything happens quickly. In the digital design world, “Lean” and “Scrum are the most important buzzwords. That's not to say these strategies are worthless - in fact, there are significant merits to being the first to market a new idea - but there are also inherent dangers in going too fast and launching a not-ready products in the market.

There may be a fatal flaw in the design itself, or it may lack the key functionality needed to make it truly adoptable and usable by users. It is important, at this point in the innovation development cycle, that the team takes the time to properly define the digital product they want to create.
It is here when prototyping, testing, refining and validating come into action.

Once the team agrees on the right strategy for your product, it's time to prototype, test, and refine. Taking a project to market without this kind of careful inspection and iteration can be disastrous for a product. And, of course, a key component to the prototype testing part of the program is getting the design into the hands of real users through market testing, online testing, and even live testing for validation. If you want to know what customers actually adopt and use, you need to involve them in the design process.

Just as it's important to have all the right players involved, it's also important to cover all the key considerations for new product development and innovation. This includes minimal branding and naming, developing the right look and feel elements, defining the appropriate features and functionality, and selecting the delivery model for the complete solution or service.

And despite previous caveats about moving too fast or not doing enough validation, you also don't want to go too far in the other direction—you're writing Chapter 1, not the whole story. It is essential to bring your innovation to users in a timely manner for further validation and refinement by the market. According to Adobe, average mobile app usage drops by more than 50 percent after the first six months.

This provides an opportunity for competitors to steal users by offering richer functionality and better performance, forcing existing app product designers to find ways to entice people to stay.

It is also important to appropriately decide how to enter the market and when to upgrade. Determining how to go to market (and how long to stay before upgrading technology) is among the most difficult decisions to make when innovating.

Once you've completed your detailed planning, iteration stages, validation, branding, design, functionality and market channel, it's time to execute. And then recycle and update your design, based on market feedback and performance, and do it all over again.

In summary, Thomas Edison once said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. As designers of new digital products, we like to celebrate the inspiration that creates a great idea. But it is important to remember that real innovation is found at the intersection of vision and in the work of every design detail.