The first step in designing or redesigning a product is understanding the people who will use it and the problem you are trying to solve. Before sketching concepts, building prototypes, or writing a single line of code, you need to research your users, their needs, and the context surrounding the product. Every major design framework treats this research phase as the foundation that everything else builds on.
Why Research Comes Before Ideas
It is tempting to jump straight into brainstorming solutions, especially when you already have a hunch about what the product should look like. But committing resources to a poorly researched design opportunity is, as engineering design literature puts it, “a guaranteed path to failure.” The goal of the first step is to replace assumptions with evidence so every decision that follows is grounded in real user behavior and real market conditions.
This principle holds whether you are creating something from scratch or overhauling an existing product. The specific activities look a little different in each case, but the underlying purpose is the same: define the actual problem before you invest in a solution.
For New Products: Empathize and Discover
The design thinking framework, one of the most widely taught approaches in product design, calls its first phase “Empathize.” In this stage you gain an empathic understanding of the problem by conducting user-centric research. That means talking to potential users, observing how they currently handle the task your product would address, and identifying pain points they may not even articulate directly.
The Double Diamond model, developed by the UK’s Design Council, labels this same phase “Discover.” The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues. Both frameworks are saying the same thing in slightly different language: go learn from real humans before you design anything.
Practical research methods during this phase include:
- User interviews: One-on-one conversations where you ask open-ended questions about habits, frustrations, and goals related to the problem space.
- Observation: Watching people perform tasks in their natural environment to spot friction they might not mention in an interview.
- Market research: Analyzing current trends, competitor products, and existing solutions to understand what is already available and where the gaps are.
- Problem statement development: Writing a clear description of the problem to be solved, the target users, and the desired outcomes of the solution.
A product design opportunity is essentially a gap or need in the market that can be addressed by creating a new or improved product. Identifying that gap requires all of the activities above, ideally completed before any significant engineering or development work begins.
For Redesigns: Audit What Already Exists
When you are redesigning a product that is already in the market, the first step still centers on understanding users and problems, but you have an additional advantage: existing data. A product design audit examines how the current version is performing and where it falls short.
The audit starts by clarifying why a redesign is even on the table. Is growth slowing? Are users dropping off at a particular point? Is the product confusing to new customers? Without a clear goal driving the redesign, the audit will not produce useful insights. From there, you dig into quantitative and qualitative evidence:
- Conversion funnels: Where in the user journey do people complete the desired action, and where do they abandon it?
- Drop-off points: Specific screens, pages, or steps where users leave at unusually high rates.
- Feature adoption: Which features get heavy use and which ones are ignored.
- Retention and churn: How many users come back over time, and how many stop using the product entirely.
Pair that data with direct user feedback, but interpret it carefully. Users often describe symptoms rather than root causes. Someone might say “this app is slow” when the real issue is that they cannot find the feature they need. The skill is identifying behavioral patterns beneath surface-level complaints and balancing three things that do not always align: what users say, what users actually do, and what the business needs to survive.
Aligning Business Goals With User Needs
Research in the first step is not limited to users alone. You also need to understand the strategic and commercial landscape. A SWOT analysis (evaluating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is one common tool for defining whether a potential design project is worth pursuing. It forces you to weigh internal capabilities against external market realities before committing time and budget.
There is an art to committing the right amount of resources at this stage. Spending too many hours on detailed analysis before getting buy-in from leadership or stakeholders can be wasteful if the project never moves forward. But skipping this step entirely means you risk building something nobody wants. The first step is about finding the balance: enough research to confidently define the opportunity, not so much that you stall before design even begins.
What Comes After the First Step
Once you have gathered your research, the next phases involve defining the core problem in a concise statement, generating ideas for possible solutions, and evaluating those ideas for feasibility (can you build it), viability (does the business model work), and desirability (do users actually want it). You then select the strongest concept, build a prototype, and test it with real users to validate or refine the design.
Every one of those later stages depends on the quality of your initial research. A well-defined problem statement leads to focused ideation. Solid user data makes prototype testing more meaningful because you know exactly what questions to answer. The first step is not just a formality to check off. It shapes the trajectory of the entire project.