What are the seven steps of the engineering design process?
Most project development requires a systematic approach to creating innovative, near-accurate, and in-demand products that can solve customer problems effectively. Architects & engineers should foster a proper pathway to approach a project for creating large projects, from defining the goals to research to prototype development and deployment. ProjectPro Data Engineering Projects for Beginners is the perfect place to learn about it. This article will give a comprehensive insight into the data engineering design process and its different phases.
What is a Data Engineering Design Process?
Today, all projects are designed and developed by engineers, data engineering design process is a project management guide that helps in providing a systematic approach & supervising the overall creation and execution of large data engineering projects. Engineers and researchers have subdivided the entire development process into seven actionable phases. Each phase will have a scheduled timeline to achieve a specific milestone. Today, all projects designed and developed by engineers, scientists, and architects leverage this design framework to deliver a solution/project.
7 Steps of the Data Design Engineering Process
Engineers and architects typically approach the engineering design process in seven different phases. These are:
Define the problem - Problem-solving usually starts with finding the root of the problem. The first and the essential phase of solving any design problem is to ask the right question. The engineers should ask questions that revolve around the pain points or look for queries related to the problem they are trying to solve. While sketching questions and looking for answers to the problem statement, engineers should also heed how competitors have addressed the issue & come up with innovative approaches. In this phase of the engineering design process, engineers need critical thinking skills and consider solutions from different perspectives. Here are some questions that engineers should ask to understand what to develop.
- What are the main goals of the project?
- Who is the end-user of the product?
- What resources will we need to accomplish this project?
- Are there similar products available on the market?
- Who are our target competitors?
- What are our competitors doing?
- How will our product address the pain point better than the existing products in the market?
Conduct research - In this phase, all engineers should brainstorm and go through group discussions to develop an innovative solution. At this point, engineers work closely with the R&D and marketing team to understand the scope, extent, consumer behavior, & demand of the overall project aptly. After thorough research, the engineers should ask the following questions:
- Why would the target users choose our product?
- Where do users commonly shop for such products?
- What unique features should we incorporate to make it stand out in the market?
- What changes would drive other existing products better in the market?
Imagine and conceptualize - After you have discovered the pain points, target customers, and come up with other marketing facts, it's time for a team meeting. Gather the team for different units/sub-sections & do a group discussion on how to proceed with the project and develop the prototype. Usually, the engineering team uses scenarios, case studies, and storyboards to get a precise user perspective through which your team can outline your product's development.
Creating the prototype - Once the engineering team plans everything, they will need to build a sample prototype of the project. A prototype is the functioning version of the project. This prototype will mimic the finalized product. By analyzing this prototype, engineers can find new angles for improvement & get to know about user experience validation. Often engineers call it a beta release. If engineers do not want to release the prototype yet want to know the end-user review, they can deliver the prototype to a handful of users to get reviews. The users' feedback will help the team troubleshoot specific errors and reiterate the prototype to extract a better version.
Select and finalize the product - Once the engineering team reviews & make changes to all the different Kiosk feedback gathered so far from the prototyping tests, the project head decides to close the product development phase by choosing the final version of the product. This finished product will be released officially and publicly for use by the masses. It usually becomes version one of the product.
Product analysis and testing - Once the team decides on the final version of the product, it goes to the analysis and testing phases. Before deploying the product to the market, the product gets delivered to the internal or outsourced analysis and testing team. The engineers work closely with the analysis and testing team to check the quality of the product as per the reviews given in the prototype phase. This phase also performs other product checks like bugs, product performance, and memory utilization. One question that the team should consider during the product analysis and testing phase is whether the product or the solution meets the requirement of the end-users.
Improvement for the next version - In the final stage of the product development, the engineering design process continues even after deploying the product into the market. The team gathers genuine user feedback, reviews of prototype testing, analytics of competitor data & market sales to cater to an improved product version. These facts, analytics, and reviews help engineers create & deliver a customized solution to end-users' unique problem(s). The improvement phase remains in iteration. Every product version mends a particular problem & comes up with some new features that can address the customer's demand.
We hope this article has given you a crisp idea of the seven stages of the engineering design process and how they work one after another to accomplish a project. The engineering design process is something that engineers, architects, students, and other project builders can use to solve their problems and come up with meaningful solutions to them. This systematic approach to solving the customers' concerns gives a clear roadmap, from finding the problem to building and deploying the product in the market and refining it as per the feedback.