When it’s done right, design has the power to improve the everyday lives of users. When done wrong, design can disrupt and frustrate them. It enables us to understand, communicate, and improve the world around us. However, great design won’t be possible without enough time to process, incubate, experiment, and execute.
For someone who is new to wine, it can be difficult to appreciate, or even notice, the difference between a fine wine and a mass-produced bulk wine. Fine wines are meant for special occasions when you will take the time to savor the product’s distinctiveness, but if you are looking for a wine to drink around the campfire, bulk wine can get the job done.
Only high-quality wines are able to keep maturing for years, keeping their original qualities and adding even more flavors over time. Before being bottled, it is usually aged for at least 6 years in premium-quality oak barrels.
Like wine, the design process is a gradual progression from a minimum viable product to a polished masterpiece.
And in the words of the CEO of Jaguar Land Rover:
If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design!
Ralf Speth
The 5 Stages of Winemaking
Maybe you like a glass of red wine with your dinner or bring a bottle of white to a casual night in with friends. But have you ever wondered how grapes become the wine in your glass? Five time-consuming but magical stages transform everyday grapes into wine:
1. Harvesting
To create a fine wine, grapes must be harvested at a precise time each year.
2. Crushing and pressing
Once grapes arrive at a winery, they are sorted into bunches, destemmed, and crushed.
3. Fermentation
Grape juice is mixed with cultured yeast and sealed away until all of the sugar in the must has been converted to alcohol.
4. Clarification
This process separates the solids from the liquid wine.
5. Aging and bottling
After the wine has been separated from all solids, winemakers age and bottle it.
Let’s put these 5 steps for making wine to use and see how they interact with the design process.
The 5 Stages of Design making
These five stages or phases are not always sequential, in that they do not necessarily need to follow any specific order and can be repeated iteratively to hone and refine our solutions throughout the process. Avoid the perception that phases are innately hierarchical or linear; rather, they are a journey, sometimes with side stops or shortcuts, but with direction and a destination in mind.
Let’s take a quick look at each of these five stages in relation to a real-world design process.
1. Empathize
Consumer needs, barriers, attitudes, and aspirations must be harvested to unlock new solutions. This means observing and engaging with human beings to truly internalize their experience on an emotional and even psychological level.
2. Define and Create
The second stage in the process is about clarity, focus, and definition. By crushing and pressing all the insights you’ve collected, you can begin to make sense of the landscape of solutions you’re exploring.
3. Ideate and Collaborate
With a deep understanding of your consumer, it’s time to start the fermentation of potential solutions.
4. Prototype
The fourth step is all about clarification, transforming ideas into tangible “artifacts.”
5. Test
The aging and bottling stage of the design process requires real users to generate real data. This phase will quickly highlight any design flaws that need to be addressed. Based on what you learn through user testing, you’ll go back and make improvements.
As you can see, there are five distinct stages to both the design and winemaking processes. These stages are heavily linked to one another. This just serves to highlight the fact that, in both situations, time is always a vital factor for achieving a high-quality product.
Let’s jump right into some real-life examples and analyze how Apple works and see how they count “design” as a foundation principle—the starting point of the entire product development process.
Why Apple design is successful in the vineyards of product design?
When it comes to design, Apple is a pioneer. It is well known that Apple’s design teams begin developing new designs two years in advance. If they hadn’t been able to demonstrate something reliable and, dare we say it, ground-breaking and revolutionary in the world of design, they would not have been able to develop a devoted fanbase. The fact that Apple’s design teams pay close attention to every aspect of the design process is one of the reasons it takes them so long to develop new products.
Apple created products that are easy to understand, so that new users rarely, if ever, consult user manuals or guides.
Systematic Product Development Process
Apple develops products using a method that can only be characterized as logical and systematic. All the design details are formulated and ironed out even before the product is placed into production, so it is clear that they have a clear vision of how they want the product to turn out.
Quality is the key
Apple users will tell you a variety of explanations for why they continue to use Apple products despite the availability of many other, more modern, and undoubtedly less expensive options, the most of which are centered on design.
As has been emphasized numerous times in discussions and evaluations of the Apple design, simplicity is one of its distinguishing features. Apple’s products aren’t just flamboyant or eye-catching; they’re also made to look minimal, clean, simple, and uncomplicated.
Design is a continuous process
Apple focuses more on redesigns or recreations, identifying problems with current designs and improving them.
The smartphone is not an Apple creation. It’s just that Apple successfully revolutionized the concept of a smartphone when it launched the iPhone.
This simply serves to demonstrate how hard the Apple design team is working to develop a layout that will improve the user experience.
Apple’s philosophy is to create products that are so excellent that all prior efforts are rendered useless. Being the best is more significant to Apple than being the first.
In fact, Apple has demonstrated that even products with a high cost can still sell like hotcakes. Customers aren’t stupid, and the charade would end soon if Apple items were pricey. Apple, however, has shown that consumers are prepared to spend more for superior design.
In other words, Apple has established the value of high-quality technological design. Apple has pushed premium as being of utmost importance by openly supporting high-quality design.
Conclusion
A lot of wine gets rushed onto wine shop shelves or restaurant lists to satisfy the demands of customers craving consistency and businessmen balancing bank accounts. There is nothing wrong with a winery releasing a wine early. These wines can be good, and in many cases they are very, extremely, and unquestionably good.
But they fall short of a jaw-dropping reaction, for which “OMG” is the only right response. It takes a tremendous amount of time, care, and attention to make a truly excellent wine.
In an era of “I want it now,” it’s refreshing to know that there are some who still recognize the virtue of taking it slow.
Like in the winery, it takes valuable time to deliver a high-quality, well-developed design solution that is thorough, significant, and strongly defensible from any angle.
Good design embodies innovation, utility, and aesthetic appeal. It strives for clarity, honesty, and subtlety, ensuring durability and consistency in every detail. Environmental sustainability is woven into its essence. Ultimately, the pinnacle of good design is achieved when it embraces simplicity, aiming to be as minimalistic as possible.
Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Steve Jobs
good design takes time and hard work.
Purrfect
