Commercially-Focused Circuit Board Design

It can be very frustrating when your progress is stunted by lockdowns or you find an investor but they’re not in the same region as you.

Luckily there are many ways to take advantage of technology to optimise your product development process and carry out research and development.

How to design remotely

We’ve put together some quick ways to achieve results without meeting in person in this blog

Designing a product without meeting in person

Product development clients

“Ignys went out of their way to ensure that our product was the best it could be. We will be using them for future projects.” – Roland

In light of the above quote we have collected a number of client stories for different industries here.

Ignys Case Studies 

7 tips to maximise your profit margins through cost reduction

The success of your product is often governed by these three things:

• A streamlined product development process – We can help check exactly what product testing is needed and also check for costly design flaws.
• Money – Getting the right funding is crucial. There are many costs to designing a product.
• Marketing – Marketing can often be an afterthought. The trick is to not just shout about your product but to communicate the problem that it solves.

How to achieve product success

Three crucial factors for product success

Check my process – Ask us to look at your product development journey and see if you are on the right track.

If you have a product idea you are probably giddy with excitement. While the idea is still fresh in your mind we want to give you the confidence to take the next step.

In other words we can help validate your product idea through early testing.

This can be especially useful when working with emerging technology.

Product feasibility studies

The purpose of an MVP or Minimum Viable Product is not to ‘look pretty’ or feel exactly like the final product.

Instead they allow for early testing of a product, to allow investors or a focus group to take a look at your product idea and evaluate it further.

That is to say a good MVP has just the right amount of features to satisfy what needs to be shown before you move onto the next stage.

Make me a MVP

There are 8 stages in the process of electronic product development, according to our in-depth article based on our extensive knowledge of the subject.

8 stages of electronic product development

1. New idea
2. MVP/Prototype
3. Production Candidate
4. Compliance Testing – This is particular important with the introduction of UKCA.
5. New Product Introduction
6. Volume Manufacturing support
7. Cost reduction evaluation – Check out 8 ways to reduce product costs
8. Extending the product lifecycle

There are pitfalls you need to avoid in each of these stages.

How to avoid them

Read about how to avoid all of the above in our product development process stages blog.

There are a number of reasons why products which show a lot of potential fail to succeed.

1. There is already a solution to the problem your product solves – Market research is really important.
2. The product costs too much to develop – It’s important to understand all the costs involved in the process.
3. Failing to test the product – Environmental testing, edge cases, PCBs set up wrong. Efficient product testing is essential.
4. Not using quality control – The sooner production or material issues are spotted the lower the cost will be to fix it.
5. Misleading customers – Be careful not to promise more than your product can deliver. Initial sales on false promises will lead to bad reviews and hurt you later.

Other ways products can suffer

1. Feature creep – Adding too many features can add unnecessary costs or make the product too expensive for the target audience.
2. Overspending on your design budget – It is important to constantly track your spending and to try and predict any unexpected costs that may occur.
3. Not pricing your product correctly – You need to balance product profitability with entering the market at the right price for your customers.
4. Leaving no spend for advertising and marketing – However brilliant your product is, it won’t sell if noone knows about it.

Read more in our article why electronic products fail.

Temperatures can have huge implications on the reliability of a product as well as its’ efficiency too.

Why heat is a bad thing for electronic products

Heat leads to wasted energy and high temperatures are not ideal for electronic components. Elevated temperatures can have hugely detrimental effects on batteries.

So it’s important to learn more about the dangers of heat

Environmental Testing

This method is a useful way of testing your products in the heat and the cold. This extends beyond extreme hot and cold temperatures and can also look at humidity as well as temperature fluctuations.

In addition environmental test chambers can be used to speed up the testing process, looking at a range of environments.

Environmental testing

The costs of a product unit go beyond negotiations with your manufacturing partner.

This is because the development part of product development plays an instrumental part in how much your product costs.

Beware features creep

For example features creep can occur where by trying to meet all the demands of the end user the product becomes overburdened by features which can drain the battery life. The extra features may not be used by the majority of customers. This inflates the costs to them of buying the product and reducing the perceived product value.

It is also worth noting that components can play a large factor in the unit cost and pose a risk if these components become obsolete, leaving you stranded when you try and produce more volume.

Here are 7 ways to reduce product costs