Product Life-Cycle

Your constantly-updated definition of Product Life-Cycle and collection of videos and articles

What is Product Life-Cycle?

The product life-cycle is a tool used to determine the strategies that will be used at any stage in a product's development for sales and marketing purposes. It has four distinct stages; market introduction, growth, maturity and saturation and decline. Each of these suggests different business actions that can improve the profitability of the product. Designers and marketers can optimize business value by basing their strategies on the particular stage that the product is in at any given time.

The product life cycle assumes that the majority of products have a life span.

At each stage, the business faces a different set of advantages and disadvantages, setbacks and opportunities.

In order to meet these challenges, the business must have different strategies for approaching development, design and marketing for any given stage.

Literature on Product Life-Cycle

Here’s the entire UX literature on Product Life-Cycle by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Product Life-Cycle

Take a deep dive into Product Life-Cycle with our course Get Your Product Used: Adoption and Appropriation .

Designing for user experience and usability is not enough. If products are not used—and it doesn’t matter how good they are—they will be consigned to the trash can of history.

Sony’s Betamax, Coca-Cola’s New Coke, Pepsi’s Crystal Pepsi, and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe are among the most famous products which made it into production but failed to wow their audiences, according to Business Insider. In fact, Harvard Business Review dedicated a long piece to “Why most product launches fail”—so it’s not just big brands that aren’t getting their design process right but a lot of businesses and individuals, too.

So, what is the way forward? Well, once you’re sure that the user experience and usability of your product work the way you want them to, you’ve got to get your designs adopted by users (i.e., they have to start using them). Ideally, you want them to appropriate your designs, too; you want the users to start using your designs in ways you didn’t intend or foresee. How do we get our designs adopted and appropriated? We design for adoption and appropriation.

This course is presented by Alan Dix, a former professor at Lancaster University in the UK and a world-renowned authority in Human-Computer Interaction. Alan is also the author the university-level textbook “Human-Computer Interaction.” It is a short course designed to help you master the concepts and practice of designing for adoption and appropriation. It contains all the basics to get you started on this path and the practical tips to implement the ideas. Alan blends theory and practice to ensure you get to grips with these essential design processes.

All open-source articles on Product Life-Cycle

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