Consumer Product Development
Sparx engineers will consider numerous factors when designing your product, including establishing a user-centered design, ensuring functionality and performance, incorporating aesthetics and ergonomics, learning from usability testing, planning for regulatory requirements, and prioritizing cost optimization. By continuously considering these points throughout the design process, we ensure that your consumer product meets the needs of both you and your customers. Our engineers will strive to understand the full spectrum of your business, industry, regulatory landscape, and customer base to make sure our team can operate as an efficient extension of your own.
Sparx Engineering can work with you to improve your existing consumer product by incorporating the latest innovations, adding new features, reducing unit costs, and replacing end-of-life components. These facets of product engineering are extremely important to keep up with an ever-evolving market and maintain your advantage over your competition. Jumping quickly into existing designs to bring them into compliance with the newest standards or regulatory requirements and incorporating the latest technologies are a core part of our business with our clients.
User Centered Design
Throughout the project, the Sparx engineering team will engage in collaborative discussions with key stakeholders about goals for the product and the expected use case as well as reviewing competing products. The Sparx engineering team will investigate the needs and preferences of your consumers so that the product will meet and exceed expectations. Using these datapoints, we continually refine our design approach to ensure that the final product delivers an excellent user experience.
Aesthetics and Ergonomics
The Sparx industrial design team works closely with our mechanical, electrical, and software teams to ensure that our projects result in designs that are aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic for your customers. At some firms there is a gap between early artistic concepts and the realities of manufacturing, but at Sparx our industrial designers and artists work side by side with our engineers to propose concepts that we know can be manufactured within your budget. We understand that well-designed aesthetics and comfortable ergonomics are just as important as functionality to attract new customers and keep your current users satisfied.
Functionality and Performance
The product we help you create must perform effectively while meeting and exceeding the expectations of both you and your customers. At the start of a project, there is often a gap between describing what the product needs to do and establishing detailed requirements that our engineers will design to. Our project management team is experienced at taking your needs and goals and translating them into specifications and requirements to provide a solid foundation at the beginning of any project.
Usability Testing
Sparx engineers work with you to perform usability assessments and hands-on testing of your product throughout the development process. We leverage rapid prototyping and software simulations of designs to identify usability concerns early in the design process before changes would become more costly. We constantly strive to deliver a product that the intended audience will intuitively understand and can easily use.
Regulatory Testing
Consumer products must meet the requirements of a variety of regulatory agencies and standards such as the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) or the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Sparx has extensive experience in delivering products that comply with these types of requirements both in the US and abroad. One of the benefits of Sparx’ consumer product experience is the extensive network of trusted test houses that we have partnered with for testing and verifying compliance. Our designs keep regulatory requirements in mind from the start of the project to expedite the approval process and get your product to market as efficiently as possible.
Benefits of Using a Consumer Product Engineering Firm
The development of consumer products is very different than other types of product development and working with an engineering firm familiar with the consumer market is critical to the success of the client’s projects. The following are considerations that Sparx Engineering considers when developing consumer products:
Improved Product Quality
Sparx helps you to produce high-quality products that are easy to manufacture, assemble, and test. We have expertise in various engineering disciplines and technologies used for consumer products. We design our products with both Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Test (DFT) in mind and we can help you scale into mass production and ensure that you deliver quality, fully tested products to your customers.
Customer Cost Savings
Sparx engineers have experience in many industries and products and can apply that experience to your product to reduce both design costs and per-unit costs. Whether by performing Bill of Materials (BOM) optimization during design or by developing automated test fixtures to save you time and money in production, our engineers always aim to make your product competitive in the marketplace.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Throughout the development process we look for relevant ways interact with you and your customers to incorporate feedback to improve the product. Since the customer is involved all throughout the development process, there are no surprises.
Time-to-Market Advantage
Our engineering team works closely together to streamline your product development and accelerate your time-to-market schedule. We can get your product out to the world faster by streamlining aspects of the development process with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, as well as parallelizing tasks to increase efficiency.
Sparx Engineering —A Consumer Product Development Firm
Developing consumer products requires a consumer product engineering firm with a breadth of knowledge and expertise, as well as a diverse problem-solving background in a wide range of industries. Our team has over 500 years of cumulative engineering design experience. Sparx’ breadth of industry expertise allows us to think about consumer products differently than other engineering firms. Our exposure to designing highly reliable products for medical, oilfield, and aerospace gives us a deeper understanding of technical engineering principles. Our experience along with our understanding of consumer behavior trends allows us to build dependable and exciting consumer products in a very competitive consumer market.
At Sparx, we are more than just an engineering firm. We are your partners in innovation, we are your technology accelerators, and we’re dedicated to providing the expertise, resources, and resolve needed to bring your vision to life. Whether you are in the early stages of concept development or ready to prototype your next big idea, Sparx is here to help you achieve your goals.