Unit 15 product life cycle

The life cycle is the reason that design and development happens all the way through a product's life, and not just at the start. The life cycle applies to every product, from the most technical to the simplest.

Every product is born, developed and launched. And then sales grow - if the company got the research and the design right! Sales then level off, as it settles down and matures. This is the place where there is already a great deal of competition, so the company has to work hard to keep sales of the product steady, if not actually growing.

The UK economy depends more than ever on service businesses. These are companies that do not make anything, but provide a service to other companies, or direct to the public. Holiday firms, restaurants, train companies, banks, dry cleaners, television and entertainment, telephone companies, insurance firms and Internet providers - they're all service companies. And their services don't appear by magic; someone has to design them in the same way as they would a new product. It's possibly even more difficult to design a successful service, because there's nothing to look at, touch or hold, like there is with a product.

So in service design the emphasis is on providing an experience the customer will want, will value and will be happy with. In a competitive market there's often very little to choose between one service company and another, so it's the small things that make them stand out, that really make the difference.