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What is a Digital Product?
Until the Internet burst, a digital product was always a physical object or item that could be sensed, seen, smelled, heard, or tasted something that distinguished it from a service. With the advent of the web, this changed.
A digital product is something you can sell online that has no physical form or substance: you can’t touch a website, smell an ebook, or taste a software program.
Of course, you can turn digital crops into physical products. For example, many people buy electronic books in PDF format and then print them, but the starting point of a digital product is not physical.
Benefits of Digital Products over Physical Ones
Digital products have several advantages over their physical counterparts. Product designer José Galeano ( @josegaleano ) knows the advantages well and details some of these benefits:
- It is not necessary to store them in large physical spaces.
- Delivery to customers is immediate.
- There are no costs linked-to materials or assembly.
- What it takes to believe them is work.
- Its easy reproduction frees up time to concentrate on marketing, advertising and branding.
- They generate passive income. It remains available to users and creates money even when we are not working.
- They may require a relatively small investment to create.
Which are the Best Sellers?
The Digital Products Especially Consumed On The Web are:
Software and apps. Although many are free, others offer in-app purchases or business models (advertising, for example) that make them very profitable.
- The ebooks, like this free one from Domestika on watercolor.
- The audio files. Whether they are podcasts , songs or sound effects.
- The games.
- Photos and videos. They are offered in image banks.
- Products related to e-learning, such as online courses and tutorials .
- The art. Recently, the creation of digital art encryption technology, called NTF, has made this art form also marketable as a product. As a result, many artists have turned exclusively to selling works in NFT format.
How to Create a Digital Product
If you want to design a digital product, you must follow the following steps indicated by the experts:
Look For the Idea
The first step is to create an idea about what we will sell. For this, there are some guidelines that you should know. For example, creating educational or informative content is much easier to sell than entertainment, which is more subjective.
Research, Your Client
The next step is to conduct a thorough investigation of possible customers. Customer research remains perhaps the most crucial part of the entire process. If you don’t understand your customer, it will be very difficult to sell their product.
What is a Digital Product Prototype?
According to the Mexican José Galeano, a prototype represents the final product that allows its main functionalities to be visualized and verified before it goes to development. It is a sample of our final product to make sure tests in a few words. Prototypes are indispensable. They allow us to show, communicate and fix a series of ideas among all the team members: designers, developers, marketing, branding and end users.
In the first stage, low fidelity prototypes are created. These refer, instead, to the flow of navigation and leave aside the visual approach a bit. Instead, they focus clearly on the experience of end users.
What is the Use of Prototypes Being Animated?
An animated prototype is this partial implementation but with much higher fidelity. These prototypes help us much closer to the final product, providing more excellent reliability when testing. In addition, it will allow us to develop a perfect guide for the engineering team, that is, for the one that is going to bring this prototype to reality. Also, if our development is an app, it will allow us to adjust the details of the animated part.
Some Examples
Oleoshop is a digital product without going any further since it is still a digital service in the cloud. Spotify is another subscription-based digital product. Acumbamail is a digital product for sending newsletters. A digital book ( PDF or a Kindle ) is a digital product. Other well-known digital subscription products are newspapers and online publications that use subscription services to provide access to information or so-called paywalls to access specific news content for a fee.
Conclusion
Digital product definition or DPD is digital data that specify the 3D CAD geometry and design requirements for a product.
DPD data, known as product manufacturing information (PMI), includes manufacturing data for building and measuring a part, shifting from a 2D drawing workflow to a 3D CAD model-based workflow.