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Design & Technology · Key Stage 2 · The School
Who is it for?
A product designed for "people" is designed for nobody. Name the USER: a left-handed eight-year-old, someone carrying shopping in the rain, a grandparent with stiff hands. The moment the user is specific, most decisions answer themselves — a lid that needs a strong grip is simply wrong for the third user, and no amount of good looks fixes it.
Criteria you can test
DESIGN CRITERIA are the list of things the product must do, written so you can check each one. "Must look nice" cannot be checked. "Must be openable with one hand", "must hold 500 ml", "must stand up when empty", "must cost under three pounds" each can. Write them before designing — criteria invented afterwards always happen to match whatever you made.
Research first
Research is what stops criteria being guesses: ask the user, measure the thing it must fit, look at what already exists and what annoys people about it. Even three questions to one real person beats an afternoon of assuming. The criteria are then evidence-based, and you can point to why each one is on the list.
"It should look nice." — untestable, delete or replace. "It should be strong." — how strong? Rewrite: "it must hold 2 kg without bending." "It should be easy to use." — rewrite: "a six-year-old must be able to open it with one hand." Each rewrite names a test somebody could actually run, which is the only way you can say at the end whether the design worked.