Design Compass Knowledge Hub
Answers, definitions, and step-by-step guides for evaluating a product idea across the 19 criteria of the Design Compass: commercial viability, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility.
Guides
- How to evaluate a product idea with Design Compass
Evaluating a product idea with Design Compass means working through 19 criteria across three rings (Design for Market, Environmentally Sustainable, and Socially Responsible) to produce a scored, visual picture of where your idea is strong and where the real risks lie.
- How to redesign a product to be more sustainable
Redesigning for sustainability means systematically identifying and addressing the highest-impact environmental weaknesses in your current product, using the six Environmentally Sustainable criteria of Design Compass as the evaluation framework.
- How to run a benchmark on a product idea
Running a benchmark means opening the Benchmark tool, working through all 19 segments of the Design Compass, assigning an honest colour rating to each one, and using the resulting visual map to identify strengths and priorities for improvement.
Glossary: the 19 criteria
The centre
- Problem Statement
The Problem Statement sits at the centre of the compass and anchors every other criterion. It defines who has the problem, what the problem is, and why existing solutions are insufficient, so that all 18 surrounding criteria are evaluated against a clear, shared reference.
Design for Market
- Cost
The Cost criterion examines whether your product can be manufactured, delivered, and sold at a price that is sustainable for the business and acceptable to the target market.
- Distribution
The Distribution criterion examines how your product reaches the customer, covering the full channel from manufacture to point of purchase and beyond.
- User
The User criterion examines whether there is a clearly defined, real group of people with a genuine need your product addresses, and whether you understand that group well enough to design for them.
- Quantity
The Quantity criterion examines the size of the addressable market and whether that size is sufficient to support a viable business at realistic conversion rates.
- Uniqueness
The Uniqueness criterion examines what genuinely differentiates your product from existing alternatives and whether that differentiation is meaningful to the target user.
- Marketing
The Marketing criterion examines how your target users will become aware of your product and be motivated to buy it, covering both the message and the channels through which it reaches them.
Environmentally Sustainable
- Efficiency
The Efficiency criterion examines how effectively your product uses resources during its use phase, including energy, materials, water, space, and human effort, and how versatile it is across different use contexts.
- Materials
The Materials criterion examines the environmental and social profile of every material in your product, from raw material extraction through processing to manufacture.
- Energy
The Energy criterion examines the total energy consumption of your product across its full life cycle, including manufacture, distribution, use, and end of life.
- Longevity
The Longevity criterion examines how long your product remains functional and valued in use, and whether its design supports repair, maintenance, and upgrade to extend that useful life.
- Alternatives
The Alternatives criterion examines whether the function your product provides could be delivered with less material, through a service model, or by a fundamentally different approach with a lower environmental footprint.
- End of Life
The End of Life criterion examines what happens to your product and its materials when it is no longer needed, including whether it can be disassembled, repaired, remanufactured, recycled, or safely returned to the environment.
Socially Responsible
- Safety
The Safety criterion examines whether your product poses any risk of harm to its users, bystanders, or those involved in its manufacture and disposal, and whether those risks have been identified and addressed.
- Inclusivity
The Inclusivity criterion examines whether your product is accessible and usable by the broadest possible range of people, including those with different abilities, ages, body sizes, languages, and levels of technological familiarity.
- Ethics
The Ethics criterion examines whether your product and the business practices behind it are honest, fair, and consistent with widely held values, including transparency about what the product does and how it is made.
- Influence
The Influence criterion examines the broader social and cultural effects your product has beyond its immediate users, including how it shapes behaviour, norms, and expectations in the wider community.
- Fairness
The Fairness criterion examines whether the value exchange between your business and your customers, workers, and suppliers is genuinely equitable: whether everyone involved gets a fair return for what they contribute.
- Social Impact
The Social Impact criterion examines the effect of your product on the communities where it is made, sold, and used, including whether it creates or destroys local value, supports or undermines community wellbeing, and leaves those communities better or worse off.
Comparisons
- The three rings compared: Design for Market vs Environmentally Sustainable vs Socially Responsible
The three rings of Design Compass each evaluate a different dimension of product quality: the inner ring tests commercial viability, the middle ring tests environmental responsibility across the product life cycle, and the outer ring tests social responsibility and broader community impact.
- Design Compass Basic vs Advanced
Basic (free) includes Learn and Generate. Advanced (£25 per month) adds Benchmark, Expert Chat, and Projects. Basic suits anyone exploring the methodology; Advanced suits anyone doing structured, in-depth product evaluation.
Frequently asked questions
What is Design Compass?
Design Compass is a structured evaluation tool that helps entrepreneurs and designers assess a product idea across three dimensions: commercial viability, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility, using 19 scored criteria arranged in a visual compass.
Design Compass organises 19 evaluation criteria into three concentric rings on a visual compass interface, giving you a clear, scored picture of where your product idea is strong and where it needs work. Rather than relying on intuition or reviewing sustainability as an afterthought, it builds rigour into the earliest stages of product thinking.
The platform offers five tools: Learn, Generate, Benchmark, Expert Chat, and Projects. Together they take you from first principles through to a structured, shareable evaluation. It is used by founders, product managers, and designers regardless of technical background.
What do the three rings of the compass represent?
The three rings represent Design for Market (commercial viability, inner ring), Environmentally Sustainable design (lifecycle impact, middle ring), and Socially Responsible design (ethics and community, outer ring). A strong product idea scores well across all three.
The inner ring, Design for Market, examines whether your idea is commercially viable and user-centred, covering criteria such as cost, distribution, user needs, quantity, uniqueness, and marketing. The middle ring, Environmentally Sustainable, assesses lifecycle impact across efficiency, materials, energy, longevity, alternatives, and end of life. The outer ring, Socially Responsible, looks at safety, inclusivity, ethics, influence, fairness, and social impact.
Each ring represents a distinct lens of quality, and the methodology holds that a genuinely good product idea must pass scrutiny on all three: a product that is commercially compelling but environmentally destructive or socially harmful is not a complete solution.
How does the Benchmark tool work?
Benchmark lets you colour-rate your product idea against each of the 19 compass segments, building a visual map of strengths and gaps that you can track across iterations.
You select a colour rating for each of the 19 segments, and the tool builds a visual map of your product’s performance. You can compare the current version against previous iterations or target benchmarks, making it straightforward to see whether a design change has improved your position across the criteria that matter most.
Over time, Benchmark tracks how your thinking evolves as you address weaknesses and refine your concept. It is the tool that turns the Design Compass methodology from a one-off exercise into a repeatable, evidence-based process. Benchmark is available on the Advanced plan.
What is the difference between the Basic and Advanced plans?
Basic (free) gives access to Learn and Generate. Advanced (£25 per month) adds Benchmark, Expert Chat, and Projects: the tools needed for structured, in-depth evaluation and AI-assisted guidance.
The Basic plan gives you access to the Learn and Generate tools, letting you explore the Design Compass methodology and generate initial prompts across the 19 criteria. It is the right starting point for anyone wanting to understand the framework before committing to a deeper evaluation.
The Advanced plan adds Benchmark, Expert Chat, and Projects. These are the tools you need for a structured, scored evaluation: colour-rating your idea across all 19 segments, consulting AI expert personas for domain guidance, and managing your evaluations as projects with shareable reports. Most serious product development work happens on Advanced.
What is Expert Chat?
Expert Chat connects you with AI personas, each specialising in a different aspect of sustainable product design, so you can ask specific questions grounded in the Design Compass methodology.
Expert Chat provides a set of AI personas covering domains such as materials science, market strategy, environmental impact, and social responsibility. You can ask specific questions about your product, get feedback grounded in the Design Compass methodology, and explore angles you may not have considered independently.
Because each persona brings a different disciplinary lens, Expert Chat is particularly useful when you are working through segments outside your own expertise. It is available on the Advanced plan and is designed to complement, not replace, advice from human specialists.
How does the Generate tool help with product ideas?
Generate presents prompts and provocations drawn from the 19 compass criteria to push your thinking beyond the obvious and surface considerations you might not naturally reach on your own.
Generate draws on the full set of 19 segments to surface prompts that open up new angles: how your product could be designed for disassembly, what unmet social needs it might address, or whether a different material choice could extend its life. It is most valuable early in a project, before you have committed to a direction, when the cost of expanding your thinking is low.
The prompts are structured around the Design Compass criteria, so Generate also serves as an accessible introduction to the methodology. It is available on both the Basic and Advanced plans.
How do I know if a product idea is worth developing?
A product idea is worth developing when it solves a genuine, evidenced problem for a real group of people, can be produced and sold at a sustainable margin, and stands up to scrutiny on environmental and social grounds.
Design Compass walks you through all three dimensions systematically, so you are not relying on intuition alone. Score your idea honestly across the 19 segments and you will quickly see where the real risks lie: an unproven market, a fragile supply chain, or an end-of-life problem you have not yet addressed.
The Benchmark tool is the most direct way to answer this question: a colour-rated compass across all 19 criteria reveals which segments are weak and whether those weaknesses are deal-breakers or solvable design challenges. An idea worth developing will show a clear path to improvement, not just a list of unresolved gaps.
What is the product development process?
Product development is the structured journey from an initial concept to a market-ready product, typically covering problem definition, research, concept generation, prototyping, testing, and refinement repeated in cycles.
The process is rarely linear. Teams move forward and back between stages as they learn more, and the goal at each cycle is to reduce uncertainty as efficiently as possible. Design Compass integrates sustainable and social thinking into each stage, rather than treating them as an afterthought added at the end when the design is already fixed.
Using Design Compass from the earliest stage of problem definition means that criteria around materials, energy, social impact, and end of life shape the concept from the start, rather than creating expensive retrofit challenges later in development.
What is the product life cycle, and why does it matter?
The product life cycle describes everything that happens to a product from raw material extraction through manufacture, use, and end of life. Designing with the full life cycle in mind reveals hidden costs and risks that a narrow focus on the use phase misses.
Ignoring any stage of the life cycle creates liabilities: high embodied energy in manufacture, materials that cannot be recovered at end of life, or a use phase that generates ongoing waste. These are not just environmental concerns; they are increasingly regulatory requirements and represent real business risk as legislation tightens and consumer expectations rise.
Design Compass addresses the full life cycle explicitly through its middle ring, which covers efficiency, materials, energy, longevity, alternatives, and end of life. Working through these six criteria for any product idea will surface the life cycle considerations most likely to cause problems.
What is an MVP and when should I build one?
A Minimum Viable Product is the simplest version of your product that is functional enough to test your core assumption with real users, built before investing in full production.
You build an MVP as soon as you have a clear hypothesis you need to validate. The goal is to learn quickly whether the problem is real and whether your solution works, so you can refine or pivot before spending significant resources. An MVP is not a cheap product; it is a focused test of one specific assumption.
Design Compass is useful before and after an MVP. Use it before to identify which criteria carry the most risk for your concept, and after to evaluate whether the MVP has revealed new information that changes your scores across the 19 segments.
What is the Double Diamond design process?
The Double Diamond is a Design Council framework that structures design work as two phases of divergent and convergent thinking: Discover and Define (finding the right problem), then Develop and Deliver (finding the right solution).
In the first diamond, you open up to research and insight before narrowing down to a clearly defined problem worth solving. In the second diamond, you generate multiple solution directions before converging on the best one to develop and deliver. The framework emphasises that jumping straight to solutions before fully understanding the problem is one of the most common failure modes in product development.
Design Compass maps naturally onto this process. The Learn and Generate tools support the divergent phases, helping you expand your thinking across all 19 criteria. Benchmark supports the convergent phases, giving you a scored basis for choosing between directions and tracking progress as you refine.
How do I redesign a product to be more sustainable?
Start by mapping your current product against the six environmental segments of Design Compass to identify the highest-impact areas, then prioritise changes that reduce the most impact for the least cost.
The Environmentally Sustainable ring covers efficiency, materials, energy, longevity, alternatives, and end of life. Running your existing product through these six criteria will quickly reveal where the biggest opportunities lie. Common levers include switching to materials with lower embodied energy, extending product life through repairability and modularity, reducing packaging, and designing for end-of-life recovery.
Use the Benchmark tool to establish a baseline score for your current product, then track your score across each iteration as you make changes. This makes it straightforward to demonstrate progress and to prioritise the improvements with the greatest impact.
Why do products fail in the market?
Most product failures trace back to a small number of causes: the problem was not urgent enough, the product did not work well enough, the business model did not support a viable price point, or the product reached market too late.
Sustainability and social factors are increasingly causing market failures too, as regulation tightens and consumer expectations rise. Products that pass commercial scrutiny but fail on environmental or social grounds face growing reputational, regulatory, and procurement risk. Design Compass is designed to surface these risks before you commit to production, not after.
The 19-segment framework is structured specifically to address the full range of failure modes: the inner ring covers commercial risk, the middle ring covers environmental risk, and the outer ring covers social and reputational risk. Scoring your idea honestly across all three gives you an early warning system for the problems most likely to cause failure.
What is intellectual property and when should I protect it?
Intellectual property refers to the legal rights you can hold over inventions, designs, brands, and creative works. For product designers, the most relevant forms are patents, registered designs, and trade marks.
You should seek legal advice on intellectual property as soon as you have a concept you plan to commercialise. Acting too late can mean you have already disclosed the invention publicly and lost the right to patent it. In product development, public disclosure (at a trade show, in a published paper, or even in a pitch) can destroy patentability in most jurisdictions.
Design Compass addresses intellectual property indirectly through the Uniqueness segment in the inner ring, which prompts you to examine what makes your product genuinely distinctive. That analysis is a useful starting point for identifying what might be worth protecting, though it does not replace specialist legal advice.
How does Design Compass fit into a broader innovation process?
Design Compass is most effective as a tool you return to at each stage of a project, using Learn, Generate, Benchmark, Expert Chat, and Projects in sequence as your concept develops.
Use Learn to build your understanding of the methodology, Generate to expand your thinking early on, Benchmark to score your concept honestly and track it over time, Expert Chat when you need domain-specific guidance, and Projects to manage your evaluation work and generate shareable reports. Together they give you a rigorous, repeatable process for sustainable product innovation.
The framework is designed to complement existing innovation processes such as the Double Diamond, stage-gate development, or lean startup. It does not replace those processes; it adds a systematic commercial, environmental, and social lens that most processes treat as secondary or separate.
Do I need a design or engineering background to use Design Compass?
No. Design Compass is built for founders, product managers, and strategists as much as for trained designers or engineers. The methodology is explained within the platform, and Expert Chat is there to help you explore areas outside your expertise.
The 19 criteria are presented with clear explanations, and the questions are designed to provoke useful thinking regardless of your background. If you have a product idea and an honest view of what you know and do not know about it, you have enough to start.
The Expert Chat feature is particularly valuable for non-specialists: rather than needing to know which questions to ask, you can describe your product and the AI personas will help you identify the most relevant considerations for each segment. The platform is designed to build your knowledge as you use it, not to require it upfront.
