Product Design is an incredibly broad profession and encompasses an extensive list of roles and responsibilities. As it is also evolving fast, not only these previous aspects may vary, but they can also change within different companies (and even more so in the same company: squads will, for definition, have their own different challenges), causing the community to eventually come up with new roles, new names, new responsibilities, and so on. Product Design, as we speak, is the one that became popular to sum it all.
Thinking about it, I thought that the honest way of sharing a piece of my mind about this huge scenario it's showing, as an example, my own path through the product design journey. It is an incredible privilege to be able to learn so much in a role, but it also comes with a myriad of challenges - and the ability to be flexible and open to new perspectives, for the matter, is the compass to navigate through!
In this article I'll illustrate (quite literally lol) some examples of roles I've had being a Product Designer, and also some precious skills that they teached me. Let's jump into this refreshing (and sometimes agitated) ocean together?
UI Designer & UX Designer
UI and UX roles are usually sooo connected that it's rare to see them separated, actually. But, even rarely, you can find them as different roles: in my experience, the UI Designer is the closest one to the traditional graphic designer, turning ideas into actual visual products. The UX designer is the one who's gonna think of how the user is going to interact with the product - doing research, interviews, and so on. This is why UI and UX are so connected: are the visuals only the icons, vectors and buttons, or the entirety of the product developed (including the UX)?
Anyways, just to exemplify, let's say that the UI designer will be the one responsible to actually draw the product, the UX will think about the experience, and leave at it lol. So it's common to see UI designer roles being more of specialists solely responsible for the technical part of the process, leaving the user experience, research, writing and discovery to specialized professionals, for example. This might be more prone to happen in companies with incredibly detailed processes - such as financial businesses, for example. It is interesting, tho, that these companies might also have their own Product Designers acting as either generalists in their squads, or as the specialist in the development process. We return to the same aspects of Product Design papers discussed in the beginning of this article.
Digital Accessibility Designer
This one is, today, unfortunately rare, but it should not be! I defend that if we are thinking about user experience, we must cater to an incredibly huge amount of users - and we know we live in a diverse world. So how can we develop a good, accessible product for a large number of individuals if we don't apply accessibility basics? I'll dive deeper in this subject in an upcoming article, but I could not be as fascinated about this role as I am today if it wasn't for an incredible accessibility designer specialist to teach me about it! As I was learning the product processes, I knew how imperative it was to learn accessibility for design as fast as I could. This is a world within itself, so we are going to explore further in its own article soon!
Ux Researcher
I'll be honest and say that, as a former shy designer that wanted to work as a UI designer only (specially when I was just starting lol), this one is still the hardest skill for me. Talking with users was sooo scary! I had some nervous chills lol. But I needed to learn because it's so important to the product development! I have my research mentors and senior designers to thank for guiding me through it. It gets easier, but it still takes (and it should) a huge responsibility to deal with user data, filtering comments, documenting user journey, facilitating prototypes testing and so on. Learning how to use research data and talking to users to support the design process is a must.
UX writer
Knowing the brand voice to write about a new service or product, using the right copy to feature and/or highlight an opportunity, SEO, accessibility and so many other aspects are included in UX writing's world of its own! Usually, Ux writers can work as specialists & help Product Designers on these aspects, but it's also important that Product Designers learn this skill to create products (or, at least, writing sketches) and to work as a team with Ux writers.
Design OPs
For me, this particular skill - even if it literally says operations in the name and therefore usually gets credited as a more technical role - is one of the most empathetic skills to be developed in Product. The fact that you have to be able to foresee how your team mates are going to interact and work with tools (and then prevent issues), develop strategies to facilitate workflow and organize onboardings and design structures is, for me, deeply empathetic and beautiful. Combine this skill with UX and Digital Accessibility, and you have a product that is great to work on, and great to use. In short, I dare to say, good for humans.
Facilitator
This one skills is often forgotten, but I quickly learned that if I wanted become a successful Product Designer, this is the one to learn as fast as I could - facilitating discoveries with your team members, sharing insights and finds with other designers, preparing fun and light presentations, learning how to communicate ideas with different types of professionals and speaking with many kinds of personalities was a huge challenge for this shy designer! lol.
But with the help of my teammates, I could learn and experience how impactful this skill can be when you are developing products. It's about people, so involves communication, negotiation, and a tiny bit of inspiration and influence, too.
Explorer & Resourceful
As technology is evolving at light speed, so does the tech professionals need, to. I lost count of how many new tools I had to learn and adapt fast in my journey so far: Mouseflow, then Hotjar, Adobe suite, Figma, agile tools (Jira, kanban, scrum), screen readers, Baymard, many plugins or technics for a myriad of uses; also enrolling on a new course in design, entrepreneurship & tech field almost every month... If you love to learn and are curious to discover new tools to make better products, tech might be for you! In the design field, there's also the constant evolving of the design fundamentals in our projects, creativity and new solutions to every and each product. Product Design can be a huge accelerator on that!
Final Thoughts
WOAH, so much in a role right? This, of course, is my perspective based on my experience and watch of the market, and there's soooo much more to it. As Product Design is such a huge, evolving field, it will vary in many aspects discussed above, so I wanted to share some of my insights - especially to those trying to learn more about it.
It is a constant learning process, indeed, and if you have the passion to design the future in a digital space, please keep encouraged to try!!! Here are some courses I recommend bellow (none of them are sponsored lol):
Product Design by Google
A Figma UI course (there are other UI tools, but as this is the popular one, my tip is to go for it first)
Accessibility for Designers
A Design degree if you can, or a tech related superior course such as IT engineering, Computer Science, Game Design (the one I graduated yay \0/ ), and so forth.
Want more tips on how to become a Product Designer? Please comment below, so I might write more specific articles about it too. <33
Do you feel that this article helped you in any way, or know more tips to share with us?
Please let me know in the comments!
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