The hardest role in tech: Product Designer

Why being a product designer is so much harder than people think, and an overview of the skills you need to be a good product designer.

Christie Tang

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UX Collective

androidstudio

~11 min read

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March 20, 2020 (Updated: December 13, 2021)

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Free: No

I have always quietly thought to myself, that being a product designer requires the highest standards. Even though the job is fun, fulfilling, and impactful, it's not for everyone. Or at least it's not something that a lot of people can do well.

The "definition" of a product designer is always changing, and too many different titles were born out of that problem. Not because it's a new and upcoming thing and people don't know what to call them, it's because being a good designer by nature has a lot of requirements. Why is that?

First of all, you can't be lazy.

Because industry trends change often, and as technology improves, there are more possibilities for UIs. That means you need to always indulge yourself in the newest products and frequent the internet for trends. More and more tools are coming out, so if you can't learn them all quickly, you'll just get set behind.

Being a UX/product designer is increasingly becoming more demanding.

To save companies some money, companies are saying that designers need to have other hard skills, like performing UX research. This is especially true if you're on a one-man team, in which you probably also have to do UX copywriting. Plus, some companies now require that designers implement their own designs in code, or at the very minimum, understand how code works. It's no wonder that UX/product design is a hard profession to learn.

The requirements for soft skills are also particularly high.

You need to be a strong presenter to deliver your designs well, in some cases be client-facing, and still have enough time in the day after all your meetings to do actual work. The designer has to manage the goals of the user, business, tech capabilities, brand, and visual design. Between all those facets, the designer has to decide what design will best suit everybody's needs. You're like the juggling mediator.

I can already hear you now, "That's exactly what Product Managers do! Now you know how hard their jobs are!" Yes, I do think being a PM is one of the hardest jobs, and I will always respect their roles. But I must point out that a designer is one step up because it's also a technical job. "Ok, well, what do you think being a developer is then?" you cry angrily with fists in the air. I'm often envious of developers because even though their job is the most technical, they're in such high demand that they don't need extra skills on top to hold a position. I get it — it's not true for all developers, the most successful ones definitely have more well rounded and soft skills, but you can probably agree that developers could get by with just technical skills alone. This is not true as a product designer.

Wait. So how do you define a product designer? Before we get there, let's go through all the different titles.

What's the difference between all those design job titles?

I will preface by saying that these roles are not usually cut and dry like I've written them here. It's usually some combination. However, there are some companies or agencies that do separate these roles very specifically.

Production Designer

There is a different definition for production designers in film, but here I'm talking specifically about the field of graphic design. Production designers prepare assets for different sizes, formats, and resolutions. They make sure that the quality is good and that the resolution is clear. This role is more common in magazine companies or print. Because their role can be mundane and isn't as creative, they typically get paid the least and aren't as acknowledged. Exporting for different files, checking them for issues, and doing that several times a day can easily equate to a fulltime job. Because design programs now allow for automated exporting where you can export a bunch of different sizes and file types in just one button, this job is becoming less prevalent.

Graphic Designer

A graphic designer is someone who designs a fixed amount of content in a fixed amount of space. The perfect example is a poster. This poster does not change size, and if there were different sizes available the designer would probably design them differently. There are some amazing graphic designers out there, and they are mostly famous for print work, such as posters, album covers, and books.

A common misconception is that all designers regardless of roles can design a logo. For a logo, you would want to find a graphic designer. The skills for a good graphic designer entail the traditional typography, hierarchy, composition, and color, all of which take years of mastery for a trained eye. Because of this, it is expected that all other design roles have their basics rooted in graphic design. However, traditional graphic design is also becoming less useful on the web as visual solutions need to be dynamic.

Do not overlook graphic designers, as their skills are very different. But also do not think that a graphic designer has the skills for a UI/UX designer and vice versa.

Web Designer

There is actually no such thing as web designer. The reason for that is because it would just be called User Experience Designer. If you are looking at a job posting with the title "Web Designer," you should pass on it as you're probably getting scammed, or the company doesn't understand design enough to even give it the right title, both of which are red flags. "Web Designer," short for "Website Designer," is implying that a website static like a piece of paper, which is the wrong way to think about it. If you know that websites are dynamic, have hover states, need to be responsive, then you would understand the correct term is User Experience Designer.

User Interface (UI) Designer

UI designers are the ones who design things like how different UI components look and interact. For example what happens when a simple toggle is on or off? How does the user know it is toggled on and disabled , or toggled off and disabled ? Is there a hover state? Or how does the modal function? How do buttons behave? In a purist UI designer definition, these might just be wires of these UI components with no color or shadowing, and not yet any composition of a full screen, only the individual components themselves. A UI designer needs a strong understanding of system design and common UI patterns that exist.

Visual Designer

These are the designers that give color and visuals to the UI designer's work. They may define a language for the design system, such as "blue means active, grey means disabled," and apply it to all of the UI elements. They may decide that the brand is better suited for buttons with rounded corners instead of squared buttons. In a wire for a checkbox design, maybe the visual designer decides that the selected state is a blue checkbox, or perhaps it's a filled blue square with a white checkmark with a 1px stroke, or maybe it's a checkmark with a 2px stroke. Where a UX designer might say "this will be an area with some text that brings you to a different page," the visual designer can go in and decide if the element will have an image or just a colored block. Visual designers need a strong foundation in graphic design. Supposedly the visual designer takes care of the high fidelity mockups.

Interaction Designer

An interaction designer is probably the closest to a motion designer for user interfaces. It's not really motion like an illustration bouncing and coming to life, but rather designing the animation movements of micro-interactions. These micro-interactions are particularly important in UI, as it makes things feel natural and can draw a subtle amount of attention when appropriate. Going back to our toggle example, the interaction designer can design how many milliseconds it should take for the toggle to move. They also make transitions in states more or less obvious, which can be important you need to show that a user has taken an action. Like a graphic designer or a UI designer, the sensitivity for speed and timing needs to be trained.

User Experience (UX) Designer

A purist UX designer doesn't do any of the visuals or components. They think of the system as a whole, and create flows from one page to another. They think about the hierarchy of where goes what, like what layout is most conducive for the user to make a payment or add to cart. What image is used on this banner or what color is being displayed here is not important to the UX designer. This is why traditional UX design schools teach mostly black and white wireframes, user personas, information architectures, and flow diagrams. All of these can be learned, but because the role requires more critical thinking, UX designers typically get paid more than UI or interaction designers.

Product Designer

And then supposedly the product designer does it all. They consider the UX along with the UI, the motions, the visuals, and the branding all at once. They consider how this will benefit the user, the business, and the design. On top of that, it is often expected that they have at least a basic understanding of coding so they know what is and isn't feasible, and which layouts are most scalable. Given that a product designer does everything, I always recommend those starting out to start building a strong foundation in graphic design, because the sensitivity for colors, spacing, hierarchy, typography...that is the most difficult to train. Things like UX are quicker to learn on the job.

And there are other skills like...

Soft Skills

Depending on what industry you are in, this might be even more important than the average designer. Even for an in-house designer, you still need to present your designs to stakeholders in a convincing way so that you don't get bullied into doing just what the business wants. This is imperative. At the end of the day, people are all visual beings, and people are heavily swayed by the things they see before you even start to describe your thinking process.

You're the only person who has been working and thinking about every scraping detail of this project for hours and days. And if you can't describe your thinking process efficiently and effectively, the stakeholders may not listen to your decision-making process and all your work is for naught. Why sacrifice all that hard work, for one person to look at it in ten seconds and ask you to change everything? This is the fastest way to burn yourself out.

If you work with clients, you know exactly what I'm talking about. With clients, if they don't listen, you may not get another chance to push back, so it is incredibly important that you as the designer present your work with confidence and with a sense of guidance.

Business Acumen

You need to learn the business lingo to talk the talk. It will help significantly with your soft skills. Empathy is part of the job, and the only way to understand where product managers are coming from is to understand the industry you're in and how businesses work. What generates revenue? What are the costs of the business? Show that you know what you're talking about by using their language.

Coding/HTML/CSS

Learn it. Given that you are working with the web, the more you know the better you are as a designer. Learn about CSS grids, flexbox, mediaqueries, anything that has to do with scaling, HTML, and CSS. But maybe don't learn SO much that it hinders your ability to think creatively. My dream is for someone to tell me: if you can think it, you can design it. My only worry is that I can't think it.

UX Research

UX research is academic testing using survey, in-person interviews, preference tests, 5-second tests, and various usability tests to provide guidance to designs. This is a skill I would say is difficult to do well because it can require a degree to even understand properly. There are a lot of biases that exist in testing, and it's hard to understand them without studying. For example, "Do you go to the gym and drink at least two cups of water?" is a bad question because it's a double-barreled question . Meaning there are two questions in one. I can go to the gym but not drink water, do I answer yes?

Or how about "How fast do you think the car was moving?" is a leading question because just by starting off with "How fast," is a priming factor and has shown that it makes users report significantly higher numbers. There are hundreds of biases and without studying them carefully you may sacrifice the validity of your test. I really hope more companies hire full-time UX researchers to take this responsibility off of designers' shoulders because it's a very important job that takes a lot of time to do correctly.

UX Copywriting

Depending on what product your company has and what tone it decides to embody, sometimes you gotta have a little oomf . The voice is casual and human, not a robot beeping at you, "Error: 87955 zip code." But rather maybe something more along the lines of the customer is always right of "Oops, sorry about that, try entering your full zip code." You might have to be sassy to be fun and playful, while still walking the thin line of...dare I say it...LEGAL. The hardest part is all the back and forth with legal, that by the end you're probably thinking to yourself goddamn I could be a lawyer . Jokes.

One of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou is

...People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

And that is certainly true when it comes to design and writing. The things you see and read in the UI affect how you feel . And that's why the UX copywriting is so important, and has a distinctly different tone compared to marketing. Nuff said.

This is why job descriptions are often so different.

It's because people mix and match roles together, as some people think UX+UI+User Research=designer or Interaction+Visual+User Research=designer. In a lot of companies, there is only one designer. So as someone trying to get a job in this space, what can you do other than to learn them all? It's also a bit odd to say, "Oh yeah, I'm applying for a UI design role, but nah I don't do any visual design."

I personally think it's important for people to strive towards a product design definition, which is someone who does it all. If we all learn the same set of skills, that will remove the number of job titles so we can condense to one, and in doing so it will help you become a better designer.

Being a product designer these days requires the highest standards because you need sufficient knowledge in every field. You will find that when you think about everything all at once, you have full control of your artboard, and you will be forced to consider nuances that you haven't noticed before. So if you've never done any animation, start learning about it. You'll find that it changes the way you think about UI. If you haven't learned some basic HTML/CSS, start learning about it. You'll understand responsive design like never before.

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The hardest role in tech: Product Designer