Superman, the Digital Product Designer.

Nórdico Studio
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read
Loblaw Digital

In these times when the role of the designer has diversified substantially due to the new demands of consumers and the advancement of technology that pushes the designer to reinvent himself, have surged new “designer types”, and from there arises All-powerful: Product Designer. (I will refer to product as a digital product)

‘Product Designer’ is a job title that has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but there is a lot of ambiguity around what it actually means. “

On the web you can read several ways to describe a Product Designer, several of them ambiguous, some define that is a person capable of addressing the entire process of product life spanning even the area of ​​business and the area of ​​development. Others only refer to the design process from the conception of the idea to the final product.

“Digital Product Design is Not Graphic Design”

We think that “Product Designer” is a good definition for those designers who have knowledge and participate in all stages of creating digital products, from research to development, may or may not be experts in all those areas, or have more expertise in some, but participate in the whole design process actively and know the technical aspects to understand the scope and limitations of the technology used to develop the product.

The Product Designer should be able to analyze his target audience, study and know their needs, based on those results generate possible ways to reach the solution, design the user experience, the look and feel of the product and understand what Form the product will be implemented technically. In short, the Product Designer would be a multifaceted, hybrid designer, who not only designs the visuals, but what people feels interacting with a certain product, the product should not only be nice, but useable.

Companies are betting on these types of designers, not only for the areas of knowledge they manage, but also because they are curious people, who always seek to learn something new, are restless, feel more comfortable working as a team, and see the product as a whole with a more objective look and with more focus on the user.

We are not talking about design of isolated parts, but of a product that is composed of several parts and each part requires a different expertise. There are designers who specialize only in one of these parts, and there are others who understand the whole process and know more than one area in the creation of a product. Participating in the creation of the product from the beginning, allows to understand its most primitive characteristics, which makes the designer discover the solutions naturally, and to see the product as something that is constantly transformed as the needs of users change and the product must change along with them.

We recommend a very interesting book that provides tools for designing desktop and mobile products:

Https://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111

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