UX designer or product designer？ What exactly do designers in Internet companies do?
Preface
Hi!! I am a digital product designer, currently engaged in a 3d interior design platform based online.
Recently, my cooperate, a Front-end developer, asked me some questions during a small talk:
“Yu, sometimes I am really curious about your work.”
“What is the content of your everyday work? What’s the difference？”
“What do you consider in your design and make a decision?”
I realized that R&D people in technology companies still have misconceptions and disconnects about user experience and design, even in 2022🤷♂️. A good understanding is the basis of a good relationship, which prompted me to share with developers, product managers, and other stakeholders.
Before sharing, I conducted a simple questionnaire to determine what content people are interested in designers. These are some of the topics that are of interest to everyone. Combining everyone’s interests & my observations, I had a design sharing session with partners in different roles, which achieved good feedback.
“I think it’s pretty good; it gives us an idea of how the designer thinks, which is pretty important.” — — form a Front-end Development Engineer
I plan to discuss four basic questions in four articles. This article is the first part:
- What exactly do designers in Internet companies do?
- Why is an investment in user experience so valuable?
- How to think like a designer?
- How does a UX designer evaluate their work?
（It needs to be stated that my experience is mainland China-based. Designers from different regions are very welcome to share their views.）
Modern Classification of Design
The design has a more extended history than the Internet, the software industry, or even computer science. When I was a student, the modern classification of design in textbooks was based on a broad division of design into three categories, depending on the purpose：
- Design for Communication — Visual Communication Design
(Font Design /Logo Design/Posters Design…) - Design for Use — Product Design
(Industry Design/Fashion Design/Handicraft design…) - Design for Living — Environmental Design
(City planning/Architectural Design/Interior design…)
As society evolves, more and more new things impact this old definition and blur the boundaries between different designs, such as web, software, apps, games, and other digital products. Since the medium of digital products is generally two-dimensional (computer screen or cell phone screen), most people intuitively equate design with graphic design. In reality, digital products have Communication, Product, and Environmental attributes.
Digital Product Design VS Industry Design
“Why is it that my designer friends have an excellent division of labor and seem to be doing the same job?”
UI/UX/CX… These positions and terms are confusing for many people outside the design industry and novice designers. People have different interpretations of this phenomenon in the design industry, such as Slava Shestopalov’s article — “Why UX, UI, CX, IA, IxD, and Other Sorts of Design Are Dumb.”
Let’s talk about my view. My point is that the concepts of UX / UI /Interaction design, etc., are for a finer division of labor in the digital product design process. The difference in the digital products served determines the scope of our work & knowledge structure.
Before working at an Internet company, I had experience working as a partner in an industrial design studio. So early on in my career as an interaction designer, I built my perception of my work by drawing analogies between the similarities between “industrial design” and “digital products design.”
Designing a tangible product requires a lot of work, which may include: business analysis of the market, human factors engineering analysis of the user, concept sketching, prototyping of 3D models, CMF(Color, Materials, Finish), structural design, and so on. Each part of the work is specialized and requires knowledge in different areas.
Ideally, it would be best to have a dedicated staff for each piece. Still, in reality, the division of labor is often not that subdivided, considering the cost of delivery and other factors.
Similarly, the same story happens in the field of digital product design. Digital products are not only about the user interface, including user research, interaction design, user interface copywriting, motion design, acoustic design, and other tasks. For example, for large digital products such as games, the division of labor for designers is often more detailed. In addition to standard UI design & interaction design, it also has original painting design, scene design, and even map design.
This development process of fine division of labor is widespread in other industries. Its emergence at some level means that digital product design has become more standardized and scale. The funny thing is that we never doubt: “Why should companies recruit front-end engineers, back-end engineers, or prominent data engineers？ You know, all of you are developers.”
UX, UI … existence, because the job market made such a choice due to this division of labor model can benefit enterprises better. Of course, the criteria for this division of labor are not unique and absolute. Still, the size of the company and the type of digital products together affect the degree of division of labor among designers.
Requirement for Designer
Many people who don’t know the design industry have a vague idea of what designers are capable of (like my programmer friends). A typical bias they have about a designer’s abilities is: “He must know how to draw, or he must know some kind of prototyping software.”
What are the required competencies for a designer? To figure this out, we can look at the job ads of companies.
This is an advertisement for a senior UX designer. In short, in addition to some basic requirements, companies generally require UX designers to have the ability to prototype and conduct user research. The situation is similar in Chinese Internet technology companies, but some companies also need UX designers to design the UI.
Combining the job market’s needs, we can roughly analyze the competencies required for a career as a digital product designer. The “Fundamental & Technical” analysis method is a widespread interview technique for recruiters (and the way I use it most often). For the “Fundamental” of a designer, the interviewer will generally focus on the following information.
- Education
- Personality
- Project experience
- Communication skills
- Cooperation ability
- Creativity
- Curiosity
- Empathy
- Other
For the designer’s ‘Technical,’ according to the type of design product, I divided the designer’s skills into four dimensions. I ranked them according to their importance to a table.
In addition, some Advance Skills can help you get more competitive & salary, such as：
- Some data analysis skills and statistical knowledge
- Some code development experience
- Designer or user of large design systems（Ant Design, Fiori…）
- Accumulated expertise & experience in a particular field (CRM, ERP, Data visualization…)
Small Part of an Iceberg is Visible Above Water
Those not in the design industry should respect one fundamental thing: “The designer’s work is not only what can be visualized on the interface.”
More than what you did and how you accomplished it. Sometimes why do it? What is the relationship between different stakeholders? Where is the evidence to support your design? …These ‘non-design’ tasks are more critical. If we take a closer look at some of the UX case studies, it’s easy to see that probably more than 2/3 of the work shown is not directly visible to users in the final interface.
