Hello👋
My name is Bona. I work as a product design manager at Meta, designing for Fundraising products across Instagram and Facebook. It has now been 5 years since I started at the meta.
I have always been passionate about mentoring others. In the past, I focused on 1:1 and group mentoring in-person with folks in USA but noticed there are so many others who would benefit from a similar mentorship.
So I started posting a light weight mentorship videos via Youtube recently. They are bite-sized knowledge sharing, going over common questions from past mentoring sessions. Videos are in Korean with English subtitles. (Not all of the videos have eng subs yet, I aim to add to all of them though.)
This is my first video, going over the difference between UI designer, UX designer and Product designer. It’s definitely rough around the edges, but hope this helps peeps who want more mentorship in Product Design.
Product design vs. UX design (interaction) vs. UI design (visual)
A lot of people ask me the differences between three design fields and how they differ. Historically, product design only referred to design of physical products such as furniture or mugs or anything tangible. Now the term encompasses the design of digital products as well such as websites, mobile apps or VR products. If you have been in the fields of design for a while, you may have noticed these names of roles have shifted over the years. Back in the days, there were more roles that were called web designers, or UX / UI designers, and now we see more roles with product designer tags.
At a high level, the tasks that people do under these roles are not hugely different. They all design digital products with slightly different focus.
UX designers (= interaction designers) focus more on improving product usability. They focus on making products easier to use for customers by discovering user pain points via user research and making proposals for product change.
UI designers (= visual designers) focus more on the product execution and visual craftmanship. They focus on making the product appear attractive, visually polished and easier to read.
Even though they have slightly different focus, there is a lot of overlap. For instance, as a UX designer, you would need visual design skills in order to make proposals for product design changes to solve user pain points. UI designers would need to understand usability in order to make effective visual design layouts.
What is a focus of a product designer?
Product designers usually refer to the generalists who possesses three key hard skills; UX, UI, and product thinking. So, the biggest delta here is product thinking.
Product thinking is an ability to recognize and propose new product ideas. In double diamond design process, the earlier part is “identify right things to build” (ideation) and latter part is “build the things right” (execution). So, the product thinking is the earlier part of the design process, vs. UX /UI focuses on the latter part of the design process. In other words, product thinking is the ability to think about what to make, and UX and UI is the ability to implement those ideas well.
What field of digital design are you interested in or are in part of? Do you think these definitions make sense based on your experience? Let me know in the comment below. Also please let me know if you have any questions about product design so that I can cover it in the next article or video.
Thanks for reading!
