8 Designer Profiles in IT: Discovering the Ukrainian Industry. Part 2
This is the second part of our research about design profiles in the Ukrainian design industry, which is dedicated to:
- XR Design
- Conversational UI Design
- Service Design
- Design Research
If you want to learn more about Product Design, UI/UX Design, Visual Design and Motion Design, please go to the first part.
XR Design
How it’s different
XR (Extended Reality) designers deal with the next 3 directions:
- Augmented Reality (AR), where users see the real world over the camera, glasses or HUD (Heads-up display), but with an overlay of virtual objects;
- Mixed Reality (MR), when the user not just can see virtual objects in the real world, but also touch and move them.
- Virtual Reality (VR), when users see only immersive virtual reality with a head-mounted display like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or other.
Typical tasks
Here is how XR Designer at SoftServe Liza Nesterenko describes her typical process:
Every AR/MR/VR project starts with an idea and the concept, which should define the logic and user flow. Immersion — how deep users dive into virtual reality — is the most important part of an XR project. We should make users believe that virtual reality is actually real.
Sometimes, you can meet even deeper specialization. Julia Shutkevych, Senior Creator в FFFACE.ME, designs AR-masks for Instagram:
The big part of AR-filter development is to come up with creative stuff. Also, you need to think about the usability of your filter because you always design for the audience. AR designers develop tools to create new content, so we think how to augment the reality, so the user would love to share it in stories.
Conversational UI Design
How it’s different
CUI designers work with both, AI voice assistants and chatbots. The chatbots can be able to understand natural language (NLU-chatbots) or can work based on predefined user commands.
Typical tasks
CUI designers in Ukraine work mostly with chatbots. The reason is that there are lots of ready off-the-shelf solutions from Google (Google Assistant), Amazon (Alexa), Apple (Siri) and Microsoft (Cortana).
Conversational designer from BotsCrew Anka Sydorova tells:
I do a lot of research and cooperate with the client to get the project goals and user needs. Based on that, I create User Personas and User Journey Map. After that, I create a logic diagram — what will chatbot do on each step of the conversation.
Yura Melnyk, Conversational UI designer at SoftServe, adds:
It’s really important to define the chatbot personality because it should follow the brand Tone of Voice. Also, you need to define every possible step and way of the conversations, so they all could lead to the logical ending of the dialogue and would satisfy user needs.
Service Design
How it’s different
If you have ever used any delivery apps, mobile banking, or Uber then you have seen Service Design. Besides the app interface, you get an experience of the service itself, communication with staff, and with physical environments. But how are all those processes coordinated behind the scenes? How is this app integrated with other products or services? How does it make customers happy?
Typical tasks
Here is how Rodion Sorokin, Service designer at DOT_DOT and editor in Humanized Design, describes the process:
We always start with reframing the task. Usually business comes with a solution in mind, but we need to step back and formulate the problem that service design needs to solve. Then we do research, where we discover the customers' behaviours and their Jobs to be done. After that we design best-case scenarios, test them, launch the pilot, and finally implement the service with multiple steps.
Kateryna Zaiko, Head of Design in Symphony Solutions, adds:
Customer experience is not always getting better just by changing the interface. It may be fragmental, limited only by digital products, may suffer from unsynced teams and processes. All this may be resolved by service design.
Design Research
How it’s different
As you see, each of the profiles requires research at every project. Usually, big service and outsourcing companies in Ukraine hire design researchers, who can help to understand the audience (user interviews, competitor analysis, shadowing, focus-groups), test the product with real users (user testings, A/B testings, eye-tracking) and facilitate co-creative workshops.
Typical tasks
Iana Svitlova, User researcher at Preply, tells:
Usually, I receive a research request, define the goals and tasks and appropriate research type and methods. Then define the research questions and start user recruiting process. After the active research stage, I analyse the outcomes and provide the results.
UX Researcher and leader of R9 Research Community, Dariia Ivashchenko explains:
The tasks can be so different! For example, we had a request for the diary studies to understand how users install a video doorbell and what difficulties they have. Or we had research to validate the design solution: conduct a usability testing of the design concept or ready-to-go feature to discover critical blockers in user experience.
Profiles vs Market
If these articles made you think that all the profiles are equally spread within the Ukrainian design industry, no they aren’t.
At the time of writing (Dec 1, 2020), ukrainian job-website djinni.co has 443 openings in UX/Design category.
Searching by the keywords gives us the next insights:
- web (UI/UX) and product design are the key profiles of the design industry in Ukraine;
- “UX/UI” in position name can mean interfaces or websites, or both;
- companies tend to combine graphic and motion design positions into one;
- XR, Research, Conversational UI and Service design profiles are relatively rare. Only big companies tend to have this level of specialization, and these positions are relatively new for the Ukrainian design industry.
So, there are multiple design profiles in Ukraine with specific skillsets and tasks. That means deep and wide design expertise and community, that enables various full-cycle complex design solutions.
Check how we adopt all the design profiles here, at SoftServe.
