How To Master Product Design of The Future
7 expert forecasts of product design evolution
What’s better, Sketch or Figma? What designers should learn — how to code or how to do business? Digital product designers have been concerned about their future since the very beginning of their profession.
So I asked digital product design experts about their views on the future of their profession and it turned I got three certain categories.
Read on to learn their forecasts on the nearest future of digital design.
Tools
Expanding the arsenal of design tools for creating more effective solutions at a faster pace is something that many product designers pose as their main secret of success.
A lot of my colleagues say tools are important, and being able to create a product by one’s own is absolutely invaluable.
“The advice I would give designers today is to learn the basics of coding and read technical literature. This will equip them with the knowledge of product development and technical constraints. For example, understanding how data is stored and fetched on the back end allows designing better search and filter interactions, which will eventually result in better customer experience. In addition, I can see a new trend towards helping designers to prototype in code. Tools such as Webflow and Framer are becoming popular among designers as they help put together an interactive prototype quickly.”
Daria, Lead UX Designer, Amazon
One possible explanation for the prevalence of this approach is the product designers’ concentration on their specialization and narrowing their responsibility zone. As a result, we tend to focus on horizontal growth and enhance already acquired hard skills. Better, faster, cheaper.
Should designers learn how to code and become tech-savvy guys? This question will forever stay without a “correct” answer. For some, who are hands-on craftsmen loving to bring crazy ideas to life with the speed of light, it will be the only way to proceed with their careers. Expanding a toolset together with getting to code things on your own can bring you full autonomy or make you an indispensable specialist in any company.
Long story short, mastering the tools is a necessary, but not sufficient part of the product designer profession.
Communication and Research
An ability to investigate, analyze and transform data into effective communication will become even more important for a product designer.
“Today, product design goes beyond user experience design. Most of the work is about achieving certain KPIs established by the business for its further development through product optimization.
It is no longer enough to know about your monetization schemes, product roadmaps, competitors, and success criteria. I believe in strengthening the data-driven approach and that we all need to learn the fine points of product analytics. This includes not only working with large amounts of data and conducting A / B tests but also operating with a wide range of metrics, building funnels, analyzing the smallest changes in performance and making design decisions based on them.”
Lina, UX Team Lead, WIX
Another thought, but quite similar in its way of thinking, came from my friend who works in one product company in Berlin:
“Product design is first and foremost teamwork. The ability to be a good communicator will never disappear from the designer’s list of responsibilities. A product designer must be able to describe their work in a way that a project manager and an engineer can understand. In addition, from time to time it is necessary to defend one’s opinion or to reach consensus. To become such a good communicator, a product designer should accumulate experience of communication with different participants of the product development.
And, of course, a product designer needs to conduct user tests, analyze their results and offer qualitative changes. This is something that will not disappear from our daily tasks.”
Maria, Product Designer, AirHelp
Product designers, developers, managers, writers, marketing managers, QAs — all of them need to act as a team to come up with the best possible experience for users. And communication skills become decisive here.
Mastering tasks like running user research, getting the necessary information from different business branches and providing in-depth analysis have already brought huge benefits for product designers. These skills are highly valued by employers because the depth of research determines the quality and success of a future product. But then again, all of these skills rely on our communication skills.
You’re a real product designer only when you have research-based data that allows you to operate with numbers, proves your hypothesis and helps you communicate your ideas with all the parties involved. Otherwise, you’re just another designer that moves pixels around.
Yes, there are still many companies considering research an unnecessary luxury or just a step at the beginning of a major project. Designers often have to fight for resources to be able to do their job at a high level. Research and ongoing communication with users usually have lower priority in such companies than developing new features and fixing errors.
Still, over time, managers and owners of such companies get to realize the value of UX research. That’s why research execution, data analysis, and communication skills are expected to get more demand over time.
Business and psychology
A dozen years ago product designers were focused mainly on the web. Suddenly, people started using smartphones. Mobile apps were on the rise until the mobile-first approach and adaptive design conquered the designers’ mindsets.
Today, when you’re attending any design conference, you will hear design discussions on the voice user experience or virtual reality interfaces.
The progress won’t slow down anytime soon.
“Study what will always remain unchanged and where the competition will be the most intense. I have books on psychology and psychiatry, sociology and scriptwriting on my desk right now. Five years later, people — with all their desires, motives, and fears — will stay the same as they are today. The biggest challenge will be in getting the user’s attention, and therefore it is necessary to learn how to impress them. Telling an interesting story through design, which will present a unique user experience, will be an extremely necessary skill for product designers.
And there is another unchanging extreme: the fundamentals of business. From this perspective, it would be great for product designers to know the basics of business operation and enterprise economics and understand how ideas are implemented and transformed into money. This is essential.”
Denis, Chief Design Officer, LUN
Preparing yourself for the future other than focusing on fundamental principles is no longer rational. If the product design is about people, business, and their interplay, then books on psychology (and even psychiatry) shouldn’t surprise you.
Knowing human nature and business fundamentals will help you create effective design solutions at all times. Here are other product designers’ thoughts on this:
“A product designer will be closer to the business development. User experience and product development strategy are closely linked to the effectiveness of design decisions. This is when the design outcomes have a significant impact on the company’s growth.
Research and understanding of cognitive psychology, on which we do not currently focus enough, will be the main tool for understanding people, formulating hypotheses, and creating a final user experience.
Design tools and services will become more automated and will help us to focus more on creating value thinking about technical details.”
Alex, Product Designer, Preply
“Everything is changing so fast! It’s necessary to be able to obtain new knowledge and skills quickly to understand the unfamiliar processes or a new business environment. A skill to understand what are you lacking at the moment and get it is the most important one for product designers.
Lately, I’m paying more attention to team management, communication skills and understanding of business processes. Most likely, this will be gaining momentum for other product designers in the coming years.”
Alex, Head Of Design, Rentberry
“A specialist who can identify business challenges and user’s needs, conduct user research, offer solutions and check their validity at the end will never be out of work today and tomorrow.
These skills are forming the foundation of any product designer. Of course, you can say: “Switch to Figma urgently or Framer and learn the code”, but without the basis, all these tools will not make a designer really useful.”
Igor, Lead Experience Designer, EPAM Systems
So, starting from today, you can go beyond thinking of “what is better, Figma or Sketch?” and “do I need to code?”. Only your fundamental knowledge of psychology and principles of the business operations will provide you with stability in the future, no matter how much our digital world will change.
Thank you for reading!
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