Designing Wayfair’s Product Design Role
The Wayfair design team has combined all UX and UI positions into a singular role called Product Designer. Here’s why.
UX vs. UI
Update: Since writing this a few years back, we’ve re-rebranded our team to “Experience Design,” as it’s more indicative of the end-to-end problem space.
The Wayfair design team has existed in some form since the brand’s creation in 2012. While initially scrappy and small, we’ve since grown to include more than 80 visual designers, product designers, user researchers, and UX writers — which makes us one of the largest creative teams in Boston. As the team has grown, we’ve also evolved, establishing processes to encourage our designers to improve their skills and advance their careers.
In 2015, Wayfair began hiring User Experience designers to join agile product teams. A year later, I joined the company as a Senior User Experience Design Manager. At the time, while UX and UI designers worked together frequently, they had two separate roles. UX designers would typically complete user research, information architecture, and interaction design, while UI designers would cover branding, interface design, iconography, and prototyping.
This design team arrangement is somewhat common among tech companies. In fact, some choose to separate their teams even further by creating distinct roles for User Researchers, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, and Visual Designers.
Enter the Product Designer
Over time, we found that while there were some procedural benefits to having separate UX and UI roles, it ended up causing confusion and unrest among our design team. Many UX and UI designers had capabilities that were only being used in the opposite role. This put arbitrary limits on designer responsibilities in areas where they may have some expertise. For example, UX designers were often capable of interface design, and UI designers were often capable of interaction design, but our separated format did not allow us to take advantage of this.
After some intense planning, we made the decision to combine the UX and UI positions into a singular role called “Product Designer.”
This hybrid role has become increasingly popular in recent years, and has been adopted by many of the very best design teams, including Facebook, Airbnb, IBM, Dropbox, Uber, PayPal, and Twitter.
To solidify the responsibilities for this role, we took inspiration from the O’Reilly book Org Design for Design Orgs. With the book’s suggestions in mind, we then assembled a rubric that outlines five major practical skill sets that our product designers can focus on, including user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, and prototyping.
To be clear, our designers are not required to be experts in all of these skills. Instead, the rubric we created encourages them to play to their strengths, while also ensuring they have room to expand their skills. As designers level up, they’re expected to strengthen and expand their skillset accordingly.
Training for the future
This new Product Designer role has been well received among the team. However, it’s resulted in increased responsibilities, which come with deliverables that some designers are not accustomed to completing. To make this transition easier, the design leaders put together a series of in-person training sessions for all Product Designers.
Here’s a snapshot of the sessions we’re offering:
Sharing our expertise
As the Wayfair Product Design team has come together, we’ve learned we have an amazing collective wealth of knowledge. We have a smart team with a great process, and we want to share what we’ve learned with the greater design community. Stay tuned to the Wayfair Design Medium feed to hear more from us!
Interested in joining the Wayfair product design team? Browse our open positions here.
