The digital product designer role

Published June 28, 2024

Fragmentation in User Experience Discipline

As we find ourselves in 2024, it’s disheartening to witness the ongoing fragmentation and confusion within the realm of user experience (UX). Despite significant advancements in the industry, there’s still a glaring lack of consensus among professionals about what truly defines a product designer, UX designer, and visual designer. This confusion isn’t just a minor annoyance; it’s a fundamental issue that undermines efficiency and clarity at the highest levels of organizations.

The issue

In many organizations, titles like product designer, UX designer, and visual designer are tossed around interchangeably. Professionals bearing these titles are often expected to perform similar roles, yet the distinctions between them remain nebulous. This ambiguity affects team dynamics, project outcomes, and ultimately, the user experience.

Several factors contribute to this enduring issue:

Vanity and Appearances: There’s a tendency for designers to embellish their titles on platforms like LinkedIn, often for the sake of vanity and professional image. These titles frequently misrepresent their actual responsibilities or areas of expertise.

Proliferation of Bootcamps: The surge in design bootcamps has further muddled the landscape. These programs often promise quick specialization, resulting in a wave of designers who view themselves as experts in narrowly defined aspects of the discipline. This fragmented learning model is then perpetuated within companies.

Specialization Over Multidisciplinarity: The industry is gravitating towards specialization at the expense of a well-rounded skill set. Ideally, product designers should have a broad, multidisciplinary background, but current trends favor deep, narrow expertise.

Learning from software engineering

We can glean valuable insights from engineering frameworks and organizational structures. Engineers often have a broad understanding of various facets of their field, enabling effective collaboration and innovation. Adopting a similar approach can help designers cultivate a more cohesive and integrated skill set. Often a Frontend engineer will do backend work and vice versa. Would you hire a software engineer that has knowledge of typescript but isn’t open to learn new languages when required? I think wou wouldn’t, reader. And yet, this is a reality amongst Product Designers.

What should Product Designers do then?

Embrace Multidisciplinary Learning: Designers should move away from focusing solely on specialization and instead strive to become well-rounded professionals. In the tech industry, we are essentially software builders, and continuous learning is crucial.

Develop Cross-Functional Knowledge: A “UI” designer cannot create a cohesive experience without understanding information architecture, typography, elements hierarchy, research, and business outcomes. Similarly, a UX designer needs to be proficient with UI design tools like Figma and design systems.

Innovation with Business: UX designers must consider business outcomes to drive innovation. Understanding the “why” behind innovation enables designers to create more meaningful and impactful solutions.

Adapt to Emerging Technologies: With the rise of AI, the role of a product designer will likely evolve to include elements of UI engineering. Designers will need to acquire basic knowledge of programming languages like TypeScript or JavaScript. AI can handle initial, mundane tasks, freeing designers to focus on exploring the solution space and crafting superior products more efficiently.