UX Designer vs. Product Designer: What’s the difference? (with added cat illustrations!)
I was never clearly aware of the exact definition and differences between a UX Designer and a Product Designer. It’s a not straightforward and clear difference like in UX vs UI. I started asking around and I realised a lot of people share the same struggle.
So off I went on my quest to find the answer to this common misunderstanding, and we all know that “sharing is caring” I decided to write an article dedicated to dummies, documenting my findings and the path to reach the light at the end of this tunnel.
To make this reading even more pleasant I added bespoke cat illustrations because I can’t get enough of cats and I was very inspired. 😊
“Product Design and UX Design are two important fields in every organisation, however, they are often misunderstood as being the same.”
Departing from this common misunderstanding, I broke down this article into digestible chunks focusing on the differences and similarities each of the roles share.
What is a Product Designer?
A product designer is responsible for the user experience of a product, usually taking direction on the business goals and objectives from product management. Product designers also work closely with sales and marketing teams to find business value opportunities through competitor, market, and user research. They play a significant role in ensuring a digital product stays relevant and competitive, evolving with market trends and customer demands.
What is a UX Designer?
UX designers focus on solving usability issues and ensuring products follow a logical flow. They are heavily involved in early user and market research to identify and understand user problems and develop design solutions to fix them.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology — not the other way around.” — Steve Jobs
Duties
Product designers usually oversee a wider range of product development and make research to identify business opportunities that align with user needs than UX designers. In theory, every single organisation will define and utilise product designers in different ways and it is up to you to get clarity on what the business expectations are from the product designer. Generally, they have the following responsibilities:
- Market research: Product designers conduct initial research to determine if an idea is worth pursuing. They then budget the funding to develop a product and forecast how much the company can make in sales to become profitable.
- Stakeholder relations: Product designers provide company leaders, clients, investors or other stakeholders with status updates and timelines for completion.
- Production efficiency: They consider the most efficient and cost-effective way to produce a good or service and arrange the infrastructure necessary to accomplish it.
- Brand development: These designers consult with brand strategists and marketers to create a public image that reflects the purpose of the product and the company’s values.
- Product road mapping: Product designers develop strategies for introducing a product to the market and then determine how the product can gain users and earnings.
- Team management: Product designers coordinate the efforts of various departments to maximise efficiency and creativity.
UX designers have a slightly more narrow focus than product designers. Typically, a UX designer must consider what’s best for the user and the overall user experience. At the same time, they are also responsible for making sure that the product or service meets the needs of the business.
- User research: UX designers conduct research to understand competitors’ user experiences. They also understand their own customers to identify urgent pain points and opportunities for growth.
- User perspective: UX designers try to define and test hypotheses about how users will interact with a product. This user perspective enables them to realise what features are most important to consumers.
- Design: At the beginning of product development, UX designers conceive of the layout and wire-framing of a product. After launch, they make improvements while continuing to reference the initial design language.
- Prototype development: UX designers create multiple solutions for each problem and test them with real users to make adjustments.
- Testing: UX designers extensively test promising prototypes to ensure products and updates function smoothly.
- Support infrastructure: UX designers help develop the information architecture underlying a product.
Differences in salary in 2023 (London, UK)
(source Glassdoor)
Junior UX Designer: £61,376 / yr
Junior Product Designer: £56,560 / yr
Senior UX Designer: £73,462 / yr
Senior Product Designer: £79,362 / yr
Skills
I listed some of the skills that are commonly expected and nice to have based on job spec research.
UX designer:
- Problem-solving
- Communication
- Design thinking
- Testing
- Prototyping
- Creativity
- Critical thinking
- Empathy
- Communication
- Data analysis
- User research
- Teamwork
Product designer:
- Product design
- Problem-solving
- Project management
- Strategic Planning
- General understanding of HTML, CSS, Javascript
- Budgeting
- Long-term planning and strategy
- Technically proficient
- Business acumen
- Data Science
- Research
- Leadership
There are a few key ways that product designers and UX designers differ:
- Product designers tend to be more business-oriented (I’m not saying UX designers are not). Product designers can be expected to be more aware of business priorities than UX designers. This might manifest in working more closely with business or product teams than a typical UX designer might, and ensuring business needs are met in a finished product.
- Product designers tend to take the lead in the overall project length. Product designers are often the ones tasked with captaining the entire design process of a product. They can wrangle UX and visual designers, researchers, and business teams together to make sure all needs of a product are met. Because of this, product designers can be expected to have some experience leading projects or teams.
- UX designers are more design focused. UX designers are often expected to design the actual visual and interactive elements of a product. That’s not to say that product designers don’t — but as a UX designer, expect to dig a little more into the hands-on aspects of designing a user-friendly product.
Product design is an “evolution” of UX design.
If you’re interested in becoming a product designer you need to master the basics in UX (UI design is a very good plus) and combine them with business savviness (having really tactical insights into what actually moves the needle for a business). You have to be confident about your strategies and the only way that you can be confident about them is by doing it yourself, being down in the trenches, testing failing and succeeding so you know what works and what doesn’t.
Conclusion
As you could see the roles of UX Designer and Product Designer share a lot of similarities, but the mindset and execution may differ.
Depending on the organisation you work for, business goals, problems you’re solving, the product you’re working on and the type of questions you have to deal with, you could be leaning more towards a UX Designer or a Product Designer.
The importance is to get clarity from your business because at the end of day, Product Designer, or UX Designer, we’re all trying to solve problems for the end-users and ship high quality, user-friendly, beautiful products.
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