Perspective
Hiring the right designer for your digital product
As many enterprises and startups start to value design as one of the primary drivers for their digital product, there have been many buzzword job titles which have sprouted up for the hiring of such talent in organizations.
The common buzzwords used in such design resource hiring intentions being: ‘experienced web designer’; ‘experienced UX/UI designer’; and ‘experienced product designer.’
It is essential to clarify that the primary goal of a digital product is to solve the problem, while its tertiary goals may include communicating the idea, mission, values, services, or projects to audiences. The interchangeable use of buzzword job titles and the failure of identifying the key attributes as well as distinctions between the same can hurt organizations in hiring the right design talent for envisioning and designing their digital product.
This comprehensive guide helps you chalk out all the key differences and similarities of job titles, meaning you’ll never get confused and lost while hiring for design resources for building your amazing digital product.
Who is who?
The Web Designer
A web designer is someone who is both creative and technically inclined, and uses both these attributes to build or redesign websites. The web designer has the ability to understand what is needed to make a website functional and easy to use, but at the same time make it aesthetically appealing to the user. — Careerexplorer.com
Web designers are typically individuals who are skilled in designing websites, or blogs, or a company website, or landing pages. Their skills range from graphic design, SEO, coding, or online conversions/ optimization knowledge. They mostly take up designing small scale websites, which excludes complex web apps such as social networks, or e-commerce websites, or fintech websites/apps as they require extensive product thinking and experience design.
Usually, a web designer strives in a communication or marketing agency where critical responsibility is to create, develop, and maintain websites. The focus of the web designer’s work is the communication of the client’s idea, mission, vision, work, and people involved through websites.
The UX/UI Designer
While most job descriptions or hiring goals may refer to this buzzword, it is critical to acknowledge that: UX and UI design are two distinct elements of experience design. UX refers to user experience, which primarily centers on how something operates and how people interact with it. While UI, or user interface, strongly focuses on the appearance, layout and visual elements of experience design. Most enterprises and startups combine these two terms aiming to discover unicorns for their design requirements.
The user experience designer’s role is to make products easy to use for users through an understanding of the target market, understanding and interpretation of user behavior and needs, ideating and creating design solutions that fit those needs, and testing the derived solutions with actual users to improve upon the product.
The user experience designer looks to take control of the vested responsibilities through the design thinking process, from research to ideation, prevailing to be user-centered as its core duty. In short, the UX designer’s role is to ensure that the product gets seldom optimized for the user.
The role of the user interface designer or UI designer is to complement the user experience of the product with a great look and feel, and pleasurable interactivity. The role involves the transference of a brand’s image, voice, tone, guidelines, and visual asset’s to the digital product’s interface to improve and complement the user experience of the product.
Often hiring organizations combine these two distinct skillsets calling out ‘UX/UI designers’ in job descriptions, probably out misinformation or just the hope of discovering unicorns having both skillsets. It is important to note that while UX/UI designer is buzzword job title used nowadays, and a designation assigned probably to most members of a design team, the design process, and designOps gets shared among members according to their strength of skillsets.
The Product Designer
Why:
A great way to illustrate the definition and role of a product designer is look at this clip from the Founder (2016), a movie about the beginnings of McDonald’s, also modeled as an example on UxDesign.cc.
So, to define, the product designer is an individual who takes charge and oversees the process of envisioning and creating the product, complementing it with usable, meaningful, and delightful experiences.
The product designer has to be accountable to business considerations and objectives, be adhering to the resources, and also seek to recognize and address problems with the product at a holistic level.
While UX designers are primarily concerned with the usability of the product, the role of the product designer is to think about the product on a holistic level: user experience, technical design, marketing, product funnels, identifying critical features and making product roadmaps for the future and its integration into existing platforms. Product designers work in close proximity and synchronization with UX, UI, visual designers, and other departments such as marketing, development teams in enterprises and startups creating digital products.
Eventually, product designers should be among the first individuals to be onboarded on to your team if you are conceptualizing and designing a new digital product for the market. They would empower the stakeholders of your project/ product to brainstorm and envision the concept into something tangible yet useful while accessing the existing competition and the problems it is currently addressing.
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