What does Product designer actually do?
After having a long journey of working as a UI/UX Designer for more than five years, I got an opportunity to work as a Product Designer. I always thought Product Designer is almost the same as UI/UX Designer. I very recently learnt I am partially right. Though as a Product Designer you apply the same design principles, you set up a process for every task – there are more number of hats that you get to wear. You also work in building the entire product from designing screens to working on banners to working on Ads for marketing. Its a full stack experience and looking at the data at end of the day is the fun part in all of this!
UX/UI Design
Yes, you get to work as UI/UX designer where you have the same set of process. If you are the only designer in the team as in my case, you get to set the process to solve each user issues. I follow the industry standard process of first gaining the brief of the problem. Come up with the problem statement in a line or two. Then move to secondary research that includes what other competitors are approaching the same issue. I don’t want reinvent the wheel which is time consuming and also increases the cognitive load of the users to relearn an action. Then I move to making a list of Ideal users (target audience). Come up with the set of maximum of 5-10 open ended questions and conduct the interview.
Then I move to coming up with the affinity and empathy mapping. Building profile that the entire team can refer to. Then based on this I come up with solutions by first coming up with the HOW TO questions.
Then answering the How TO questions. This makes my motive for solution pretty clear removing the biases. Once done with the same, I move to wireframes, style guide and Visual designs. During all this I make a document and keep it for future reference and also keep updating based on new findings. Once done with solution, I start looking at the data of how the design is helping the users. By doing this, I find out whether the solution has improved the user experience. If not, I find at what point are they facing the issue.
Banner Design
Working on designing graphic design elements also becomes a part of this job. I predominantly work on making banners, as I work on an audio platform. Here I got to concentrate more closely on the each graphic element – the right image with the focal point explaining the plot, a text with right font, size and colour for the name of the series. The different sizes of the banner, and seeing to that all of them has a single focal point in view. Once the banner is done and uploaded looking at the data and analysing what is appealing and is the banner speaking to user expectation and if not I go back to my drawing board.
Ads
Next is my favourite – Ads. Here we experiment human Ads, illustration Ads (where I get to draw the characters) and come up with Ads with audio files as trailers. Here, again graphic elements like image and banners comes into picture. So does the audio synching with the entire story line. Again here my marketing team analyse the data and we see what Ads have better response rate compared to previous one. And we improve everyday!
In conclusion, my role as a product designer is helping me grow more as a designer. And in each of this task my knowledge of graphic design and my experience as UI/UX designer is also making the product better. This role is helping me explore the world of product designer and audio platform!