The ‘UX Design’ vs ‘Product Design’ clash

A lot of people from the software industry been shifting toward the use of the term ‘Product design’ over ‘UX design’. And most often, these terms are also used interchangeably. So what should we call this job now? It’s getting kinda confusing.

There is a phenomenon that have been going on for a while, I like to call the “LinkedIn syndrome”. It is when people are given the chance to freely give themselves job identities. Some of them tend to be too generous about that (Surely you’ve seen it before: Trainer | Motivational speaker | Secretly Superman |… and it goes on for 2 pages), others might get creative for the sake of standing out.

This is causing job titles to be constantly changing, almost in a trendy way.
For example calling yourself a ‘web designer’ in 2020, is pretty similar to walking around with a haircut of a rock star from the 80s.

In a previous article, I shared my thought about using of term ‘User Experience’ in a design context, through which I concluded that it can be a little bit misleading. The User experience of a product can be affected by numerous components of the business. For example, if you are crazy enough to buy an Apple product (😆), your overall assessment on the experience of owning it wouldn’t depend solely on the product itself. Other aspects of design that could be affecting this experience could include;

• Product design (Aesthetics and characteristics of the product)
• Package design (Ease ad satisfaction of unpacking the product)
• Software design (Usability of the operating system — iOS)
• Space design (Store interior design)
• Service design (Customer relationships — was the salesman helpful enough? Did you have to wait too much in line?…)
• System design (i. e. stores locations and supply chain— Was there a store close by? Do they handle delivery to where you live? )
• …

All of these aspects and many others could have, directly or indirectly, affected you overall judgement on using a product even through most of them doesn’t include the actual use of the product. So if we were to create the ultimate “User Experience Designer” job position, that person will be responsible to deliver all the elements that do that.
While it is theoretically possible for a human being to have inquired all of the necessary skill set to do this job, I will let judge upon the odds of finding such person.

Returning to our main subject, if the job we are talking about is to produce prototypes of software products (mobile or web application), it would be more appropriate to call it ‘Product designer’, or ‘UI designer’ instead of ‘UX designer’. Obviously the process of designing a product is not isolated from other activities of a company. But usually, it’s not the job of a single person to be responsible for all the other things that affects the experience. It’s not that I think using ‘UX designer’ as a job title is completely wrong. It’s merely about being technically correct of what it is delivered within a job. The software product design is also nothing but a narrow, it can include an extended set of disciplines, from interaction design, information architecture, usability testing,

The main message that I am trying to convey here, is that we need to try to be more precise about the jobs we create. Including more responsibilities isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially when there are too many of them so one may end up not doing them, or doing inconstantly. The practice of software product design alone include an extended set of disciplines like interaction design, content writing, information architecture, usability testing, graphic design, motion design… with each one of these can be a separate job in some cases.

Learning and testing many aspects related product design, especially at the beginning of our careers, is always very rewarding. Helping us discover our strengths and weaknesses, and figure out what we should focus based on experience. However, getting specialized is what often makes professionals go from doing great work to doing extraordinary work. So I think, at some point, we should aim for that. Being a specialist does not necessary mean to ‘tunnel vision’ on something specific. It implies investing more time and effort in a narrower set of skills.

This approach is often referred to as the “T-shape learning”, and brought up by many professionals to be one the most effective ways to successful career path.

In a nutshell, it doesn’t really matter that much what a job is called, as long it’s done to the fullest, and presents in an understandable way what it includes.

The constant shifting in naming a job doesn’t seem to be a bad thing also, allowing professionals to reestablish their interpretations of concepts, reposition themselves accordingly.