What is a product designer ( for me)?
People often confused these terms: Product design, industrial design, UX design, and UI design. Here are each of these professions defined.
UI DESIGN:
UI is an acronym, means Users Interface. A UI designer works on digital interfaces generally for app and website but also exploitation system. It’s simple, everything you can see on a screen is designed by a UI designer. UI designer usually works with prototyping software as Figma, sketch or Invision studio. They also can learn front-end development languages and frameworks to integrate their own work or understand developer work, but it is not necessary. With the rise of no-code and low-code solutions as Webflow, UI designers can quickly do an MVP of their work, but still, need a developer for a bigger project.
UX DESIGN:
UX is for user experience. People often do amalgam between UI and UX designers. Some UI designer introduces themselves as UX and vice versa, but it is absolutely not the same profession. A UI designer is focused on a digital interface, it’s like graphic design applies to digital. UX designer work is more about the experiences of the user. The medium does not matter, digital or not, services or products. UX designer work is to ask and observe users to guess the optimal experience of the product and services, some people prefer the term of UX researcher.
INDUSTRIAL DESIGN:
Industrial designers focus on physical products. There is many types of industrial designer:
- Transportation designer.
- Tool designer.
- Stencil making.
- Automobile designer.
- Automobile interior designer.
- Sports equipment designer
- furniture designer
- Airline interior designer
This is an exciting discipline that mixes manual work creativity and artistic sensibility with technology interest.
PRODUCT DESIGN
The product designer is he who does not want to be lock in a case. It’s both an industrial designer and a digital (UI UX) designer. A product designer is usually assimilated as a person who does both UI and UX on a digital device, but it is more, he deals with both physically and non physically products.
There are many types of designer who is not defined here as architects, space designers, interactive designer…
what type of designer are you?