Product Design vs UX Design: what’s the difference?
One of the best things about working in technology is that things are always changing, including what tech folks’ job titles are. As a design professional, it can be easy to get confused by the different job titles du jour. So what’s the difference between a User Experience Designer and a Product Designer? I had an answer based on past conversations with peers in the field, but after some lightweight data collection and analysis, I was led to think differently.
The Pre-Data Collection Answer
Even if there is not a clearly articulated difference between digital “Product Design” and “UX Design” today, the term Product Designer implies a focus that will become increasingly important for technology design professionals:
Design will not be just about users. It will also be about the business. As Product Designers, we must drive product solutions that service the goals of both the users and the company.
As the need for optimal user experience penetrates beyond consumer software and into the enterprise software space, this means that designers will need to understand complex business models and challenges. We need to understand comprehensive product and platform offerings, pricing schemes, and product roadmaps. It is not enough to champion the voice of the user. We must also have our ears open to hear the voice of product managers, sales folks, and other colleagues to understand the voice of the business.
The Post-Data Collection Answer
I went to bed last night satisfied with my answer above. When I woke up, like any respectable technology designer worth my salt, I wanted to double-check my assumptions with data.
In order to conduct lightweight data collection and analysis, I went to Indeed.com and searched for “Product Designer” and “UX Designer” separately under the location “San Francisco”. Manually, I randomly selected ten job postings from each category. I copied and pasted the full body of the postings into the phrase frequency counter on writewords.org.uk to count which common phrases containing up to 4 words occurred in each bucket.* My hypothesis was that I would see statistically significant overlap between the phrases in both the UX Designer and Product Designer job postings. Instead, here’s what I found.
(If you would like to build off of any of these insights, I recommend that you conduct further independent analysis, since I did this quickly while curious on Memorial Day Weekend!)
My hypothesis was not the reality at all. Instead, there were almost no phrases semantically or literally in common between the Product Designer and UX Designer job post categories. Of note is that even within the two buckets, there is not a lot of statistically significant overlap.
After quickly cleaning the data to get rid of redundant phrases such as “San Francisco” and “you have”, upon looking at the phrases data visualization for the Product Designer bucket, we see that some common themes that emerge include the collaboration with product managers engineers, encouraging candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply, visual design, and understanding needs, product innovation, and in a relatively small theme of overlap, User Experience (UX). In the UX Designer bucket, common themes that surface include User Interface (UI) design, the desire for experienced designers, and interaction design.
However, it’s important to note that even within the buckets, the numbers of overlapping phrases are not significant. For example, the highest frequency of overlapping phrases in both buckets is three times. I tried to squeeze further insights by manually bucketing phrases of semantic similarity together, but even so, I was surprised at the few number of overlapping phrases even within Product Designer and UX Designer job posts.
Where does this leave us? First off, as I comment in my footnote at the end of this post, this analysis could do with more sophisticated techniques of data collection and synthesis. Additionally, it could probably do with a larger sample size. However, if you are a tech professional trying to decide whether to call yourself a Product Designer or UX Designer, this analysis implies that job descriptions can only get you so far in identifying which position you fit. You can probably do both roles with some slight differences in job requirements and collaborative environments, but for the most part, it will remain that Product Designers and UX Designers will bring their own individual skill sets, backgrounds, and expertise to these roles even if we share similar titles. Happily, we seem to still be in a time in which tech design job roles, requirements, and titles are still too liquid for real demarcations to emerge between Product and UX Design.
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*Note: If I had more knowledge of how to use code to parse text strings, I would have included more job postings in the sample set. Additionally, I would have used an algorithm to randomize which posts were included in the sample set rather than randomly selecting myself. Furthermore, rather than looking for simply word matches, I wish I had intelligent technology to help me match phrases that may use different words but have the same semantic meaning. I would also find a way to keep the source job posting attached to the phrases being used in the analysis. Have you ever used these techniques to analyze qualitative data? If so, let me know by commenting on this post, or please get in touch with me directly!
