The clear-cut difference between UX Design and Product Design, explained
The separation isn’t as blurry as most people make it out to be. Here’s why.
Note: I presented this work at the ConveyUX conference, including some updated charts and data:
What’s In a Name?
If there’s one thing that people in the design industry love to debate, it’s job titles. The field of interactive design has gone through many phases over the past few decades, with job titles evolving over time. If you were working in the early to mid 2000’s, you might have been called an Information Architect, Interaction Designer, or even a Usability Analyst. Starting around 2010, the term “user experience” entered the popular lexicon, and shortly thereafter, “UX Designer” grew into the dominant title.
On the other hand, if you were called a “Product Designer” up until a few years ago, you were most likely working as an Industrial Designer on physical products. However, in the mid 2010’s, tied to the rise in popularity of SaaS (Software as a Service) products, we started seeing the term Product Designer applied to job titles for designers within the interactive design industry as well.
Misconceptions About the Difference
The rise in Product Designer positions has lead to confusion around the difference versus UX Designers. Multiple camps have attempted to explain the difference, generally grouped as follows:
- They’re the same same, but product design includes more elements. Many people believe that UX Designers focus purely on user needs, while Product Designers focus on a combination of business needs and user needs. This is FALSE. UX Designers have ALWAYS had to incorporate business needs into their designs; a fact that is supported by an analysis of job description keywords that I’ve included farther down in this article. The industry uses a different term for UX Designers who don’t incorporate business needs into the design process… We call them “Unemployed.”
- Product Design is an evolution of UX Design. In this line of thinking, the field of UX Design is evolving and maturing into Product Design. Similar to how “Information Architecture” was transformed into an umbrella term to encompass a much larger sphere of design, and then shed in favor of the even wider umbrella of “User Experience,” the term “Product Design” expands the scope even further. The problem with this logic is that not all experiences are products. But of course, that statement depends on how broadly you define the term product...
What is a “Product,” anyway?
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary provides two relevant definitions for Product:
1) Something (such as a service) that is marketed or sold as a commodity
2) Something that is produced
While these are both accurate when it comes to physical products and commodity services, this is not how the interactive design industry has come to define it. A more accurate definition would be:
3) A digital tool or experience that is updated continuously while still in use
This often refers to SaaS products that receive ongoing updates as the company adds features and adjusts to market forces and customer demands. Interestingly, this definition doesn’t necessarily imply that someone pays for the product. For example, Facebook employs Product Designers to continuously test new features and improve the overall experience, yet Facebook’s users don’t pay for the service.
The Real Difference
To be clear, both UX Design and Product design follow the same Design Thinking process (define, discover, ideate, validate, etc.) The difference isn’t WHAT they do, but rather WHEN they do it.
UX Designers spend most of their time developing products prior to launch, whereas Product Designers spend most of their time updating products that have already been launched.
Up until the initial release of a product, the UX Designer and Product Designer roles are identical. However, after launch, UX Designers typically move onto other projects, sometimes revisiting it at a later date as a “redesign” project. On the other hand, Product Designers never stop working on the product, continuing to evolve it over time with each subsequent release.
It might sound like a minor difference to say that Product Designers continue designing products post-launch, but the reality is that quite a few things change once a product is being used in the real world. Existing users must be educated about new features and retrained on new workflows. Development teams become more cautious in order to prevent breaking existing functionality that is currently in use. And large design changes must often be broken up into smaller “releases” to fit into Agile development cycles.
The Proof
In addition to my experience leading teams of UX Designers and Product Designers, I decided to include some quantitative data from recent job postings in order to back up my analyses.
I accessed 10 “UX Designer” and 10 “Product Designer” job postings for NYC on Indeed. (The first 10 search results for each, excluding any post with Junior or Senior prefixes.) I then ran keyword and phrase frequency analyses on both groups, looking for categorical differences.
The Similarities
All of the following keywords appeared with approximately the same frequency in postings for UX Designer and Product Designers:
Teamwork Keywords: Collaboration, Communication, Cross-Functional, Leadership
Design Method Keywords: Principles, Process, User Flows, Prototypes, Mobile/Web, Wireframes
Idea Keywords: Concepts, New, Opportunity, Creative
Research Keywords: User Testing, User Research, Usability
Business Keywords: Stakeholders, Marketing
The Differences
The following is a rundown of the keyword categories that differed greatly between both data sets:
Project(s): UX Designer (18 instances), Product Designer (0) — Indicates that UX Design environments are primarily “project-based.”
Problem(s) UX Designer (0 instances), Product Designer (18) — Product Design environments are very process-oriented, and try to identify and reduce problems within their workflows.
Quality: UX Designer (3 instances), Product Designer (11) — Indicates that Product Designers are responsible for ensuring that designs are developed as intended (i.e. Quality Assurance.)
Platform(s): UX Designer (0 instances), Product Designer (7) — Product Design environments like to leverage re-usable, scalable platforms to increase capabilities and efficiency.
Visual Design vs UI Design Terminology: UX Design environments used the term “ Visual Design” whereas Product Design environments referred to the same skill as “UI Design.”
So, which are you?
Not sure whether you’re a UX Designer or a Product Designer? Or maybe you’re a student wondering what each job experience would be like? Here’s a point-by-point comparison of each:
Design Environment
When starting a new job you are more likely to:
(UX Design) …design something new, or redesign something old.
(Product Design) …inherit a design that already exists, and continue to evolve it over time.
Your design constraints focus on:
(UX Design) …how to achieve the ideal user experience within the available time-frame and development resources.
(Product Design) …how to get closer to the ideal user experience with each subsequent release.
Your usability challenges likely center around:
(UX Design) …making the experience easy for new users to get on board.
(Product Design) …making it easy for existing users to learn about new features and changes.
The challenges you enjoy are more likely to be:
(UX Design) …diverse, coming up with new ways to solve a range of problems through user-centered design.
(Product Design) …long-term, morphing a product over time and helping it grow into the best possible experience.
Work Environment
You are likely to work with:
(UX Design) …Project Managers, who want to get projects done on-time and on-budget
(Product Design) …Product Managers, who must balance competing requirements and feature requests to meet performance targets (sales numbers, customer satisfaction, etc.)
You are likely to work in an environment that uses:
(UX Design) …Waterfall methods, divided into projects and phases.
(Product Design) …Agile methods, divided into sprints and release cycles.
Chances are that you work for:
(UX Design) …an agency, design studio, or shared company service (i.e. an “internal agency.”)
(Product Design) …a software provider, either for use internally or externally.
Conclusion
As you can see, the roles of UX Designer and Product Designer are similar in most ways, but different in execution and mind-set. The choice between them could be considered one of “breadth vs. depth” with UX Designers exploring a range of possibilities for successful products, and Product Designers going deep into the evolution of products over time. Of course, there will be exceptions to the rules that I’ve stated above, with many environments not fitting cleanly into one or the other. However, I hope this clears up the confusion for the majority of people …until we inevitably morph our titles into the next iteration, and start this process all over again.
