What Does a Digital Product Designer Do?
‘What does a digital product designer do?’ You’ve probably heard that one before – and maybe even wondered yourself. In fact, there isn’t a single answer to this question. Depending on the project requirements, product designers will wear many hats – from market research and wireframing, all the way through to UX writing or even basic software development. In this article, we’re going to shed light on each possible role your digital product designer might perform.
Table of contents
What is a digital product designer?
A digital product designer is focused on one thing: solving users’ problems. And they’re adept at using all the teams, tools, and data at hand to build solutions that meet users’ needs. The duties will change from company to company, and even the job title may differ. Product designers are sometimes known as Experience Designers, Information Architects, or UI or UX Designers. In many cases, product designers perform all these roles, all at the same time. Throw in some coding and project management, too. Because problem-solving is one of the key product design skills – and these skills help them create meaningful products that matter.
What does a digital product designer do?
The exact scope of a digital product designer’s responsibilities is broad. Digital product designers are creative, empathetic design-thinkers. Your company will want to utilize their skills in ways that make sense for the business.
Digital product designer skills and responsibilities
Now that we’ve answered the question “what is a digital product designer?, let’s take a quick look at their skills and responsibilities.
Communication with other teams
Given the number of distinct roles a digital product designer performs, it’s easy to characterize (or worse, dismiss) them as a ‘jack of all trades’. But that’s not entirely accurate. Think of doctors – they may specialize in certain areas, but all of them need to learn basic medical care. Even dermatologists can diagnose a mild case of flu. So it goes with digital product designers, who rarely have clear, succinct, easily categorized job descriptions. Their work spans multiple teams and disciplines. And that demands the ability to discuss concepts with all of them – especially developers, designers, marketers, and the C-suite.
A top product designer can adapt their communication depending on whom they’re talking to – high-level executives won’t want to run through every line of code that makes an app function; developers are unlikely to want to know the gritty fiscal impact of the end-product. It’s about tailoring the message to the right audience and using tools, such as digital prototypes, and hard user data to facilitate that dialogue. Exactly as it should be in a role so grounded in strategy and empathy.
Market and user research
An excellent digital product designer puts the user first. This is the user experience (UX) side of the role. Every solution – and all the ideas and prototypes that come before it – is built around user needs, behavior, and intent.
To ensure good UX, product designers will conduct market and user research. What do users really want? How do they go about getting it? And how can you use that data to guide product design?
It’s important to understand why you’re undertaking this research. This isn’t to confirm whether your proposed solutions work – that’s what usability tests are for. The research phase should be done as early as possible in the product design and development, helping you understand your users. You may not even realize the challenges users face until after the results come in.
This is the foundation upon which you’ll create an impressive solution that users love. Before you even begin, make sure you:
- Outline a clear research objective – what are you hoping to learn from this?
- Select the right users – are these the people who will use your eventual solution?
- Analyze the data – how will the research inform your next steps?
You’ll find a few ways to conduct this sort of research, including:
- Surveys – A good survey can prompt all manner of thoughts and ideas from new and existing users. There are loads of free survey-making sites available – popular ones, like Google Surveys, have the bonus of being familiar to users. To boost response rates, keep your questions short, simple, and open-ended.
- Interviews – Whether it’s remote or face-to-face (source), one-to-one interviews offer a more relaxed dialogue about your product (and your competitors’). Treat these as conversations to extract the maximum useful data, without pressuring the user.
- Focus groups – Focus groups let you gather a lot of research data from a lot of people at once. These sessions are helpful for users to bounce ideas and opinions off each other. Just be mindful to avoid letting one or two people dominate the group and determining the direction of your project with their input.
If it’s hard for you to handle this research on your own, then a Product Designer is certainly someone to turn to!
Product ideation / conceptual work
Once a digital product designer has the data from users, it’s time to start figuring out how to act upon it. This is the sketching-out-ideas stage, making sense of the research without committing to a single idea (at this early stage, there may not even be an idea).
Product ideation includes visualizing:
- user personas,
- challenges faced by users,
- opportunities to improve designs,
- storyboarding solutions.
Digital product designer skills demand ‘big picture’ thinking. A product designer needs to be able to see the esthetic benefits of UI design as well as the functional requirements of UX design, and to harmonize them in the finished product.
User journey mapping
User story mapping lets a product designer zero in on what paths your users take when navigating your website or using your app. Each map will be different, based on what your company is trying to achieve. For example, a product designer will look at the path a user takes to reach the account hub, review orders, or how they buy. It’s a useful way to see if your app or site is blocking interactions.
User stories
User stories help create a narrative around your users, to better understand them. They’re a key tool in Agile project management, but can also be used by product designers to demonstrate the UX and business results. Use them to visualize your end product from the user’s perspective. User stories don’t need to be exceptionally long, and they always follow a simple structure of: ‘As a [user], I want to [perform X action], so I can [achieve Y outcome].’
Prototyping (lo-fi & hi-fi)
Digital prototyping offers a way to present a product vision, without wasting too much time developing the solution in full. It’s especially good for rallying the team around an idea and helping less technical stakeholders visualize the product. This is a product designer’s first step in genuinely transforming an idea into a real-world solution.
It comes in two flavors:
- Low-fidelity prototypes, also known as wireframes, are the absolute basics of product design – it might be a sketch on the back of a napkin, or a quick wireframe build that outlines the flow or function of an idea. They won’t look like the end product (and they certainly won’t work like the end product), but they help determine how useful and practical a possible solution may be. Lo-fi prototypes are ideal to evolve a foundational idea quickly, without draining time and resources.
- High-fidelity prototypes are much closer in form to what the end product, hopefully, will be. They take more time to build, and this usually occurs later during the design stage when your team has a clearer idea of what they want or need to build. The goal being to create something fairly faithful to the end product’s look, feel, and function. It’s all subject to change (because everything in design and development is), but hi-fi prototypes help you decide how good the idea really is.
Wireframing
Wireframing is a tool that helps to create a very initial, visual concept of how the digital product might look. Wireframes are usually very basic and present mainly UX and UI features rather than actual design. They’re used by scrum development teams to initiate a discussion about the product itself. Most likely, the wireframe will be used as a base for the next step of the product design process for the entire team: product designers create the UI and designs, developers start preparing the application, copywriters start working on content, etc.
Branding
What are digital product designer responsibilities? Such specialists do everything – and you can include branding on the list. In some businesses, digital product designers will be integral to building or maintaining brand identity. That means drawing on their experience, and knowledge of user responses, to determine the logo, fonts, images, and colors used by your brand. Rather than parking their tanks on the lawn of creative designers, a product designer typically oversees the strategy, not the execution, of the branding. So, they might suggest using softer colors, or defining an artistic style that appeals to users, but it’s up to the design team to bring that vision to life.
Copywriting
Alongside research and design, some digital product designers will also undertake copywriting for a website or app. That doesn’t mean your product designer is going to start pumping out eBooks and SEO blog content (although plenty have the skills to do just that). Instead, these tasks are usually shorter pieces, often closely tied to UX design. Tips, help & advice, those greyed out prompts you see in text fields, these are all examples of the types of copywriting a product designer will create.
Often, these are reliant on research which dictates which words work best to achieve the desired outcome. Expect lots of variant testing going on before, during, and after, to decide whether call-to-actions like ‘Sign up now’ or ‘Join us here’ get more clicks.
Basic software development
Digital product designers need to add coding to their ever-growing list of product design skills. They don’t need to be hardcore developers, but they have to understand code at a basic technical level. Otherwise, how else can they suggest solutions to user challenges, or determine what’s feasible during the creation stage? It’ll also help them strategize and communicate with the product development team that needs to deliver on the product vision.
In smaller teams, or those without a strict hierarchy of roles, product designers may also find themselves helping to develop the company website – which requires knowledge of a whole other set of coding languages.
Digital product designer job description – key takeaways
After reading this piece, you’ll surely agree that your digital product designers are genuine polymaths. They are skilled in a number of disciplines, such as user research, usability research, prototyping, and branding. While it’s understandable that the smaller the company, the more jobs or tasks product designers will have to take on, it’s important to create a work environment that will enable your designers to focus on what they do best – design products.
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