What does a Product Designer do: Responsibilities and Skills

A term as simple as "Product designer" might seem the easiest to learn. However, there's a lot of ambiguity behind the true meaning of this term. In a real sense, a product designer's skills and responsibility go way beyond just "designing" a product. A good product designer possesses multidisciplinary skills that help them assess, develop and improvise products.

Customer experience is an essential part of any product development company. Product designers work on improvising end-user experiences, and these improvisations directly impact how a customer interacts with a product. Every good product designer's skills and responsibility include delivering meaning to the function of a product, and they form the basis of communication design in products. A product designer's role is also associated with an Interaction Designer, UX Designer, Customer Experience Architect, and Information Architect.

Product Designer Responsibilities

Most product design roles are associated with the following responsibilities:

• Collaborate with other team members in the product development team to establish principles, objectives, and measurable outcomes.
• Contribute or lead the ideation process. Evolve the ideas into intuitive products.
• Gather all data from the user research team and turn it into actionable insights using wireframes, sketches, concepts, and prototypes.
• Perform exploratory work with UX researchers like surveys, user interviews, ethnography, and iterative tasks like usability testing.
• Utilize creative graphic and interaction design skills to build immersive designs using industry preferred tools.
• Guide, mentor, and lead UX professionals concerning their projects.
• Stay in line with assets like style guides, design systems, and branding to ensure that the designed application is seamless through and through.
• Be an active participant in critique sessions and design feedback returned during product development.

Product Designer Skills

Product designers share many similarities in terms of skills with UX Designers. However, most differences come through the understanding needed to work with technological departments like engineering.

• Understanding of surveying-focused software.
• Working knowledge of essential office-related software utilities like Email, Word Processor, Instant messaging, Spreadsheets, Presentation, etc.
• Conducting meetings or monitoring focused research studies via. Popular web conferencing tools.
• Experience with popular design tools like Marvel, Sketch, Invision, Adobe XD & Figma.
• Managing products with the help of project management tools.
• Familiarity with working with project management, ticketing, and workflow tracking systems.
• Understanding of basic front-end coding and corresponding development procedures for successful design handoff.

These skills and responsibilities make product designers adept at diverse collaborative activities. Most events during their workplace journey require them to work with teams. Distinctive qualities in design presentations, receiving feedback and addressing critiques highlight factors that differentiate one designer from another.

If you wish to become a product designer, check out the Product Design course on ProApp. This course covers everything you need to know about Product design from scratch. The course highlights are core topics like fundamentals, concepts, and the design process. So, what are you waiting for? Download ProApp and get started with product design today!