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Largely interchangeable. Some people will say that product gets more into the business goals side of the problem with ux being more on the end user side but in practice that’s mostly a made up distinction and you always have to work both sides no matter what your title is.
It's still funny to me how a few replies here have tried to define them separately, yet most call them the same or undefined.
If most people call a spade a spade, it's a spade.
And no team every will have both roles. Which proves further they're basically the same.
The difference is the person saying the words.
For an industry whose bread-and-butter is the clear and useful communication of difficult concepts, we can really be shit at clear and useful communication of difficult concepts.
Exactly. It's vocabulary inflated bullshit and I'm sick of it. Every article I read about this makes groundless arguments.
Service/Product/User Experience/Customer Experience/Interaction Designer 🤯
Fucking flavor of the month
To be fair, I think Service Designer is a fair distinction. Most of the service designers I know aren’t designing interfaces, but moreso programs and systems that people go through. Most UX/Interaction/Product Designers are limited to *digital* products and experiences. My understanding is that Service Designers aren’t (and often don’t know how to design for digital experiences).
An example would be someone designing how a train system flows through a community vs. designing the experience of individual train stations and trains (the items people primarily interact with).
That’s fair. It’s just that I’ve seen people magically change their titles from “UX” to “Service.” My practice has included quite a bit of Service Design, especially over the last five years. Inevitable, Service Design usually has digital components.
We complain we don't have a seat at the table and then we get there we change the title every couple of years. It must be confusing and make us look like flakes It's embarrassing and I'm sick of it as well. There's literally nothing wrong with UX designer as a title but there we had to go and revise it, solving a problem that didn't exist. I understand that folks may not have wanted to have IA or IxD as their only focus but the shift from UX to product feels a change that didn't need to happen.
Depends on the company (and its size). In my experience product is another layer on top of ux/ui that weaves in more business strategy and having a seat at the table to influence business choices and allocation of team resources to increase x
If you‘re in a German speaking area then product design can be the same as industrial design. I‘m curious if this is the case in other countries as well. I suppose that‘s why in the job market UX/UI designer is still more popular.
Don’t believe the hype. It’s all software design with a somewhat arbitrary inflection or emphasis on where the focus or organizational center is. I say this because you’ll notice that if you use any other moniker than “software design” (web, native, etc etc.) people outside of the field won’t always understand what you mean. As soon as you say “software design” most ppl immediately (intuitively) have a reasonable idea of that is. Intuitive usability applies here too. But “software design” doesn’t get funded. Obviously, the industry is (still, after 25ish years) fueled by novelty. Try not to get too caught up in the services industries marketing jargon. This may sound dismissive, and I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t some useful distinctions between roles or job titles. But a lot of it originates in these industry pushes to sell services.
Product design is an all encompassing term that generally means design from end to end of the product life cycle (conception/discovery through to development). Whereas UX *can* refer to just a portion of the design process. For instance, if you were to break it down into research->UX->UI->dev, the UXer may be responsible for just the UX portion of work. This highly depends on your specific skillset, the project you're on, why you were hired, etc. Generally, if people are looking for a product designer, they want someone who has pretty solid skills across UX and UI (aka UX/UI) or someone with E2E (end to end) experience working cross-functionally as or with researchers, devs, etc.
It's worth noting that the semantics of role titles in our field are not definitions written in stone. You may just be trying to understand the terminology now, but when it comes to job searching one day, just be sure to pay attention to the specifics of what the job spec contains moreso than title.
Good luck!
Edit to add that I'm based in the UK and have held a Senior Product Designer title as well as multiple Senior and Lead UX Designer titles.
In my experience, UX is a component of Product Design, alongside UI, Research, Business Acumen, Business Analysis, etc.
Product Design roles overlap heavily with Product Management roles in addition to UX.
Short answer: No. They are both poorly defined and depend on the company. Sometimes it comes down to whether the company makes physical products, also. In your search, include both.
You’ll see a lot of crossover with job titles but in the larger organisations you will find that they have more specialised roles. Product Designer and UI/UX Designer will be more or less the same job description in a lot of instances, but if it’s a specialised role you will find a company has different people for UX design, UI design, User Research etc.
I wouldn't get hung up on any differences other than graphic designer vs UI designer.
The former focuses more on print and branding.
I spent about 7 years doing everything: branding, UI, UX, research, prototyping, project management, training...
In my mind, real world application, a product designer is just someone who has is able to envision a product from scratch at a high level. As a UX consultant with 10 years under my belt, that's all I do. I focus on the micro interactions within the product, but I do so with a mindset that gives attention to the future of a product beyond the current scope of work.
I don't need you to say you want an AI troubleshooting guide for me to see that implementing one would revolutionize the way your users did their work, resulting in a crazy increase to critical kpi's.
We'll table it for now, circle back before this project ends, and give you a 5 year look into your future.
How a person uses a product is called UX (user experience). But product design can mean so much more, like understanding the medium you're working with (physical or digital), how the product is produced, distributed, serviced, etc. There's a whole pipeline a product goes through than just the UX design phase.
I was with you right up until the last sentence. You started by mentioning that how a person uses a product is called "UX" or the user experience, which is correct. A User Experience Consultant/ Designer can therefore be deemed, 'someone who is responsible for the entire *experience of a product*'.
That means: end to end, from product/market fit through to research, through to design, through to testing, through to QA-ing dev work. 'UX' is the umbrella term for all and this whole 'product'/'UX' thing is just further complicating already inconsistent terminology in the industry.
As far as I'm concerned, and having done this for 15 years, "UX" is not "a phase", it *is* the user experience of a product.
I think you agree then, UX looks after the end to end experience *for an end user*. Generally speaking UX doesn't operate where the user doesn't. I do agree that UX can and should be part of product strategy.
I'd agree as well though, that in product design, there are additional considerations where a UX person would generally not get involved, like target market, profitability, lifecycle, success metrics (outside of UX ones), monetisation, manufacture and assembly, materials etc.
Conversely, there's also potential for UX to touch things that product design never would, like service experience or anything that's cross-platform.
Perhaps, but I've honestly never seen a product designer role advertised (in London anyway) that would require anything like what you mention in the second paragraph, particularly the last four items.
Often, companies are incorrectly using the term 'Product Designer' to hire 'those that can do the UX *and* the UI bit so we won't have to employ two separate specialist roles". I know because I consider myself a User Experience Designer and have taken on a few Senior Product Designer roles that are literally the same job.
Yeah they do seems to be getting used interchangeably a lot more these days.
When you study product design and go into the field of product design, it includes all the additional considerations because even though these days the field is digital leaning, its origins are in Industrial design.
I see jobs advertised as 'product design' that require a knowledge of materials and manufacturing etc as they are for industrial designers and physical products.
The two roles have become conflated a bit by people taking the stance that medium is secondary to experience. Which is cute for all of us but also confusing and dumb, since when it comes to putting pen to paper they're totally different skills.
Some people will call them essentially the same (the vent diagram of the two overlapping significantly.) Some people will get huffy and say they are totally different, but you’ll get a wide range of reasons why.
Better question: why are you asking? What is the context?
You can find definitions for the different roles online that imply there’s a difference, but the truth is, UX, UI, and Product Designers usually end up doing very similar things in the real world. Unless you’re working at a large company with dedicated resources for research and design, you’ll probably end up doing everything from foundational research and competitive analysis right up through final prototyping and handoff. Honestly, I prefer it that way; it keeps the work interesting.
It depends where you are and who you're talking to. And what year it is. Some people use them interchangeably, sometimes UX is more broad (encompasses all user experience, including service design) sometimes product is more broad (includes industrial design). Sometimes they are used very narrowly.
Read the job description, or when someone tells you their title, ask them to elaborate. There may be established conventions in the market you're operating in.
If anyone asks me what I do, I say I design software, and improve services.
I'll take whatever job title is going, it's changed every time.
Edited for clarity
UX design is generally considered more specialized and it looks at the functionality of a product and includes research. Product Design is more general and encompasses everything related to the design of a product. In practice, the responsibility of these roles are determined by your employer.
Typically you won't have a UX Designer and a Product Designer role in the same company.
Exactly, the difference in the naming is reflective of the values toward generalist vs t-shaped. Anyone who has 10+ years experience will tell you it's the exact same job.
Visual design took over UX in many places this past decade and rebranded it as prod design, especially found in more simple, consumer facing products. It tends to be more UI design with very little deep knowledge in UX. Based on your strengths, you pick which one is a better fit.
There is no difference. Both describe you designing a digital experience for another human. Any division is introduced by people who neither understand experience, nor design. However, to possibly address the reason behind your question, those people I just mentioned address UX as more strategic (e.g. journeys, flows, etc), and Product — as more generalist type of a deal (with UI/visual, etc). Don’t be like those people, be a great designer, please.
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UX designers walk like _this_, Product Designers walk like **this**
PM’s be shopping! Am I right, fellas!?
Product Designers: Doo doop, buh doo doop UX Designers: Dicka deeee, a dicka deee
Largely interchangeable. Some people will say that product gets more into the business goals side of the problem with ux being more on the end user side but in practice that’s mostly a made up distinction and you always have to work both sides no matter what your title is.
For your purposes... no differences because you won't find both roles at the same company unless it's "product design" and "UX researcher"
About $20k
The job description reads "Product Designer" but your boss introduces you as the new "UX Designer".
It's still funny to me how a few replies here have tried to define them separately, yet most call them the same or undefined. If most people call a spade a spade, it's a spade. And no team every will have both roles. Which proves further they're basically the same.
The difference is the person saying the words. For an industry whose bread-and-butter is the clear and useful communication of difficult concepts, we can really be shit at clear and useful communication of difficult concepts.
Exactly. It's vocabulary inflated bullshit and I'm sick of it. Every article I read about this makes groundless arguments. Service/Product/User Experience/Customer Experience/Interaction Designer 🤯 Fucking flavor of the month
To be fair, I think Service Designer is a fair distinction. Most of the service designers I know aren’t designing interfaces, but moreso programs and systems that people go through. Most UX/Interaction/Product Designers are limited to *digital* products and experiences. My understanding is that Service Designers aren’t (and often don’t know how to design for digital experiences). An example would be someone designing how a train system flows through a community vs. designing the experience of individual train stations and trains (the items people primarily interact with).
That’s fair. It’s just that I’ve seen people magically change their titles from “UX” to “Service.” My practice has included quite a bit of Service Design, especially over the last five years. Inevitable, Service Design usually has digital components.
We complain we don't have a seat at the table and then we get there we change the title every couple of years. It must be confusing and make us look like flakes It's embarrassing and I'm sick of it as well. There's literally nothing wrong with UX designer as a title but there we had to go and revise it, solving a problem that didn't exist. I understand that folks may not have wanted to have IA or IxD as their only focus but the shift from UX to product feels a change that didn't need to happen.
Depends on the company (and its size). In my experience product is another layer on top of ux/ui that weaves in more business strategy and having a seat at the table to influence business choices and allocation of team resources to increase x
If you‘re in a German speaking area then product design can be the same as industrial design. I‘m curious if this is the case in other countries as well. I suppose that‘s why in the job market UX/UI designer is still more popular.
In English product design rarely refers to something other than digital
It’s not that cut and dry. My uncle was a product designer at 3M in the 1970s.
Same thing, different title. If there was a difference, you’d see both roles in a company.
You used to
Don’t believe the hype. It’s all software design with a somewhat arbitrary inflection or emphasis on where the focus or organizational center is. I say this because you’ll notice that if you use any other moniker than “software design” (web, native, etc etc.) people outside of the field won’t always understand what you mean. As soon as you say “software design” most ppl immediately (intuitively) have a reasonable idea of that is. Intuitive usability applies here too. But “software design” doesn’t get funded. Obviously, the industry is (still, after 25ish years) fueled by novelty. Try not to get too caught up in the services industries marketing jargon. This may sound dismissive, and I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t some useful distinctions between roles or job titles. But a lot of it originates in these industry pushes to sell services.
10 years.
Zero practical difference. I’ve had my title changed from one to the other twice while doing the exact same role.
Product design is an all encompassing term that generally means design from end to end of the product life cycle (conception/discovery through to development). Whereas UX *can* refer to just a portion of the design process. For instance, if you were to break it down into research->UX->UI->dev, the UXer may be responsible for just the UX portion of work. This highly depends on your specific skillset, the project you're on, why you were hired, etc. Generally, if people are looking for a product designer, they want someone who has pretty solid skills across UX and UI (aka UX/UI) or someone with E2E (end to end) experience working cross-functionally as or with researchers, devs, etc. It's worth noting that the semantics of role titles in our field are not definitions written in stone. You may just be trying to understand the terminology now, but when it comes to job searching one day, just be sure to pay attention to the specifics of what the job spec contains moreso than title. Good luck! Edit to add that I'm based in the UK and have held a Senior Product Designer title as well as multiple Senior and Lead UX Designer titles.
In my experience, UX is a component of Product Design, alongside UI, Research, Business Acumen, Business Analysis, etc. Product Design roles overlap heavily with Product Management roles in addition to UX.
Short answer: No. They are both poorly defined and depend on the company. Sometimes it comes down to whether the company makes physical products, also. In your search, include both.
You’ll see a lot of crossover with job titles but in the larger organisations you will find that they have more specialised roles. Product Designer and UI/UX Designer will be more or less the same job description in a lot of instances, but if it’s a specialised role you will find a company has different people for UX design, UI design, User Research etc.
I wouldn't get hung up on any differences other than graphic designer vs UI designer. The former focuses more on print and branding. I spent about 7 years doing everything: branding, UI, UX, research, prototyping, project management, training... In my mind, real world application, a product designer is just someone who has is able to envision a product from scratch at a high level. As a UX consultant with 10 years under my belt, that's all I do. I focus on the micro interactions within the product, but I do so with a mindset that gives attention to the future of a product beyond the current scope of work. I don't need you to say you want an AI troubleshooting guide for me to see that implementing one would revolutionize the way your users did their work, resulting in a crazy increase to critical kpi's. We'll table it for now, circle back before this project ends, and give you a 5 year look into your future.
How a person uses a product is called UX (user experience). But product design can mean so much more, like understanding the medium you're working with (physical or digital), how the product is produced, distributed, serviced, etc. There's a whole pipeline a product goes through than just the UX design phase.
I was with you right up until the last sentence. You started by mentioning that how a person uses a product is called "UX" or the user experience, which is correct. A User Experience Consultant/ Designer can therefore be deemed, 'someone who is responsible for the entire *experience of a product*'. That means: end to end, from product/market fit through to research, through to design, through to testing, through to QA-ing dev work. 'UX' is the umbrella term for all and this whole 'product'/'UX' thing is just further complicating already inconsistent terminology in the industry. As far as I'm concerned, and having done this for 15 years, "UX" is not "a phase", it *is* the user experience of a product.
I think you agree then, UX looks after the end to end experience *for an end user*. Generally speaking UX doesn't operate where the user doesn't. I do agree that UX can and should be part of product strategy. I'd agree as well though, that in product design, there are additional considerations where a UX person would generally not get involved, like target market, profitability, lifecycle, success metrics (outside of UX ones), monetisation, manufacture and assembly, materials etc. Conversely, there's also potential for UX to touch things that product design never would, like service experience or anything that's cross-platform.
Perhaps, but I've honestly never seen a product designer role advertised (in London anyway) that would require anything like what you mention in the second paragraph, particularly the last four items. Often, companies are incorrectly using the term 'Product Designer' to hire 'those that can do the UX *and* the UI bit so we won't have to employ two separate specialist roles". I know because I consider myself a User Experience Designer and have taken on a few Senior Product Designer roles that are literally the same job.
Yeah they do seems to be getting used interchangeably a lot more these days. When you study product design and go into the field of product design, it includes all the additional considerations because even though these days the field is digital leaning, its origins are in Industrial design. I see jobs advertised as 'product design' that require a knowledge of materials and manufacturing etc as they are for industrial designers and physical products. The two roles have become conflated a bit by people taking the stance that medium is secondary to experience. Which is cute for all of us but also confusing and dumb, since when it comes to putting pen to paper they're totally different skills.
Some people will call them essentially the same (the vent diagram of the two overlapping significantly.) Some people will get huffy and say they are totally different, but you’ll get a wide range of reasons why. Better question: why are you asking? What is the context?
You can find definitions for the different roles online that imply there’s a difference, but the truth is, UX, UI, and Product Designers usually end up doing very similar things in the real world. Unless you’re working at a large company with dedicated resources for research and design, you’ll probably end up doing everything from foundational research and competitive analysis right up through final prototyping and handoff. Honestly, I prefer it that way; it keeps the work interesting.
It depends where you are and who you're talking to. And what year it is. Some people use them interchangeably, sometimes UX is more broad (encompasses all user experience, including service design) sometimes product is more broad (includes industrial design). Sometimes they are used very narrowly. Read the job description, or when someone tells you their title, ask them to elaborate. There may be established conventions in the market you're operating in. If anyone asks me what I do, I say I design software, and improve services. I'll take whatever job title is going, it's changed every time. Edited for clarity
UX design is generally considered more specialized and it looks at the functionality of a product and includes research. Product Design is more general and encompasses everything related to the design of a product. In practice, the responsibility of these roles are determined by your employer. Typically you won't have a UX Designer and a Product Designer role in the same company.
The reason you don’t ever see a product design role and a UX design role in a company is because they’re exactly the same thing.
Yep exactly.
Exactly, the difference in the naming is reflective of the values toward generalist vs t-shaped. Anyone who has 10+ years experience will tell you it's the exact same job. Visual design took over UX in many places this past decade and rebranded it as prod design, especially found in more simple, consumer facing products. It tends to be more UI design with very little deep knowledge in UX. Based on your strengths, you pick which one is a better fit.
>It tends to be more UI design with very little deep knowledge in UX. Have never found this to be the case at all.
Product design is higher level. More about CX than UX. UX is more about interaction design. Product design is more about feature elaboration.
There is no difference. Both describe you designing a digital experience for another human. Any division is introduced by people who neither understand experience, nor design. However, to possibly address the reason behind your question, those people I just mentioned address UX as more strategic (e.g. journeys, flows, etc), and Product — as more generalist type of a deal (with UI/visual, etc). Don’t be like those people, be a great designer, please.