UX Designer Vs. Product Designer: What’s The Difference?

Along with the development of digital technologies, lots of new occupations appeared. Link builders, SEO managers, growth hackers…In the design domain, we may also see the diversity of professions, which, on the one hand, have much in common but still bear distinct differences.

When businesses feel the necessity of hiring a designer for product development, they may face difficulties defining who they need to get on board – a product designer or a UX designer.

And here, let’s figure out who product designers and UX designers are and cover their most significant peculiarities.

Product designer responsibilities and skills

Before the SaaS industry boomed, the product design specialty was mainly related to creating the design for physical products. However, when businesses started to move to the cloud, product designers became engaged in building interactive product designs from the ground up.

To a certain extent, a product designer can be considered a product’s “business owner” due to the high engagement in all aspects of the product design process, starting from building a concept and elaborating on user experience to polishing the user interface details.

Putting in other words, the product designer is business-oriented. This expert cares about product requirements and cost-effectiveness, conducts market and competitive analysis, offers efficient product solutions, and gathers market feedback by thorough user research.

The competencies the product designer must include but are not limited to:

• deep understanding of UX/UI principles
• knowledge of building user personas, customer journeys, and user flows
• profound experience with tools like Sketch, Adobe After Effects, and Figma
• outstanding communication, problem-solving, and management skills

More about product designer’s responsibilities you can read in the blog post by Eleken.

Besides, the product designer should know marketing fundamentals and has an idea of business models, pricing strategies, and main metrics that show if a product is viable and can satisfy customers’ needs.

The product designer’s main goal is to ensure the product is effective from a business perspective and ultimately bring profit to a company.

UX designer responsibilities and skills

The term “UX designer” transformed from “user experience” designer, and this abbreviation is now commonly used in job titles. The UX designer’s priority is to ensure customers easily achieve their goals when interacting with the product. In addition, they struggle to make product accessible and usable for as many people as possible. And if we say that the product designers are business-oriented, the UX designers are entirely customer-oriented.

Of course, they also care about business but from a customer satisfaction perspective. To understand end users’ needs, the UX designer investigates their behavior by conducting UX research and user interviews and running lots of user testing.

So, what skills does a UX designer have to possess to successfully perform these tasks?

Here is a rough skillset:

• profound knowledge of UX design principles
• hands-on experience with creating sketches, wireframes, and prototypes
• remarkable communication skills
• awareness of current trends in UI/UX design
• knowledge of how to build user stories, personas, storyboards, and customer journey maps
• understanding of interactive design concepts and principles

So, as you see, the UX designer’s skills are more specific while the product designer’s skills are more comprehensive and generic.

Whereas the responsibilities of product and UX designers are partially overlapping, they have apparent differences.

Image credit: Mockplus

First of all, let’s look at the similarities that unite these two design occupations.

Similarities in product and UX designer occupations

1.   Process

Both UX designers and product designers follow the same product design process, from conducting market and user research to various concepts development and prototyping. Also, both occupations are engaged in product testing, minding different purposes, though. When testing, the product designer will try to determine if the product is viable and ready to be put on the market, while the UX designer will focus on whether customers are happy with the product.

2.   Methods

It’s hard to imagine more effective methods for product design development than market research, competitive analysis, and user interviews. So it’s no wonder that both design occupations typically operate the same methods to perform their tasks. Moreover, building customer journey maps and user flows, gathering references and mood boards, creating wireframes and prototypes are those skills that UX and product designers should be experts in to give birth to a successful product.

3.   Tools

The number of useful and convenient tools is pretty small. Product designers and UX designers use MIRO for building user flows, Sketch and Balsamiq for wireframes, and Figma or Adobe for prototypes.

Differences in product designer and UX designer professions

Perhaps the first difference between a product designer and a UX designer that comes top of mind is the focus. As we’ve discussed above, the main focus of the product designer is business, while for the UX designer, it’s the customer. Although it’s true, it isn’t that plain.

The truth is that UX designers also mind business goals as, eventually, all the efforts they put into enhancing user experience resulted in product success.

The principal difference between these two design professions is when they do their job.

I’ll explain myself right away.

UX designers’ job is crucial at the stage of product development before the product launch. On the contrary, product designers work on updating the already existing product. These specialists ensure that the product didn’t suffer after next feature releases, and it still performs well even after significant design changes were made.

And now, let’s look at how all these similarities and differences are reflected in product and UX designers’ salaries.

Salaries of product and UX designers

According to Glassdoor, the average UX designer salary is around $103K per year.

The product designers’ salary isn’t significantly higher making up $104 K per year.

These figures prove one more time that despite certain differences, these two design occupations are very close to each other. However, to decide which professional to hire for your business, check the more precise product and UX designers’ duties.