Difference between Product Designer and UX Designer

A product Designer is a professional skilled in UI, UX, and Design Systems who is responsible for designing a product prototype. A UX Designer is a professional in the field of web design who is responsible for designing the interactions and the overall look and feel of a website, application, or product. Oftentimes, these two roles are overlapping and may seem confusing. In this article, we will discuss the difference between a Product Designer and a UX Designer.

Product Designer vs UX Designer

Product Designer

Product design is a set of processes that collectively is about imagining a product and then bringing it into reality by designing it and iterating until the desired prototype is formed. It involves all the processes from imagining the product to creating a final prototype for the development team to work on. A product Designer is a professional skilled in UI, UX, and Design Systems who is responsible for designing a product prototype.

Roles and Responsibility of a Product Designer:

• User Research: A Product Designer on a daily basis has to work on consuming or researching user data. Product Designers use software like Hotjar etc. to understand things like user demographics that would allow them to understand their user personas.
• Creating User Personas: The role of Product Designers is also to create and understand user personas. In larger companies, product designers might already have user personas documents that are ready for them to learn and study but in smaller companies or in startups product designers would need to come up with the user persona and try to document them.
• Creating User Journey Maps: Another responsibility of a Product Designer is creating and understanding user journey maps. User journey map is where product designers try to picture themselves as the user and picturize the stages a user goes through in the website.
• Developing Storyboards and wireframes: The next responsibility of a Product Designer is to develop Storyboards. Storyboards is a frame by frame composition of what your products going to look like from a user interface point of view.
• Conducting User Interviews and Testing: Once the prototyping is done, oftentimes Product Designers would like to test it before going into a development production cycle and the best way to do that is really to test your product get some feedback.

UX Designer

UX Designer is a professional in the field of web design who is responsible for designing the interactions and the overall look and feel of a website, application or product. The role of a UX designer is to ensure that the website, mobile app, or software is user-friendly. Role and the responsibilities of a UX designer may vary from company to company, some companies focus on UX designers to design the overall prototype as well while some are more focused on user research and consumer strategy part.

Roles and Responsibilities of UI/UX Developer:

• User research: User research is the key responsibility of a UX designer. a UX designer has to prepare for the research, write the interview guidelines and scripts, and create documents that outline how research should be conducted step by step.
• Research analysis and presentation: It is the responsibility of a UX designer to then take detailed notes of the research. there’s a lot of information that will be gathered so the role of UX developers is to analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data.
• Workshops: In most of the companies, workshops are a responsibility for a UX designer where people from different areas of the business to come together and generate ideas and decide where the focus should be.
• Wireframes and prototypes: Creating wireframe and prototypes is the sole responsibility of a UX designer. Wireframes are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept.
• Creative and innovative design solutions: A UX designer is expected to develop creative and innovative design solutions, to design the screens of the User Interface and create different visual touch points and establish the interactivity with them.

Difference Between Product Designer and UX Designer

	Product Designer	UX Designer
Technology required	Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch User research and testing Design Systems Usability Testing Tools Design System tools	Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch User research and testing Visual design principles Web accessibility best practices
Salary	Average salary of a Product Designer in the US is about $100k	Average salary of a UI/UX Designer in India is ₹4.1 LPA.
Responsibilities	User Research Creating User Personas Creating User Journey Maps Developing Storyboards and wireframes Designing and Building Prototypes Conducting User Interviews and Testing Developing Design Systems Collaborating with other teams	User research and analysis Creating wireframes and prototypes with tools like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, etc. Designing the entire application from layouts to icons and the entire interface. Collaborating with Frontend developers. Ensuring design consistency across platforms Staying updated with the latest design trends and new tools for UI/UX Design.
Skills & Methods	Wireframing, Prototyping and creating Storyboards Design Systems User research & testing Presentation User Personas	Wireframing and Prototyping User research & testing Visual design principles & tools Web accessibility best practices

Conclusion

What a product designer really do on a daily basis is that he or she would be working on ideas and trying to understand users, trying to understand business needs, work with Design thinking methods, for example, working on a User Journey map or coming up with Product Design Storyboards. While for UX designer, the role is to ensure that the website, mobile app, or software is user-friendly.

These two roles complement each other yet are different in many criteria, we hope that this article helped you understand these difference and made you more informed about the design process.