3 Important Jobs of Product Designer.

Product design is the process of creating a new product to be sold by a business to its customers. - Wikipedia

It’s clear that Product Designer’s jobs are not just making product to look visually good but also about inventing ideas, (re)defining values then translating them into a product that worth to be sold.

Inventing Ideas

Care and Empathy is a must have skill for Product Designer. Ideas come when we are aware of sorrounding aspects of the domain problem. There is no room for Ego. We should always thinking in people’s hat, to seek the missing link between what users need and the actual product offering to surface.

(Re)defining Values

Always questioning and be reasonable because Ideas-only is not enough. People might be changed and we could be wrong, so don’t let the product went dormant. We might have worked hard and shipped a feature, Yay! but the world is keep spinning and they way people doing something is going to be evolved. People always want the better from the better. New insights are always there for you to catch on. It’s totally OK to see back in time the past stuff evaluating whether the value is still relevant or not.

Translating Into a Product

Execution matters. This is how you package the product behaviour into something that as human as possible and worth for the money customer will be paid for. This part also when I believe Designer should able to code, at least making a prototype. It’s is somewhat half-baked if your design process stop on Photoshop or Sketch. It’s like you know the recipe but you can’t cook it.

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While Software Engineering is a discipline that have been here for awhile. Product Design is relatively new. We are still going to see different approaches on its process amongst the practitioners. But as a start, we can refer to this post about How a Product Design Process Looks Like?

Reflecting towards that, the more I involved in software making the more I believe that Product Design and Software Engineering is actually (should be) in one field come under Software Development world. Both of them is inseparable and very possible to be grouped in one person skill set.

But well, that would be another interesting topic to discuss in separate post.