Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

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Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

Career Services Orientation

Lesson: Exploring Various Roles in Design

10 minute read

As technology evolves, and the need for design continues to grow, the number of career paths available has exploded.

There is a wonderful (and often bewildering) world of design job titles out there. These largely depend on how a given company runs their design process, and how that translates into a skills mix within a team. Often, specialized roles arise out of a need to divide labor between designers on a team. Equally, there are a lot of roles—particularly in smaller companies—that require you to be a jack-of-all-trades, or responsible for overseeing and managing the design process end-to-end.

Although you’ll find some job titles coming up often (like UX Designer, UX/UI Designer, Product Designer), it’s important to be aware that those roles could mean different things in different companies, depending on their product, processes, and values. Nevertheless, all of the job titles out there in this field somehow relate to digital product design (apps and websites, in the main), so it’s important to understand which of roles are well matched to your set of skills, as well as your personal and professional preferences.

Let’s focus on three high-level categories first, and dive deeper into the roles within those:

The Specialist

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Diagram showing where UX research, visual design, interaction design, and frontend development happen in the design process.

At larger companies, design teams typically benefit from sheer force of numbers. In a larger team, a single designer can focus on one small function or area of responsibility within the design process. Positions like UX Researcher and Visual Designer typically appear in larger teams. By dividing labor in this way, each designer becomes more expert in their area of focus, allowing the whole team to make more assured progress with a project. Let’s take a closer look at a few of those specialist roles:

UX Researcher

Researchers form the vanguard of the design process. They conduct interviews with users and other stakeholders, design and distribute surveys, and look into the competition and what they offer. These designers focus on providing detailed research insights, which in turn allow the design problem to be better defined, the audience or target market to be better understood, and the way forward to be decided. As well as the actually delivery of research, designers in UX Research roles often select and design which research methods to use, synthesize reports to hand off to other designers, and continue working with the rest of the team to guide how the work moves develops.

Interaction Designer

An Interaction Designer tends to define the flow of a website or application, determining how a user interacts with it. Designers in this role often create the project strategy, and help to create prototypes to test product or feature ideas.

Visual Designer

A Visual Designer focuses on the graphic elements of a product. Once they receive the prototype or wireframes depicted from the interaction designer, a visual designer applies the “coat of paint” to make the website or application look appealing to its audience.

Front-End Developer

While front-end development is not a core component of design, it is the implementation of design deliverables. This is a person who can take visual elements and bring them to life using coding languages, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They typically handle the integration of the interactions determined by the interaction designer and set the styling for the site or application by using mockups from the visual designer.

The Generalist

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Diagram showing how product, UX design, UI design, and web design may overlap in the design process.

Particularly in smaller companies, you’ll often find more generalists working on the design team. These are cross-functional roles that serve more than one part of the design process. A single designer’s duties can cover different kinds of work, and crossover with other designers within the organization. When reviewing job adverts, you’ll tend to find that these positions with generalist titles require a broader base of skills, to ensure that you are able to work on each step of the design process.

UX Designer

Sometimes, a UX Designer will own the entire process of research, synthesis, ideation, and prototyping. Someone in this role might conduct interviews, report their findings, develop a series of flows and wireframes, and then create a prototype to test. They may also be asked to determine the information architecture, create personas, and develop concepts for interactions within an app or website.

UI Designer

Like a visual designer, UI designers focus on the graphics and visual language of an app or website. However, the UI designer’s work is likely to cross over with the UX designer: they will often help out with ideation, prototype creation, and thinking through interactions within the product. UI designers are also usually in charge of maintaining pattern libraries, style guides, or design systems for a product or brand.

Web Designer

Although the title Web Designer hit its peak in the early 2000s, you’ll still see it around. It is probably the broadest of all the job titles in our industry, and it can mean a lot of things. Typically it combines the visual/UI design of a site or application, and the implementation of those designs using front-end development skills. Other times, the role is more similar to that of UI Designer—so pay close attention to what responsibilities and requirements are listed.

Product Designer, aka UX/UI Designer

When new to digital design, it’s common (and logical) to assume that “product design” refers to physical products like TVs and radios. In fact, that branch of design is usually referred to as “industrial design”. Any job adverts you see for a Product Designer will be some combination of UX/UI design skills for digital products like apps and websites. Product Designers are usually expected to be able to understand, lead, and deliver the digital design process end-to-end. Occasionally, these job descriptions may ask for some front-end development skills, so again, check the requirements carefully for each individual posting.

“Unicorn” Roles

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Diagram showing how a UX design team of one person may overlap with a frontend development team in the design process.

Many small companies would love to find an individual who can handle the entire digital design process from start to completion—research to implementation. However, these roles don’t always lead to the best results, because—by definition—the individual requires an exceptional breadth of knowledge. That is likely to mean their knowledge is thinner in each area than it would be for one of the generalist roles listed above. These designer–developer hybrid roles are often seen at very small companies, and are often created due to budget constraints.

UX Team of One

A UX Team of One means a single person who handles pretty much everything from research to implementation. This is similar to a Product Designer role, except a company will often hire more than one Product Designer, and the team then distribute work. In a UX Team of One, an individual designer handles all of the upfront research, ideation, prototyping, and UI design. Once a product gets to implementation, they will probably hand off deliverables to someone else.

UX Engineer

UX Engineers are usually developers who have a lot of design knowledge. They can therefore contribute to the research, ideation, and prototyping stage, before leading the implementation themselves. These roles are often primarily focused on development skills, so check the full job description before applying.

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The digital design job landscape is vast, and the requirements of each position can vary significantly, even when they’re advertised with the same job title. One Visual Designer role might be focused on branding and UI styling, while another might turn out to need extensive knowledge of HTML and CSS. Do your research for every position, in order to ensure that you’re a good match for the skills required. And always be prepared to learn new skills, as both the industry and its job titles are evolving every month.

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