I was in a job interview the other day. Near the end it dawned on me that I’ve never been in a job interview. 34 years old and a designer for almost 13 years. Not one job interview.
My college placed me into my first official job. Then I was self-employed. Then a client’s company was acquired and convinced me to join. Nobody has ever needed to interview me.
There’s a first time for everything.
There I was, sitting in my first interview, nodding and smiling while talking about experience design. Then, out of nowhere, the interviewer used the phrase “look and feel” as a way to measure the results of experience design.
Whoa! Hold on. That doesn’t sound right. Are we talking about the same thing?
After a few minutes of trying to unpack what each of us meant, it was clear we had wildly different definitions of experience design — enough to make me incompatible to their team. I can’t say that either one of us was right or wrong, but that we had adopted several perspectives and bundled them under the term experience design in surprisingly different ways.
Ugh. Words are hard.
They’re even harder when we have conflicting definitions for them. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to take a step back and define a few common terms that get thrown around in product design, and what paid professional is best equipped to address them.
In short, I’d like to get specific about the fundamental skills involved in product design, a few brief examples of the type of work that can be done for each skill, and how they’re mapped to common product design roles.
The Fundamental Skills
It’s unreasonable to expect an individual to be strong in all the skills of product design — that’s what a team is for. You don’t need the word designer in your title to participate in any of these skills. As long as you have coverage for each skill, no matter where it comes from, you should be in good shape.
The fundamental skills of product design
How People Relate to Your Product
How something looks and feels can mean a lot to a customer or potential customer. First impressions are a big deal. The second, third, and millionth impressions are a big deal. This is where you can make someone feel good about what they’re doing, or are considering doing in the future.
Are you inviting, or intimidating? Are you encouraging, or pressuring? How you present yourself visually (aesthetic) and how you respond or entertain dialog (personality) can be the difference between getting the job done, and being enjoyable to work with.
Aesthetic
Aesthetics is everything people can look at and potentially draw a conclusion. Does it look sloppy, hip, fun, generic, professional? This is the most subjective part of designing a product.
What does “professional” look like aesthetically? It’s hard to say. Although there are many ways to tackle this problem and remove, little by little, much of the subjectivity. You may never get all the way to objective, but you can always get closer.
To flesh out what “professional” might mean for your product, choose a few concepts and their opposites to place on spectrum. Calm to lively, clean to gritty, subtle to flashy. Once you have a few relevant spectrums ask everyone on the team where they think the product currently lies on each spectrum. Then, ask them where they think it should be on each spectrum. The space between each person’s answers and the space between different people’s answers can surface a lot of potential confusion about the visual design of your product and where it needs to go next.
Spectrum chart showing differences in opinions
A spectrum chart is a tool that can reveal a lot about the aesthetic desires and expectations of your team. There are many, many more tools. A designer with aesthetic skills should have an overflowing toolbox to help them not only make the product look good, but surface and expose the reasons why it looks the way that it looks.
Personality
Personality is all the ways your product can respond to a person in a way that engenders humanity. A good shortcut is to think about how Harley Davidson plays the part of an outlaw. Once the outlaw theme is chosen, it’s easy to compare everything your product says and does to that imaginary character.
What would an outlaw say in this situation? What would an outlaw do?
As you get better and better at playing the part of an outlaw, it will be easier and easier for people to identify who you are and what makes you special.
Some blowhards might call this a “brand”.
Archetypes from the The Hero and the Outlaw
Don’t know where to start? You can dig into Jungian archetypes on Wikipedia, read The Hero and the Outlaw and take a lot of notes, or explore the differences of your favorite characters in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or any other team oriented story — they’re all based on groups of specific archetypes. Frodo Baggins is the Innocent and Peregrin Took is the Jester. Hans Solo is the Outlaw and Yoda is the Sage.
Which archetype or character best suits your product? Why?
Finding an archetype isn’t the point, it’s a tool to help you find an interesting place to start. The goal is to eventually document all the things that makes you, you. Then you can have a discussion about the personality of your product armed with unbiased, goal-oriented reasons.
Much like aesthetics, it’s not about the having the “right” answer. It’s about surfacing and exposing the reasons why you’re making the decisions you’re making. A designer with good personality skills should not only be able to make the product more likable, but surface and expose the reasons why it acts the way it acts.
How People Use Your Product
Interface design, interaction design, and experience design bring a hot mess of jargon to designing products. Before attempting to explain the differences between these types of design, here’s a dysfunctional story that tends to play out in product teams.
As a team, we mistakenly assume that everyone understands what’s going on. It feels good to talk about interface, interaction, and experience design as related, but different skills. Although we never explicitly say what the differences are. We’re scared of offending each other by asking to define something as basic as interface design.
Sure, that’s nice
Although, when it’s time to get to work, they blend into each other enough that it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins.
Wait... What?
By the time you realize how everyone is defining these skills, it’s too late to untangle the mess. Too many promises have been made. Too many people are relying on too many things.
The work you thought was going to happen isn’t happening.
This sucks. It can destroy the moral of the team. Especially the designers.
To draw hard lines for these skills, I like to think of them as scopes of work. How big is the problem you’re trying to solve?
Interface
If a problem or opportunity can be resolved within a single interface, then you’re doing interface work.
Improvements resolved within one page
Even if you notice similar patterns on different pages, and choose to consolidate how they’re designed, you’re doing interface design. An interface designer can have a huge influence on the entire product as design patterns are identified and adopted. Although, they are single interface problems.
Interaction
When a problem or opportunity takes a few steps to solve, then you’re getting into interaction work.
Improvements resolved within one series page.
Each interface needs to be designed with the past in mind. Where did they come from? They need to be designed with the future in mind. Where are they going next? With each interface being designed, there are potentially multiple interfaces influencing and constraining the design.
Experience
When a problem or opportunity requires several completed objectives to be resolved, then you’re getting into experience design.
Improvements resolved within multiple series of pages
For example, a person using your product might ask:
How are my social media efforts contributing to my business?
To accomplish this, they might have to:
- Publish an article on a content management system
- Publish a few comments on various social media properties linking to the published article
- Build a traffic report for your article from social media properties
- Build a lead conversion report for the published article
What makes this intangible, inspiring the jargon of “experience” design, is that there may not be anywhere in the product that asks or answers that larger question. It could be a question in the person’s mind, and answered through an aggregate of efforts within your product. Even with the help of other products.
Ideally, you would root out these bigger problems and opportunities. Then design to resolve them within your product. Although, that might end up becoming a different product.
What People Need From Your Product
You might think someone is going to a movie theatre for entertainment, when it’s an excuse to avoid doing their chores. Figuring out why someone is using your product is tricky. A lot trickier than you might think.
A great Jobs-to-be-done tool is a forces diagram. What are the forces encouraging someone to change their behavior? What are the forces preventing someone from changing their behavior?
Jobs-to-be-done forces of progress diagram.
To use buying a couch as an example, the person had a desire for a more comfortable couch (the pull). Although, since they didn’t use it much, comfort wasn’t a strong enough influence to buy. Going to the store and transporting the couch on a Saturday, a day to relax (the habit), might be enough to delay the purchase. If the couch is a different size, they might be worried about how to arrange the room once they get it (the anxiety). These forces continue to prevent the purchase. Eventually a family member comes to visit (the push) and makes the trip to the store and rearranging the room worth the effort.
In this example, making the couch easier to transport (free delivery?) or easier to imagine in the room (same size as their current couch?) could have sped up the purchase by several months.
Investing in making the couch more comfortable would have been a waste of time. Unfortunately, that would be the assumption of many couch designers — to make it more comfortable. An easy mistake when comfort is the primary stated desire of the customers.
Sometimes the leverage you’re looking for isn’t in a convenient or intuitive place. Investigative skills are essential to build the necessary audience context. This is the most important “soft” skill of a product designer.
Business Context
Until you create a product that can support itself financially, you’re not designing a product. You’re tinkering. Asking someone to exchange something, like their time or money, for access to your product is when tinkering becomes designing.
Getting that exchange of value to work for both parties requires constant attention. Every action you take will change the context of the exchange. Opening new opportunities and creating new weaknesses. Forever requiring you to adapt and revise.
Fortunately, there are four primary points of leverage:
- Increasing the value of the product to the customer
- Increasing the time someone will remain a customer
- Decreasing the cost of maintaining the product
- Decreasing the cost of attracting people to the product
For example, imagine you’ve built a product people find useful and will pay for over a long period once they’re comfortable. Then assume it’s a cheap product to maintain. Under these circumstances there’s a good chance you’ll make a lot of money from anyone that becomes a customer. Unfortunately, it’s hard to convince people to try it and has become expensive to attract new customers. In this situation, rethinking parts of the product to be more self-explanatory will help people see the value and be more likely to give it a try.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC).
As your product gets easier for people to understand and try, different problems and opportunities will show up. Once an area of your product is easy enough to use and gains wider adoption, it’s clear to you customers that a feature is missing and they become frustrated enough to consider an alternative product. Now the amount of time people will remain a customer begins to slip. The dance never ends.
Product people with business skills know that at any given time one point of leverage will give a disproportionate return for their effort. Knowing which one, by how much, and for how long, will make the difference between rolling in money or closing up shop.
Common Product Design Roles
To put all these skills into perspective, here are common product design related roles and how their skills apply. Not every novice starts from the same place or grows through experience into the same skills. Consider these useful stereotypes to discard after learning more about the individuals you are working with or considering hiring.
A Novice “Interface Designer”
Can quickly make things look good, but might not be able to explain why. The look and feel of the their designs tend to be driven more by their tastes and inspirations than a strong product personality. They can efficiently solve problems from screen to screen, although might not grasp how to design for larger objectives. They’re reliant on their company or team leadership for strategic decisions about what to design.
Novice “interface designer”.
An Experienced “Interface Designer”
As an interface designer gets more and more productive, they tend to start developing opinions about the personality of the product and the needs of the user. Methods to evaluate those opinions are critical to their continued growth (using the product, user testing, user research).
Experienced “interface designer”.
A Novice “Product Manager”
Can quickly identify problems and opportunities for their business, but may not have a strong grasp of what the audience needs to be successful. They have a good sense of what their audience is doing outside their product to satisfy higher order goals, but can’t design the interfaces or interactions to satisfy those goals. Excellent communication skills are required to translate their external awareness into something their team can design.
Novice “product manager”.
An Experienced “Product Manager”
As a product manager gets more effective, they lean into learning what will make their audience more successful. Along the way, they tend to develop a sense of how the product should treat their audience.
Experienced “product manager”.
A Novice “Experience Designer”
Has HCI (human-computer interaction) background that makes them talented researchers and observers of human activity. They can quickly figure out what people are trying to do. Although, they may not be able to create interesting or appealing interfaces or interactions. They’re reliant on guidance for what is beneficial to the business.
Novice “experience designer”.
An Experienced “Experience Designer”
As an experience designer gains experience (I hate this jargon) they get better at identifying and framing up more discreet flows that contribute to larger goals. They start seeing patterns in how the product should respond to the audience.
Experienced “experience designer” (I’m sorry).
What Do You Think?
It’s odd that a job interview ended up being the first time I’ve ever attempted to explain the guts of my job. But now that I’ve been through a few more interviews, each one as clumsy as the first, I thought it might help to clear a few of these things up.
If you think I’m missing anything or you disagree, please let me know. Hearing other points of view is the best part of my job.
Notes
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