Product designers are in high demand and highly compensated compared to other design disciplines because they can design for the fast-growing product market.
The growth of the product market is driven by mobile. With the success of the iPhone, a new type of marketplace, the app store, has emerged and the market for mobile applications has grown rapidly.
As various companies succeeded in their strategy of attracting and then monetizing a large number of users in a short period of time, there was a flood of applications. The app store was easy to install and uninstall, so user choice was strong. If it was even the slightest inconvenience or bad experience, it was uninstalled.
So instead of using the word app design to focus on a good user experience, we used the term "UI/UX design," which combines UI, which is how you use the tool, and UX, which is the experience of using it.
This spawned a number of other specialized professions, including web designers, who dealt with the design of what appears on digital devices; UI design, which designed the process of interacting with electronics; and UX design, which designed the entire user experience.
But as time went on, competition among companies became fierce and a good user experience alone was not enough to succeed, so "product design" emerged to focus on designing a "product" to sell to customers.
Product design is about designing products that delight customers and get you the money you need. They understand the markets in which transactions take place, find the problems that customers pay for with their time and money, and deliver products that solve those problems exceptionally well. Because applications can be quickly replicated by competitors, we strive to constantly improve our products in short cycles to avoid losing customers.
Originally, "product design" was used interchangeably with the term industrial design to describe the design of physical tangible objects. Now, product design has come to mean the entirety of hardware or software that satisfies users in the marketplace.
Unlike other product lines where we had to make the product as perfect as possible, the application could be improved incrementally and frequently at low cost, and users weren't paying every time, so it was easy to know how they reacted.
Companies naturally gravitated toward smaller organizations that could learn and adapt quickly from the market, and they needed designers who could constantly communicate with users and design products that would serve their purpose. The people who fill these roles began to be called product designers.
Product designers solve customer problems with products. They research to quickly understand what the customer's problem is and study the technology needed to bring the product to life. They imagine, create, and fix quickly to meet the needs of a rapidly changing market.
Contribute to the creation and delivery of products to customers from problem definition, solution strategy, prototyping, testing, and deployment until the customer's problem is solved.
It's the ultimate role of a product designer to solve problems so seamlessly that users don't even realize the tool exists, to burn them into their memory as a wonderful experience that exceeds their expectations, and to make them believe in the product and keep using it.
Products can produce value at a low cost. Modern industry is built on manufacturing. To make things, you need production equipment and warehouses to store them. You need a minimum amount of production time and labor to produce them in large quantities. You also need a vast distribution network to get what you make to your customers.
Digital products transcend the limitations of traditional manufacturing. You only need people and computers to produce them, no warehouses to store them, and you can produce them in large quantities at no cost by simply replicating the code. You can sell your products to people around the world by simply listing them on a store.
When designed well, these products can have a high impact. With a short copy, you can make users believe in your service and use it every day. You can change the shape or color of a button to get more people to buy your product. You can make customers do things for themselves that would otherwise take an agent five minutes to do.
In a product used by 1 million people, a one-second frustration could save 277 hours of work, or an 1% conversion rate could lead to 10,000 customers. In the age of AI, interpreting and processing information has become easier, and the potential for product design using information technology is growing every day.
