Hello

What does UX/Product Designer mean for you? How would you explain it to non-industry folks?

For me User Experience (UX) Designer means making technology easier to use for people.

This means advocating for our viewers/users/customers and their needs.

I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine building a house and you’re the Architec (designer). So you would design the blueprint of the house plan, design all the rooms, decide where the front door will be etc. Once you have all these things, you’ll work with engineers who would actually build these things for you. There will be a site manager who will manage the ongoing work. There will be different vendors for managing materials required in the house-building process.

Apart from all these people involved in the work, there will be one important person involved in this work from start to finish. Yes, the owner(user) of the house. This owner will have various needs like – color of the wall, where the patio should face, where should be parking, what type of security gates should be used etc. So you as the architect (designer) would constantly work with this owner (user) and with other people involved to make sure all the owner’s needs are satisfied.

So my role as a UX/Product Designer is to build tools/experiences for people for accomplishing these tasks keeping in mind that the experience has to be easy to use, universally accessible, and inclusive for all human needs.

Designing a global experience means including:

• People that don’t have latest phones, laptops, small screens, less performant devices
• People who have fat fingers, they navigate using keyboard, cannot use touch screens
• People with slower internet connections, differences in cultural contexts