Furthermore, Product designing is an ever-evolving job role that requires you to constantly be on your toes to look out for new industry trends. Although the job is fun, it can be tasking. The “definition” of a product designer is always changing, and too many different titles were born out of that problem. Consequently, being a good designer by nature has many requirements. In this post, we would be talking about the skills needed for a product designer.

As a product designer, you must have a large variety of skills to help build the product experience while including the commercial area. 

The top 5 skills needed as a Product designer include: 

  • User research 

Firstly, the Product Designer, based on qualitative and quantitative evidence, makes informed decisions. Consequently, they need to be observant and possess observation skills, interview, and user testing techniques. The objective is to understand the needs of individuals who use the brand. As a result, they need to master data and analytics of products.

This is to say, the objective is to use these quantitative and qualitative research results consistently and understandably. The Product Designer will then model this user knowledge in different forms. This includes personae, experience maps, jobs-to-be-done.  In short, this is a top skill needed for a product designer.

  • Facilitation 

Facilitation is the collection of techniques that will be carried out to help a group accomplish its objectives. Here the facilitators aim to carry out product ideas and design. It includes essential contact characteristics. Therefore, a product designer can run UX workshops because they understand group dynamics and understand how to use diplomacy.

They must then have the opportunity to:

  • Identifying the stakeholders needed for the various workshops (tech, business, marketing, legal, for example).
  • To assist the participants by providing directions during the events.
  • To show the consistency of animation and storytelling.

  • Design (Moving Ideas to screen)

Now let’s get to the root of the concept, one of the Product Designer’s main competencies and one to be mastered. The Product Designer takes study from the research:

  • To translate them into issues,
  • To build future interactions and features (ideation),
  • Create user routes (workflows), the architecture of knowledge, interactions, and interfaces.

  • Design (The art of graphics coherence) 

We consider that prototyping “low fidelity” belongs to the family of design skills, while the UI is responsible for prototyping “high fidelity.” UI architecture refers to the art of designing the graphic layer of a digital product. This is to say,  it is about materializing all the interactions between a consumer and a product. To sum up, it conveys brand identity and makes sense coherently and aesthetically by structuring screens and graphic components.

  • Soft skills

The evolution of the design careers went hand in hand with a rebalancing of hard skills and soft skills. However, the product designer needs to appeal to qualities beyond the technological nature needed to construct an appealing and effective interface. In conclusion, to carry out its user study, he needs to bring out ideas within a community and engage with them. 

For instance, a product designer should be: 

  • Empathetic 
  • Collaborative
  • Curious
  • Good communicator