The best UX designers know the world and they can articulate how their designs are either working with or against the facts of the world.

Examples:

• The eye and brain: The designer knows how the eye and brain work, so they can tell you which elements on the screen they want people to notice and how they are going to use contrast etc to achieve that result.
• The domain: The designer can distill the knowledge they’ve received about the domain and tell you why a certain screen does or doesn’t provide the means the user needs to accomplish their goals.
• The materials: The designer knows whether their interface will sit lightly on the conventions the programmers use to implement the product or if it will require lots of special cases that raise the cost of change.
• Human nature: The designer understands peoples’ attention spans, their emotional ups and downs, their habits to skim or read carefully, their tolerances for learning curves and so on.
• Aesthetics: The designer knows what is appealing or what is unappealing to the user they’re designing for.

There are probably more examples, but this gives a sense of the idea.

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Humility.

You must be humble enough to recognize your own human limitations,
including the cognitive biases that you bring to the table. You must be
humble enough to recognize the best idea whether it is your own or
someone else’s. You must be humble enough to learn from subject matter
experts or users or business stakeholders. You must be humble enough to
take constructive criticism without taking it personally. And you must
be humble enough to understand where your strengths end and those of
your team begin.

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The new term going forward is likely to be Product Designer.

If you want to qualify it, you could say Digital Product Designer, but since nearly everything we make and buy in the future will have some sort of technology and code component, that is probably redundant.

I’ve renamed my team to the Product Design team and moved all their titles to product designers, and many other tech companies are now making that transition as well. The Facebook design team call themselves product designers, and many new startups and VCs are asking for product design. It’s a term that is better suited than UX, UI, UED, IA or IxD inside the corporate structure, and is a term that requires the designer to be focused and held accountable on the thing that they make: a product. It’s a term that also allows one to be multi-skilled or multi-faceted for their design work, so it creates a nice transition path for those whose skills may have been too siloed or walled off over the past decade. And yet the term is forgiving enough to not require those skills today while still being able to evolve as time moves on and people get better at this thing we call design.

It puts the designer on par with product managers as well for those in larger corporations, and while a lot of people say engineering or development, they really mean product engineering or product development, so it levels the playing field for designers in that context as well.

It allows business folks and recruiters to easily understand what you do while being broad enough to mean you can make something like software apps for desktop or mobile, design the Kinect, or build something like a robotic vacuum cleaner.

People get products, and in the end, product designers will be beholden to businesses in the same way that graphic designers are beholden to advertising. Our jobs exist to make money, and we exist in a corporate or capitalist environment. Otherwise we’d simply be artists.

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