source: Midjourney/Reddit

A job responsibility overview. The many hats in this role.

As a product designer in a product-led company, it is your responsibility to ensure that the user experience is intuitive, seamless, and enjoyable. You are responsible for ensuring a high-quality user experience through user testing, UI design, collaboration with front-end engineers, participation in the product vision and delivery process, promoting the company’s brand, maintaining a consistent visual style and UX across products, and conducting user research. But there’s a lot more here than meets the eye. Let’s drill down further and see what companies mean when they say certain things in their job descriptions.

This blog post has been structured in a form of a list so that readers can go thru’ all the expectations in a quick manner. Some of the points I have written below are deliberately repeated since they get mentioned when going thru’ a published job description.

#1 Conduct weekly live user testing and user research to represent the voice of the customer to an interdisciplinary team daily

What they mean:

• You should define your user testing and research objectives clearly: What specific questions or problems are you trying to solve?
• Diversify your participants: Include users with a wide range of backgrounds, demographics, and experience levels.
• User testing and research can be conducted in many ways, including usability testing, focus groups, interviews, surveys, and more. Choose the method that most closely corresponds to your goals.
• Make sure that you have all the materials and equipment you need to conduct user testing, including a test script, consent forms, and any equipment you need (e.g., cameras, and microphones).
• The findings from your user testing and research can help you make informed product development and design decisions. Analyze and share the data you’ve collected: Once you’ve conducted your test and research with your users, analyze the data you’ve collected and share your findings with your team.
• Make user testing and research a regular process: To ensure that you are continuously gathering valuable insights from your users, test, and research regularly (e.g., weekly or monthly).

#2 Make UI look as appealing, modern, and powerful as the technology underneath the interface. Join the early stages of a very exciting UI modernization mission

What they mean:

• You should use a simple and clean design style that is easy to navigate and easy to read. Avoid using too many different fonts, colors, or other design elements; this makes the UI appear cluttered.
• Make the UI look polished and professional by using high-resolution graphics and images.
• Make use of white space: Make use of plenty of white space on the screen to give the UI a clean and uncluttered feel. This helps to draw the attention of the user to the most important elements.
• Make sure the UI looks good on all devices, including desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones. Make sure the UI adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions by using responsive design.
• Enhance the UI with animations and transitions: Use animations and transitions sparingly to make the UI more dynamic and interactive.

#3 Design interfaces and evolve our design systems in collaboration with frontend Engineers

What they mean:

• Make sure to communicate your design ideas clearly to the frontend engineers, and be open to getting feedback and suggestions from them to make your design even better.
• Create a shared design language to ensure that the design is consistent throughout the entire product, as a shared design language can go a long way towards ensuring that the design is cohesive and that the front-end engineers understand all the design elements and principles that are being followed.
• Creating a library of design patterns and components to be used consistently across the product is a collaborative effort between the front-end engineers and the product team. By doing so, you may be able to streamline the development process and ensure that the design is consistent and scalable at the same time.
• Ensure that your interfaces and design systems are tested regularly so that you can make sure they are user-friendly and effective. Be open to iterating and changing your designs based on your testing results and feedback from users.

#4 As a full-time member of the Growth team, take active participation in the definition of the product vision and play a key role in the exercises of discovery and delivery

What they mean:

• You must have a thorough understanding of the product and the market it operates. This will let you identify growth opportunities and will help you to contribute to the vision of the product constructively.
• As part of discovery exercises, you should play an active role in the process of uncovering insights using market research, customer interviews, and user testing. These activities will help you uncover key insights and inform the direction of your product in the future.
• Ensure that the product vision is aligned with the business objectives and goals by working closely with the members of the growth team, as well as cross-functional teams, to define the product vision and ensure that it is aligned with the needs and goals of the company.
• Contribute to the delivery process by taking part in the planning and execution of activities during the delivery process. This will ensure that the product is delivered within the specified time frame and can meet the needs of the customer.

#5 Make the company’s brand stand out clearly to users, thereby improving retention and word-of-mouth

What they mean:

• Create a strong brand identity in which the company’s values and personality are communicated. This can be done with elements such as logos, color palettes, typography, and imagery that are used to communicate the values and personality of the organization.
• Ensure that the brand is used consistently across all touchpoints, including the website, social media, marketing materials, and customer engagements, this will make it easier for users to recognize the brand and will help them build a strong association with the brand.
• You should focus on creating a positive user experience for your users that meets their needs and expectations. This will help you to improve your retention rates and encourage the word-of-mouth spread of your brand.

#6 In collaboration with the design team, create and maintain a coherent visual style and UX patterns across the products

What they mean:

• You must establish design principles with your team as the basis for guiding the visual style and UX patterns for the products, and these principles should be based on your business goals as well as the needs and goals of your clients.
• As part of the process to ensure that the visual style of the brand is consistent across all the products in the brand, you should create a style guide that clearly defines the visual elements that define the brand, such as the color scheme, typography, imagery, and tone of voice.
• Create UX patterns that can be used consistently across all products: As part of the UX pattern development process, work with the design team to identify common patterns that can be used consistently across all products. This may include things such as navigation, layout, and interaction.
• Be open to making changes based on user feedback and the results of testing to ensure that the visual style and UX patterns are current and effective. Always review and update the visual style and UX patterns regularly.

#7 Conduct user research in collaboration with Product Managers (live usability testing, userstesting.com, Hotjar, etc.)

What they mean: Same as #1 Conduct weekly live user testing and user research to represent the voice of the customer to an interdisciplinary team daily.

The only difference is the mention of specific tools this time. Here’s what the ones mentioned here point to —

• Live usability testing involves bringing users into a lab or other testing environment and observing them as they use the product. This can help get detailed, real-time feedback on the user experience.
• Remote usability testing, on the other hand, allows users to test the product from their location, using tools like userstesting.com or Hotjar. This can be a convenient and cost-effective way to gather feedback from a larger number of users.

Hotjar

You can use Hotjar as a tool to perform usability testing on your product by observing and gathering user feedback as they interact with your product. This can help you to establish whether your product is usable from your users’ perspective.

• User interactions with your product can be recorded using Hotjar’s session recording feature. This can help identify usability issues and gather detailed feedback.
• You can use Hotjar’s survey tool to ask users about their experience with the product and gather specific feedback on different aspects of the user experience.
• You can also use Hotjar’s poll tool to collect feedback from users as they use the product in real time. This is an easy way to gather feedback on specific aspects of the design.
• Identify trends and patterns in user behavior through Hotjar’s analytics tools, which can help you refine and develop your product based on trends and patterns in user behavior.

Usertesting.com

Using UserTesting.com, you can observe and gather feedback from users as they interact with your product.

• Your product can be tested by a pool of prescreened test participants provided by UserTesting.com. To ensure that you are getting feedback from the right users, you can select participants based on their demographics and other criteria.
• You can conduct real-time user tests with UserTesting.com where you ask users to complete specific tasks using your product and then observe their thoughts and feedback as they complete them.
• It is also possible to provide written feedback on UserTesting.com, which can be very helpful for getting more detailed and in-depth feedback.
• You can analyze user data with UserTesting.com to discover trends and patterns in user behavior, which will help you plan and develop your product better.

That’s the end of this short yet hopefully insightful read. Thanks for making it to the end. I hope you gained something from it.

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