As many enterprises and startups start to value design as one of the primary drivers for their digital product, there have been many buzzword job titles which have sprouted up for the hiring of such talent in organizations. The common buzzwords used in such design resource hiring intentions being: ‘experienced web designer’; ‘experienced UX/UI designer’; and ‘experienced product designer.’

It is essential to clarify that the primary goal of a digital product is to solve the problem, while its tertiary goals may include communicating the idea, mission, values, services, or projects to audiences. The interchangeable use of buzzword job titles and the failure of identifying the key attributes as well as distinctions between the same can hurt organizations in hiring the right design talent for envisioning and designing their digital product.

This comprehensive guide helps you chalk out all the key differences and similarities of job titles, meaning you’ll never get confused and lost while hiring for design resources for building your amazing digital product.

Who is who?

The Web Designer

A web designer is someone who is both creative and technically inclined, and uses both these attributes to build or redesign websites. The web designer has the ability to understand what is needed to make a website functional and easy to use, but at the same time make it aesthetically appealing to the user. — Careerexplorer.com

Web designers are typically individuals who are skilled in designing websites, or blogs, or a company website, or landing pages. Their skills range from graphic design, SEO, coding, or online conversions/ optimization knowledge. They mostly take up designing small scale websites, which excludes complex web apps such as social networks, or e-commerce websites, or fintech websites/apps as they require extensive product thinking and experience design.

Usually, a web designer strives in a communication or marketing agency where critical responsibility is to create, develop, and maintain websites. The focus of the web designer’s work is the communication of the client’s idea, mission, vision, work, and people involved through websites.

The UX/UI Designer

While most job descriptions or hiring goals may refer to this buzzword, it is critical to acknowledge that: UX and UI design are two distinct elements of experience design. UX refers to user experience, which primarily centers on how something operates and how people interact with it. While UI, or user interface, strongly focuses on the appearance, layout and visual elements of experience design. Most enterprises and startups combine these two terms aiming to discover unicorns for their design requirements.

The user experience designer’s role is to make products easy to use for users through an understanding of the target market, understanding and interpretation of user behavior and needs, ideating and creating design solutions that fit those needs, and testing the derived solutions with actual users to improve upon the product.

The user experience designer looks to take control of the vested responsibilities through the design thinking process, from research to ideation, prevailing to be user-centered as its core duty. In short, the UX designer’s role is to ensure that the product gets seldom optimized for the user.

The role of the user interface designer or UI designer is to complement the user experience of the product with a great look and feel, and pleasurable interactivity. The role involves the transference of a brand’s image, voice, tone, guidelines, and visual asset’s to the digital product’s interface to improve and complement the user experience of the product.

Often hiring organizations combine these two distinct skillsets calling out ‘UX/UI designers’ in job descriptions, probably out misinformation or just the hope of discovering unicorns having both skillsets. It is important to note that while UX/UI designer is buzzword job title used nowadays, and a designation assigned probably to most members of a design team, the design process, and designOps gets shared among members according to their strength of skillsets.

The Product Designer

A great way to illustrate the definition and role of a product designer is look at this clip from the Founder (2016), a movie about the beginnings of McDonald’s, also modeled as an example on UxDesign.cc. You can have a look at the clip as below.

So, to define, the product designer is an individual who takes charge and oversees the process of envisioning and creating the product, complementing it with usable, meaningful, and delightful experiences.

The product designer has to be accountable to business considerations and objectives, be adhering to the resources, and also seek to recognize and address problems with the product at a holistic level.

While UX designers are primarily concerned with the usability of the product, the role of the product designer is to think about the product on a holistic level: user experience, technical design, marketing, product funnels, identifying critical features and making product roadmaps for the future and its integration into existing platforms. Product designers work in close proximity and synchronization with UX, UI, visual designers, and other departments such as marketing, development teams in enterprises and startups creating digital products.

Eventually, product designers should be among the first individuals to be onboarded on to your team if you are conceptualizing and designing a new digital product for the market. They would empower the stakeholders of your project/ product to brainstorm and envision the concept into something tangible yet useful while accessing the existing competition and the problems it is currently addressing.

Presentable is a design company based in Gurgaon, India, specialising in celebration design and lifestyle brand design.

Service design is a process which helps businesses to organize their resources — people or stakeholders, infrastructure, communication, materials, and processes to improve its experience and interaction between the business and its customers.

Lynn Shostack coined the term ‘Service Design’ in 1982 to help organizations understand and unpack it’s behind the scene processes and the subsequent interactions between them. Focussing on the more comprehensive understanding through this birds-eye view framework provides strategic bonuses for business.

To elaborate on the concept of service design, let’s look at the example of Uber as a service. Imagine Uber with its multiple range of employees: drivers, designers, marketers, customer support staff, project managers, developers, accountants, and more. Service design would focus on how Uber operates and fulfills the service it guarantees — from sourcing new drivers and tech staff to onboarding the staff, to communicating new ride bookings to customers and drivers, to ensure the driver reaches the location and starts the trip on time, and also ensure the customer reaches safely and on-time, followed by collecting payments from its customers to rolling out payments for its staff. Service design would not constitute only the mobile app experience of Uber, but also the multiple interactions and processes that Uber supports as an organization to deliver the promised experience.

At voombaa, use service design tools to bridge organizational and experiential gaps by:

1. Helping organizations identify and manage frictions in their experience design
2. Helping organizations calculate time and resources for service delivery
3. Helping organizations uncover frictions in their business model
4. Drive challenging conversations around processes, policies, and management
5. Review service actors understanding when there are multiple departments in an organisation participating in delivering a service
6. Review for redundancy of processes and reduce wastage of efforts and resources
7. Helping organizations transition from a high touchpoint service to low touch through design, for cost-effectiveness and lower audience volume
8. Helping organizations establish relationships between internal service requirements, such as backstage actors, their roles, processes, and workflows.

While solutionizing a problem statement, our designers at voombaa unpack the service through tools such as the service blueprint to visualize the relationships between the different components associated with touchpoints in a specific customer journey. We work with many digital products delivering service as their value proposition and view them from the vantage point of multiple physical and digital touchpoints disseminated out across context and time, to address a contrarily invisible digital service feel tangible.

A service blueprint is an operational tool that describes the nature and the characteristics of the service interaction in enough detail to verify, implement, and maintain it. — Servicedesigntools.org

A service blueprint is contextual to a specific customer journey and supports specific user goals to the journey.

The elements of a Service Blueprint

There are six elements of a service blueprint, which are:

1. Props: Physical and digital artifacts utilized in delivering the service.
2. Processes: Workflows and routines developed by stakeholders or employees to deliver the service to the customer
3. People: Includes anyone who builds or uses the service, including individuals who would be discursively influenced by the service
4. Customer Actions: Steps, actions, and interactions that the customer completes while interacting with the service to reach the desired goal
5. Frontstage Actions: Steps, actions, Interactions which take place in front of the customer which can be human-human or human-computer interactions
6. Backstage Actions: Steps, actions, Interactions which take place behind the customers view to support frontstage actions and processes. These can be human-human or human-computer interactions.

Step by Step process for creating service blueprints

Step 1: Identify the scenario to expand upon

It is essential to focus on one scenario before expanding on its interactions and processes. In the above service blueprint for Uber, we have chosen to look at the scenario of booking a cab/ride, boarding the ride, completing the ride and making payment.

Step 2: Identify all the frontstage actors involved in delivering the service and recognize their actions, responses, and experiences.

The physical evidence and customer action rows represent the interactions and experiences exchanged between the customer/user and the service provider through the mobile application of Uber.

Step 3: Outline and link all background and backstage activities and processes

Includes all the backstage processes which the customer/user does not perceive but are crucial for the service to be delivered — Identification of the location of the passenger, displaying waiting time, and processing payment.

Step 4: Indicate Critical Moments

Add the critical moments for the user and the service provider such as excessive waiting time, user safety during trip, payment handling.

Step 5: Include Measurements

Include key KPIs for Uber which are used to measure its drivers on customer satisfaction and other customer-related measures such as Overall rating, surge rating, non-surge rating, acceptance rate, cancellation rate, fare reviews per trip, total 1-star ratings, total 5-star ratings.

Add other essential indicators in the service blueprint such as:

• Moments when the user/customer makes a decision
• Control points/ quality KPI measure points
• Cost-saving opportunities
• Potential and existing pain points
• Memorable moments for the customer

Presentable is a design company based in Gurgaon, India, specialising in celebration design and lifestyle brand design.

According to the survey conducted by the IBM Institute for business value, as many as 90% of Indian startups fail within the first five years of their inception. As per the study, the lack of pioneering innovation has been accounted for as the major reason for the failure of an Indian startup. It highlights that such startups are prone to mimicry, which intend to create value by fine-tuning already successful concepts to local markets and precludes sustainable expansion beyond India’s borders. But, there is more to the truth, as we have witnessed startups rushing to development phases without getting their hands dirty in planning research, strategy, design, and testing. Riding just on intuition and the success of its western counterparts, the Indian startup ecosystem also adopts design as a mimicable commodity to ship out to the market as soon as possible.

The first question which arises is:

Why do startups need design?
It is important to establish that the definition of design for a startup shouldn’t just limit its boundaries to just its product, it includes its brand identity, as well as service design. While most founders wouldn’t see any definite value in investing in design or look at a technology-first approach, there are studies asserting that design-led companies have a distinct competitive advantage. The Design Management Institute in their study concludes that — ‘’Over the last 10 years, design-led companies have consistently outperformed the S&P by an extraordinary 211% in their stock value.’’ It is crucial for founders to realize that practicing a design-led approach means greater revenues, customer loyalty, and a positive experience for the consumer.

The process of creating a design-led startup:
There are 6 phases that a startup needs to progress through to establish a design-led approach for its identity, product, and its supporting services.

1: Research and Strategy — Brand and Identity
2: Building Identity
3: Service Blueprint
4: Research and Strategy — Product
5: User experience Design
6: User Interface Design

Phase 1: Research and Strategy — Brand and Identity

Why:
Startups need a great logo to best represent the attributes, values and the story behind the product. To curtail resources, most startups attempt to design the identity themselves or ape something they found online. It is important to understand here that the brand and identity has implications on the visual design of the product, marketing campaigns and most importantly how users are going to perceive your product.

How:

• Stakeholder Interviews: Interviewing the stakeholders and understanding the brand positioning, value proposition and story they are trying to deliver through their product
• Develop the brand persona: Compilation of personality traits, attitudes, and values that your brand showcases while communicating with your user.
• Conduct Competitive Research: Defining and understanding competitors through gathering information about them, and using that information to supplement your own strategy.

Phase 2: Building Identity

Why:
The brand identity is going to help all stakeholders involved in the startup which includes founders, developers, designers, marketers, supporting external stakeholders and finally the users understand and align on the core values of the product. This also extends to the final stage of product design while designing the user interface.

How:

• Create brand identity: Includes the visible elements of a brand, such as color, design, and logo, that identify and distinguish the brand in the user’s mind
• Establish Brand guidelines: Includes precise rules for how the identity, colors and voice & tone are represented to users

Phase 3: Service Blueprint

Why:
A Service Blueprint helps the founders look at the experience offered in a holistic view of all the related actors, their interactions, and supporting materials and infrastructures. It provides a departure from the approach only the product bears the authority of success or failure for a business. Service components are unpacked into frontstage and backstage, depending on whether the user views them or not, and designed through a roadmap. To illustrate this, the success of a restaurant does not just depend on the quality of food, but also the supporting actors and services of the entire ecosystem such as the chef, the lighting and ambiance of the restaurant, the in-time delivery and procurement of raw materials for food preparation, etc. The service blueprint will help the stakeholders to recognize the problem statement while designing the product keeping in-view all possibilities and restrictions.

How:

• Create User Personas: Build detailed user profiles for the product which includes general demographic information, user needs, user goals, user motivations, and pain points.
• Conduct Market Research: Analyze the market size, trends, and drivers for the service.
• Identify all actors: Research and recognize all the stakeholders involved in building and delivering the service
• Identify all touchpoints: Research and recognize all the touchpoints involved in the service
• Identify Interactions: Research and recognize all frontstage and backstage Interactions
• Create service blueprint: The service blueprint will act as an operational planning tool that provides guidance on how a service will be provided with the product, specifying the physical evidence, staff actions, and support systems/infrastructure needed to deliver the service across its different channels.

Phase 4: Research and Strategy — Product

Why:
While most startup founders avoid dwelling deep into research to make up for their urgency to deliver, they sway away from building the ‘right product.’ Focussing on visual appeal and assuming what users want can wind up being extremely expensive for stakeholders in the long run. There is a need to look at user research beyond being just troublesome, expensive and time-consuming outlier as it filters out the bad ideas which look good.

How:

• Stakeholder Interviews: Interviewing the stakeholders and understanding the goals, motivations, and challenges of the product
• Create User Personas: Build detailed user profiles for the product which includes general demographic information, user needs, user goals, user motivations, and pain points
• Conduct Secondary Research: Analyze the trends and drivers for similar products
• Conduct Primary Research: Interview users of your competitor products
• Create Information Architecture: Flesh out, organize and structure the content of the product
• Prioritize features and functionalities: Prioritize the elements based on effort-impact scale, discussions to have a clear vision of implementation

Phase 5: User Experience Design

Why:
Rushing to visual design without materializing the process of moving through defining user flow, scenarios, wireframing and testing give the stakeholders the disadvantage of looking at the product myopically. It is also vital to establish that mimicking a product’s visual design to reach development and shipping would paralyze the product in its functionality, and contextually solve a different problem than intended to.

How:

• Create User flows: Define and create user flows for prioritized tasks.
• Create Wireframes: Create wireframes with navigation and information on each screen
• Test with potential users: Recruit potential users and test functionality with a clickable prototype

Phase 6: User Interface Design

Why:
The final layer of designing the product experience is crucial to making the product lovable, adding aesthetic and accessible value to your product.

How:

• Revisit Brand Identity and guidelines: Connect back to the identity and brand guidelines during phase 2 to understand identity, colors and voice & Tone
• Create Style Guide: Helps to align the visual design with the brand identity and guidelines. The focus needs to be on typography, colors, buttons, elements, effects, etc.
• Visual Design: Translate wireframes to interfaces with the style guide as a reference
• Test with potential users: Recruit potential users and test functionality with a clickable prototype

Presentable is a design company based in Gurgaon, India, specialising in celebration design and lifestyle brand design.