How to understand and explain design roles in 1 minute

Navigating various design roles is tough, especially for people outside of the design industry and IT. Here’s how mapping the roles against steps of the design process makes it easier.

Elena Borisova
2 min readJan 29, 2022

The process

The product design process consists of 4 steps: find a problem to solve, explore potential solutions, define how a particular solution should behave, look and feel.

Design process overview
Design process overview

Where does each design role sit?

UX researcher, interaction designer, and UI designer

These roles own separate stages of the process and organize their work accordingly.

Design roles: UI designer, interaction designer and user researcher
Design roles: UI designer, interaction designer and user researcher

First, UX researcher (technically not a design role) defines potential user problems. Then, an interaction designer figures out how potential solutions to these problems should behave and hands over to a user interface (UI) designer to work out look and feel.

UI designer (sometimes called visual designer) is the most familiar role as the closest descendant of a graphic designer. It exists in 2 types of organizations. In companies big enough to have a narrow specialization, UI designer teams up with UX or interaction designers for complex projects. In smaller companies, the position exists when leadership misunderstands design work for making products look pretty.

UX and Product designer

Design roles: product designer and UX designer
Design roles: product designer and UX designer

Product designers are involved across all stages — from discovering problems to defining visual design.

The scope for UX designers is narrower: the heart of UX design is problem-solving, but some of them are also involved in problem definition. It is also common for the role to hand over the look and feel part to UI designers on complex projects.

This doesn’t explain all the details and nuances but helps to understand the fundamental difference between the roles.

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Elena Borisova
Elena Borisova

Written by Elena Borisova

Combining data and psychology for product and design decision-making | Head of Design at DeepL | elenaborisova.com

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