Yep! Actually thats me! Theres quite a difference between about having "a designer" and a product focused UI/UX person though. Luckily for me, im the latter group, and I share the product manager role as well as rally with the engineering team. its actually a fun role since i sit on both sides of the fence.
> I think there is a difference between a designer and a UX designer.
Then your vision of the design world is quite simplistic. Having studied both CompSci and Design Engineering at college, I can tell you that design can be very complex, and the term “Designer” is as abstract as “Computer Scientist”, where you have distributed systems researchers, back-end devs, Ops, database administrators, release engineers, QA Engineers, and thousands of specialities.
The design field is HUGE (go and visit IDEO), ranging from mere Graphic Designers (what you've reflected as "PSD Designer"), to UX/UI Designers (those building human-computer interfaces ), to Design Engineers and Industrial Designers that have a solid base of engineering (physics, maths, materials, CAD/CAE, ergonomy, etc) and are able to shape tangible as well as non-tangible products.
Leading Designers [0] usually belong to the latest group... Pininfarina (Ferrari's Designer), Philippe Stark (who worked closely with Steve Jobs crafting his Yatch but also does graphic design and a lot of other design specialities [1]), Jony Ive (leading the iDevices industrial design but also the UI), Dieter Rams, etc.
I know he is just one example, but his success does reinforce a hunch of mine.
I never quite understood why the typical tech company product organization is so obsessed with finding the perfect graphic designer, instead of the perfect engineer.
Stick with me for a sec, I feel like I’ll draw a lot of heat here.
Good designers absolutely do good design work, and that’s wonderful! It just hardly ever, or does not at all, translate to how the product is actually built. At worst it leads to implementations being ad-hoc literal translation of high fidelity screenshots (of the perfect design!) that becomes impossible to maintain.
You could say the designer and some group of engineers are supposed to work together to build a “design system” and, well it might work, if you have good leadership. Not-so-good leadership will at worst not let engineers do this because it’s “not delivering value to the user!”, and decent leadership will let this happen once but ongoing maintenance will never happen.
So. What was the point of hiring the designer again? Having worked with companies, they do try to hire this “engineer who designs” all the time, and they constantly say things like “I know they’re a unicorn but maybe we’ll get lucky” but I think they would be surprised what a group of seasoned engineers in their field would be able to do design wise. Most web content does the same thing the same way nowadays anyway, you’re actually better suited copying UX that people will be familiar with :p
This is a great comment, but I'm still unclear about the intended meaning of "designer". Are we only talking about graphic/artistic design, or just product design? The two are not the same (IMO). For example, I'm a programmer at the core, completely left-brained/logical, who struggles with art/graphic design. However, I am a great product designer (at least, IMO!). So, the one thing I look for to complete projects I'm working on is a graphic designer.
Also, I'm glad you qualified your last statement with this: "unless the key element to what they were doing was uniquely technical." I once had a graphic designer tell me his role was more important than the programming side to web sites, which I totally disagree with. I have a one word retort to that: craigslist. It's true that oftentimes great graphic design is a necessary ingredient to the success of a site, but that's not always the case.
I’m a designer who codes, and for those who have had trouble expressing the value and finding a role that enables both, here is how I’ve positioned it:
As the primary designer for a product, who can also implement the design - the amount of communication needed between design and engineering literally evaporates.
I tell my devs they can build an ugly v1 of any feature simply for the sake of speed, and I’ll go in after to clean it up and make it look consistent. they don’t need to waste time with CSS.
Design changes so often after implementation, that I don’t even keep a living design file, most changes happen directly in code. If I do need to design something as part of a pitch or meeting material I take a screen shot of the product and just modify that.
Having worked as only a designer, and then only as an engineer, I can’t express how much faster my team is when design is part of engineering.
Speed is most critical to startups, I’ve always found interviewing with startups and presenting this skill set is highly sought after when expressed properly.
- Designing a product that people want to use. By this I mean focusing the idea, cutting off the extra bits, refining the workflow, making it simple enough for people to understand, pivoting it slightly to solve a different need, and designing the basic methods of interaction.
- Making it look pretty.
"Designer" could mean either (or both! or neither!) of these tasks. The first is what a co-founder should be. The second is someone you hire.
All depends on what you consider a designer. In many ways, I think product guy should know design--the full circle of it. I continue to see startups that hire designers who believe design is a PSD sent to the team to be converted and brought live. That is failure barring exceptional circumstances.
As the person largely responsible for the implementation of the current design, let me put it this way: you did notice that one of those positions is for a designer, right?
I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first.
I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing.
At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business.
Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally.
Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.
Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.
I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised.
There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.
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