When I started working in the UX field, it wasn't called UX. After a while, the market changed and I realized that information architecture wasn't even the best term for what I did — sometimes I was an interaction designer, sometimes I was a user experience researcher. This was true until it appeared a term that encompassed everything: UX designer, and I adopted it.

But the area — and the titles — changed after a while, and we have recently seen the rise of the UX / UI hybrid role, the product designer and the UX strategist.

A title can be important: it is how we present ourselves and how we want to be seen by the world. And I started to ask myself: leaving official definitions aside, what does a person mean when he defines himself as a product designer? Well, I consider myself a UX person, so my way of solving this question was by asking people.

My research consisted on an online questionnaire with 3 main questions:

1. What is your job title?

2. How do you explain this role to someone else? (In an interview with HR at a tech company, for example.)

3. What activities do you do in your current job?
We released an online form in UX communities on Facebook, WhatsApp and Slack. There were 306 unique answers, and we used 290, as we eliminated incomplete responses, answers from people who do not work in the area and slightly philosophical responses such as “I am against labels and no one can define me”, because they were very difficult to categorize.

What are the most popular positions?

We can say that the title “UX designer” is the most common one. Nowadays, we can affirm that there are few “information architects” than at the beginning of the century. “Product designer” and “UX / UI” are also popular terms. The title “UX strategist” is emerging, but not very popular yet. When it comes to what the term means for them, the most repeated terms were user, product and experience.

So far, we know how people describe themselves on LinkedIn and what that means to them. But what do their jobs mean in practical terms? What is the reality in everyday life? Here, we compared the responses of 6 positions that had a good number of responses.

As we’ve already seen, “UX designer” is the most popular job title. And what does the position mean in day-to-day activities? Here we compared UX designers and people who are “just UX” — and they had pretty similar answers. We compared the activities carried out by UX Designers and people who identify themselves only as “UX” (UX analyst, UX specialist, etc.) and they say things such as:

- “I try to improve things in people's lives so that they can use a company´s services and / or but products and be satisfied with them.” (User experience designer in a technology company).
- “My role is to determine the best way to convert users and keep them as customers through the needs and experiences that the product needs to provide.” (UX designer in startup — interaction designer in LinkedIn).

- “I am a person who thinks about making users' lives simpler and more intuitive when they are using an interface, whatever it may be.” (UX analyst in consulting)

In conclusion, UX designers are concerned with including the end user's vision. They do wireframes and also user surveys, but they don't always do visual design and project management.

Product Designer

Conversely, a product designer does both wireframing and prototyping, as well as visual design. The same applies to UX / UI.

- “I design the interface, mapping the user task flow, and then design to improve that flow.” (UX / UI designer at technology company)

- “I work with UX / UI.” (product designer at startup)
So, what's the main difference? Product designers perform more user surveys, as well as business and project management activities like metrics and backlog analysis. A product designer seems less specialized and with a more holistic view of the whole product, after all.

A product designer explained it very well: “I am responsible for designing end-to-end digital products. From the initial business strategic idea, converging and diverging with managers and c-levels, defending the end-user side. And that involves creating flows, organizing data, prototyping at various fidelity levels, testing with users, creating the final layouts, and following up the final implementation with the developers.”

But for many people, the roles are pretty similar: “I develop the product from initial conception to delivery and find ways to improve the user experience.” (product designer at technology company)

“I think about the user experience as a whole: from the first contact with the company to the final interface.” (senior UX / UI designer at startup)

In conclusion, product designers are similar to UX / UI designers, as they perform similar tasks with similar goals. But when someone defined himself as a product designer, he is more likely to have a complete process view, with more research and more business focus.