The definition of product design describes the process of imagining, creating, and iterating products that solve users’ problems or address specific needs in a given market.

The key to successful product design is understanding the end-user customer, the person for whom the product is being created. Product designers attempt to solve real problems for real people by using empathy and knowledge of their prospective customers’ habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

Good product design practices thread themselves throughout the entire product lifecycle. Product design is essential in creating the initial user experience and product offering, from pre-ideation user research to concept development to prototyping and usability testing.

Types of Product Design

UX Designer: User-experience and interaction designers focus on refining a product based on how their research into user behavior suggests people will get the most satisfaction from using the product. UX designers aim to increase users’ happiness.

Graphic Designer: The most artistic job within product design is creating the graphics, icons, logos, and other visual elements of the product experience. Their purview is as broad as selecting a color scheme to as narrow as tweaking individual pixels.

Motion/animation Designer: If the product experience involves elements “moving”—be it slick transitions or a user-controlled avatar—these specialists work on this extremely complicated part of the design. They don’t create the art, but they bring it to life.

Data Analyst: These designers focus on user research and other data to identify ways to improve a product’s layout, feature set, and visual aesthetic. In other words, their primary role is a scientific one, but they are also designers.

Product Designer: Of course, in many cases, a company will hire a person to handle several of the roles above and others under a product designer job. Other companies will handle some of the bigger picture, strategic elements of developing new product ideas.