SketchNotes – Being a Good Product Designer

Disclaimer: This post is targetted towards non-Designers and I have no intention to create any segregation of Designers, neither do I have any bias towards UX. From my education, I have always been fascinated by the Interaction Design of digital interfaces hence many of my thoughts align with it.

Lately, I have been reading and hearing a lot about Product Management and came across this new term called Product Designer.

Well, it’s not new, it’s synonymous to Industrial Design as earlier the product was always tangible and having a physical form. The era of Industrial Design started with World War 1 when fighter planes were getting crashed and the reason found was an incorrect mapping of the steering to aircraft pitch (go up or down). Pilots used to pull the steer back thinking that it will lift the aircraft whereas it nosedived. This brought into light the human mental models and ergonomics to light which gave rise to designing products and systems. The design decisions were mostly based on empirical 📊 data generated by conducting tests of prototypes on a very large set of users.

Since the advent of computer software, HCI-Human Computer Interaction field was introduced which was again based on empirical data and human behavioral theories.

Later Interaction Design term was coined when computer systems became accessible to the general public and Apple introduced an aspect of experience with computing. Although this is similar to HCI, a large part of it is dependent on studying users before they get the products in hand.

So here am creating a quick SketchNote ✍️ ️of what I think are qualities of Good Product Designer and what they mean.

This Sketch can either be used as a direction to understand the work of Designers, frame role and responsibilities in companies, as a hiring metric or just a Graphical Illustration on the office wall to make it look COOL 😎