What EXACTLY is Product Design? 🤔

That's a great design. But what is design really? Is it how a door opens, or is it how a website makes us feel? Is it a logo, or is it the combination of colors, shapes, and words? And what exactly is product design? How is it any different than interior design, logo design, graphic design, or fashion design? Well, let's answer one question at a time, shall we? If we look up some definitions of design, we'll discover that it's a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made. Well, I guess we now clearly know what design is and we can just end this video right now and— I don't know about you, but when I read these definitions, I still didn't understand what design actually was. So let's look at some examples of design. And how it applies to the real world. I think we can actually all agree that this is an example of bad design. This is called a Norman door, named after Don Norman, design guru and author of The Design of Everyday Things. Don describes design as an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating. And this makes total sense because door design with these handles communicate pull, and doors with this design communicate push. So put simply, design is not simply how something looks, it's how it works. So now that we know what design is, where does that place product design? If we know that design is how something works, then we can naturally deduce that product design is how a product is supposed to work. But product design actually goes a bit deeper. So let's actually take a look at the Interaction Design Foundation and see how they define product design. They define it as the process designers use to blend user needs with business goals to help brands make consistently successful products. An example of product design is determining how the app Uber should work. It essentially helps solve a user problem or user need of convenient, fast, at your service transportation with a tap of a button on your phone. And it combines that with business goals such as pricing models to help determine based on supply and demand what the pricing level should be to hit sustainable revenue numbers for the brand. So put simply, a product designer determines how a product should work based on business goals and a great user experience.

So something that actually surprised me about being a product designer is just the amount of work that is not design. So let me explain. I noticed that I was actually interacting with clients. I was doing user research. I was trying to focus in on strategy and all of these things that require a significant amount of time and thinking and strategizing. All these things actually exist outside of using your typical tools like Adobe XD. And I think those are essential skills for a product designer because you're not just designing designing an interface. You're not a pixel pusher. You're a thinker. You're an architect. You're thinking about the why behind why buttons and elements and experiences are the way they are. We're kind of expected to be the, the architects of a product and understand the business goals, understand user pain points, and be able to address those pain points in a data-driven way. That's something that surprised me the most about being a product designer.

So now that we know what design is and we know what product design is, how does that stack up against interior design, logo design, graphic design, and fashion design? If we take what we learned about what design means, which is the process of figuring out how something should work, then we can apply this definition broadly to other forms of design. Interior design is a process of determining what the interior of an office or a home should look and how it should function. It's the process of figuring out where things should go. Logo design is the process of figuring out how a logo should look like, whether it should be a pictorial mark or a letter mark, what colors it should represent and why. That is what logo design is. And the same can be said about graphic design. It's the process of figuring out what a graphic should be, what it should look like, and what it should communicate to the end user. So fashion design is the process of figuring out what a clothing item or accessory should look like when someone wears it. The colors, the fabrics, all these things are included in the design of fashion. These videos are extremely time-consuming to make. I'm still not really good at video editing, or at least being efficient at video editing. So if you can do me one huge favor, that's hit that subscribe button and like this video. That would mean the world to me. And until next time, adiós.