How to Become a Product Designer: My Experience of Transition From Graphic Design
This article describes my experience becoming a product designer from a graphic one. I’ll share some tips on the necessary skills a product designer needs, how to create your first portfolio, and how to prepare for the job interview.
My career started with graphic design—I dreamed of designing books and fonts. Before changing my specialization, I worked at Hooga; I participated in a project that won a Red Dot award (“Corruption Park”).
At some point, I realized I could do more good for businesses and users in product design.
Designers mostly don't mind specific metrics when creating a book or visual identity. They don’t question themselves: how will my work affect the product profitability? Will the book be convenient for readers? This got me frustrated at work.
I had planned to switch to product design for a year and a half. During this time, I made my first simple websites on Tilda and Readymag and later began studying Webflow. So, I dived into how websites are created and designed. I also read plenty of guides and articles to understand how a product designer works. Finally, after self-study, I decided to take courses to structure my knowledge.
I got my first job as a product designer at GR8 Tech. Later, I joined Genesis, where we developed mobile apps, games, and web projects. My responsibilities included:
- Conducting research.
- Developing and redesigning current products.
- Maintaining and creating design systems on projects.
- Mentoring and training junior designers.
What graphic design skills will come in handy?
Many skills that a graphic designer already has will be of use during the transition, such as:
- Drawing icons. You can create custom icons for apps and websites. Yes, there’s always an illustrator or graphic designer for help, but it saves time if the product designer creates icons themselves.
- Creating visual identity. You’ll need this experience to hit the audience when shaping the product’s visual style. I still create mood boards with a general style to find the right visual language.
- Book design. The general knowledge of the creating layout helps understand how UI interfaces are created.
- Working with animation is necessary, as you will often design transitions between screens, icons, and components.
What skills do you need to acquire?
Don’t overthink the interface look; instead, try to focus on a successful user experience. The product designer’s goal is to make the business profitable and the users happy. This is what product designers and movie directors have in common—they can create anything as long as it fits into the budget and shows the result. The movie needs to break the box office.
You will require basic product designer skills, no matter where you work.
Product designer hard skills:
- Developing products for iOS, Android, macOS, and Web and knowing all the technical features of these platforms. Often, designers focus on one platform in a product — for example, iOS or Android. However, it would be best to study how each of them works because some behaviour patterns can be unexpectedly helpful to you. For example, patterns from macOS may be required when designing iOS apps, and vice versa. Thus, you may bring something new to the interface design.
- Creating a visual language of a product means finding its style, applying it, and scaling it.
- Testing your design solutions. To do this, you should know how to conduct interviews, create basic prototypes in Figma, and work with data from qualitative research. Only practice will help here. You can learn by taking tests on existing apps to improve your skills.
- Forming hypotheses based on user research and analytics. Research can often be done by product managers or teams of UX researchers. However, product designers should be able to work with qualitative or quantitative research data. It is best to conduct user interviews by themselves and form the hypotheses with the team. You can learn this right in the working process or the courses.
- Working with Figma, Sketch, Adobe, etc., requires basic technical knowledge of these tools. You can learn them yourself on YouTube. It’s better to focus on Figma because most products have either already switched to it or are in the process of transition. Improve the basic tools constantly, and don’t forget to go through all Figma tutorials if they update.
- Animating and assembling prototypes. The main tools are After Effects and Principle. It’s essential to know how to work with JSON animation and submit an animation for development.
- Design management means managing the project and adjusting processes in the design team. This skill is essential when working with multiple designers on big products.
- English knowledge (Intermediate at least) is essential as most professional articles, tutorials, and free courses are in English. Clients are also likely to be English-speaking. Anyway, if you’ve read this far, you probably haven’t got any problems with this skill :)
Your skills may be required depending on your place of work, so you should be able to develop new skills and adapt to the current project's needs.
Courses, practices, and communication with developers and other designers will help you along the way. I recommend taking courses (Projector, Apollo, and Kama are good Ukrainian schools) and reading articles by the Nielsen Norman Group. You’ll acquire many skills right in the work process.
Soft skills are also necessary:
- Complying with the principles of nonviolent communication.
- The ability to learn new things from colleagues, understand how analysts, product managers, and developers work, and listen to their expertise. Product designers communicate with plenty of people on the project.
- Pitching and selling your ideas.
- Fast-learning.
How do you make your career development plan?
1. Start reading a lot. Don’t try to design anything at first; spend a few weeks on Medium, study Human Interface Guidelines and Material Design, and read articles by Nielsen Norman Group. I added links to specific articles at the end of the post.
It will be hard at first, but this knowledge will be useful. Don’t worry if you don’t understand or remember something. What matters is that you know where to find information. I still visit Material occasionally to remember how this or that feature works.
2. When the guides become clearer, move on to the interfaces. Choose an app or a website you like, take screenshots, and combine the user flow. This will help you understand how the interface works and how to design such flows.
3. Next, try repeating the design. It’s easy as pie; the more you design, the better the results. There is no need to make an exact copy; add your own vision. Then, try creating an architecture for a personal project and drawing wireframes.
4. Be sure to test your ideas on colleagues and friends. That’s an easy way to understand whether your design solution works or needs refinement.
5. Create multiple options. There were projects where I had to create 200 drafts of one screen. There is never a perfect solution, and you can always do better.
6. Keep your layouts in order and follow the 8-pixel grid. Web developers will thank you later.
Where can you study?
Here are courses in Russian and Ukrainian that I recommend.
UX Design at KAMA. I took this course myself, and I highly recommend it for beginners. Here, you’ll master the skills needed to start working as a designer. While studying at KAMA, I started working for one of the leading technology companies, for which I’m grateful to my curator, Aleksey Stiques. At the time, he believed I would succeed. Read about how I took the course here.
Product Interface Design Professium at Projector. This course is for those with experience in design. You will structure your knowledge and understand the processes profoundly.
UX / UI: user interface design by bangbangeducation is an extensive course that will organize your knowledge. It’s more suited to experienced designers.
Explore more courses in my Design Library.
I think you’ll also need a mentor during your studies. Although you can find all the information yourself, it will be difficult for you to realize your strengths and weaknesses without a mentor.
What if there’s no opportunity to take courses?
If courses aren’t an option, ask your fellow designers for advice. You can message me or any designer whose work you like. We are open people and always happy to give feedback.
I often turn to designers from Wetransfer, Dropbox, and other product companies via Twitter. There are also many Ukrainian channels on Telegram where you can ask any questions. For example, R9. Research Community, kyivux, Figma chat.
How to make your first portfolio?
There are many options and discussions on designing a portfolio, such as whether to make case studies and get awards on Behance. However, it all seems pointless to me now.
In my opinion, the best option is to create a profile in Figma Community and publish your designs there. Then, a potential employer can see your work and evaluate your skills.
You can also create a website with your case studies. Again, describing the cases in detail is important because that’s how you show your way of thinking, not only the design itself.
Your first project can be a redesign of existing ones. Try to find a problem in a real product and redo the design. As an option, you can offer your services to charitable or volunteer organizations pro bono.
How do you get ready for your first interview?
Be sure to save your CV in PDF format. Many companies print them out, so they should look good on A4.
Don’t mention the percentage of knowledge you have in Figma. Honestly, tell where you worked and what you can do. When interviewing designers, I focused on how the candidates design, why they make such decisions, and how many options they show.
If you are applying for a junior position, your soft skills play a key role. Employers pay attention to whether the candidate is open to criticism and explains their decisions well. Some product companies use the whiteboard practice instead of test tasks. A whiteboard is a quick test with a UX task on a whiteboard. You need to quickly develop a design solution in a stressful situation and explain why you propose it. It’s not the result that’s evaluated here but your way of thinking.
When you get your first job in a product company, ask a lot of questions and hang on every word. Communicate with team members as you should know who’s doing what and how. Pay attention to the job requirements; try not just to complete the task in Jira, but to find and solve the problem that users have. Be active and keep your eyes on the little things.
Useful links
- The Apple guide Human Interface Guidelines helps understand the design principles for iOS and macOS platforms.
- The guide by Google Material Design has a lot of information about the basic rules of design. Useful for Android platforms.
- Nngroup is a Nielsen Norman Group research on different patterns in interfaces.
- A complete guide to the product design process (Russian) is an article about a product designer’s work.
- Webframe.xyz — references and patterns in interfaces.
- How to choose the right metrics for a product (Russian) on Medium.
- Here is the checklist for design.
I also recommend using apps that will help you grow professionally. Adaptivity (iOS) and MaterialX—Android Material Design UI (Android) are apps for designers and developers to better understand interaction patterns.
Books
- Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler gives a profound understanding of user logic.
- Ptolemy’s map (Russian) by Herz Frank helps us understand how to evoke certain emotions in users.
- Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek is a good book for design rookies where complicated things are described.
- Living with Complexity by Donald Norman explains why interfaces are complex and when this complexity can be useful.
You can reach out to me at muntyan.dana@gmail.com or on Twitter, and you can find the rest of me at danielamuntyan.com.
