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The Hats We Wear in Product Teams
In a product team, every role is important to ensure we are designing the products we love as well as what our users will love.
In the UX design world, those “roles” tend to be referred to as “hats”. We wear “hats” based on the tasks we do at a given moment and due to the amount of skills we can have as UX designers, sometimes we go between different skills or roles. There are many hats one can wear, but in a company setting, we tend to stick to wearing one hat, which is our main role.
But having one role goes against what UX designers do. UX designers have a wide spectrum of skills. It is just a matter of getting out of the mindset of having “one” role and being able to seamlessly transition to many. In fact, most of our skills overlap because the nature of some of these roles are similar to one another.
Hats are important because they symbolize the countless abilities designers can utilize depending on the situation. Which hats do you like wearing and which hats would you consider wearing in the future?
Some of these descriptions are based on my experience working in design, but if you have a different experience of how design teams work in your company, feel free to leave a comment down below. :)
UX Design Hat
A UX designer is in charge of designing the product experience. This means mapping out how an user would use a product/service from the beginning, middle and end by understanding their needs, wants and pains. UX designers have control of the design process to develop/enhance the interaction which takes place between the company and the user, the midpoint being the product experience.
A UX designer needs to be hands on with as many human centered methods as possible in order to create great human experiences.
UX designers communicate through human-centered methods, such as helping conduct user testing with UX researchers, developing scenarios based on use cases provided by product managers and testing/developing the product…
