where should a designer go to work, and why do banks pay so much?
This article is for beginners and adult designers. Beginners will understand which way to look and where to look for their first job. Experienced guys will answer the questions: “Am I doing what I do?” and “Is it worth changing my profession?”
I have worked on large digital products and small studio projects, and now I share my experience and useful things in my tg channel. Check it out!
The first years in design are the most difficult. As soon as you begin to recognize yourself as a designer, you immediately get lost in incomprehensible terms, opinions and requirements of the industry.
— What kind of designer am I – a designer or a product designer?
— Do you need to become a product designer?
— Why is everyone talking about research, but I’m just drawing models?
— When will I need a collection of fonts?
— Design tokens and A/B tests – do I really need them?
– Where do they pay more?
— Will neural networks replace me?
The design routine can be frustrating. Sometimes tasks don't meet expectations. Some people still don't know what to expect. This article will help you put things in order in your head.
What will we look into?
Hunters and Farmers: two types of designers
All people are naturally divided into two types: “hunters” and “farmers”. The separation began about 10 thousand years ago and helped us survive. This is how two opposing approaches to life, work and creativity were formed.
Designers are also divided into two categories based on their style of work. “Hunters” love novelty – they enter uncharted territory and rethink the familiar. Farmers are better able to support and develop existing products and generally accepted concepts. The first is closer to chaos, the second – order.
The role of the hunter designer is to come up with new concepts. Typically, such guys work in creative agencies and often change projects. Most often, conceptual designers lead a project from idea to launch and participate in the formation of the vision. Typical questions: “How to change people’s attitudes towards…”, “How else can we solve this problem?”, “Are we even solving the problem?”
The role of the agricultural designer is to improve and develop. The main tasks: do not break what works, improve what is ineffective, think years ahead and reduce risks. Such “guardians” are valued for their systems thinking, meticulous attention to detail, and predictability. Typical questions: “How can we improve this?”, “How will this affect the product in a year?”, “How will we measure success?”
Both roles are fundamentally important. The need for different design competencies arises at different stages of the product life cycle.
Real example from practice.
A fast food restaurant chain wants a mobile app. The first thing a company does is contact a mobile development studio. The studio launches a product within six months or a year. The customer takes the project in-house and develops it for several years using his own designers. The team looks at analytics, cuts features, and the metrics are slowly growing. One day, financial indicators hit the ceiling. Top management goes to another creative agency with a request to rethink the product and create a new design concept.
This is the product “wheel of Samsara”, and at each stage the efforts of different designers are required.
Studio or product: fundamental differences
Now let’s look at the main differences between working as a designer in a studio and working in an in-house team for a digital product.
Abstract companies for comparison:
“Studio” is a company of 100 people. It launches turnkey websites and applications for clients from e-commerce, fintech and retail.
“Product” is a mobile application of a large bank with an ecosystem. The corporation's divisions employ tens of thousands of employees.
We will compare the duration of projects, salaries, types of tasks and required skills.
Average project duration
A studio project lasts 4–8 months, less often a year or longer. Loyal clients return after a year with a new project or to improve an existing one. The designer changes the project every few months, often running two projects in parallel.
The product lives and develops over years and decades. A designer rarely witnesses a launch and rarely works until a product closes. About once a year, employees move to a neighboring team of the current product or to another product in the ecosystem. We worked on the credit card section for a year, and then moved to the investment section team.
Types of projects
The studio takes on projects of almost any subject. Today we are creating an online jewelry store, tomorrow we will deliver hot dogs, and in a month we will create a dashboard for a fast food chain. A designer has to immerse himself in a new area over and over again.
The product is one big project. The niche and decision maker may change when moving to another ecosystem product. The designer dives deeply into the product area and begins to understand the intricacies of this particular business.
Typical tasks
Studio: brief a new client, study competitors, collect references, draw up a CJM, draw a design concept, design a solution from scratch, come up with a feature, come up with a structure, play with fonts, develop advertising creatives, talk about the brand, make animations, defend the design in front of the client , layout the site.
Product: find out the strategy for the quarter, understand the key metrics of the product, look at the analytics system, review the existing design, increase conversion, make options for A/B tests, support and scale the existing design system, work with legacy, align the interests of several stakeholders, coordinate a solution with several departments, generate and test hypotheses, participate in qualitative research, update your tasks on the project Kanban.
Freedom and responsibility
In the Studio, between you and the client there is usually a manager and an art director. Sometimes the art director is not regularly involved in the project, so you show him the layouts from time to time. The decision maker attends weekly calls with the team. Creative ideas fall into the hands of the client almost unhindered, the responsibility lies with the designer.
The decision-making hierarchy in large product companies is most often vertical. Any change on the main screen of the banking application goes through the lead designer, product and all managers above him. Creative freedom is limited by the design system, brand, financial goals, legacy, interests of different departments of the company, analytics and the vision of the product manager. The cost of a mistake will be low.
Key skills
Beginning designers, whether in the Studio or in the Product, will need approximately the same skills. The ability to beautifully layout layouts and defend your work is the basis.
The competencies of studio and senior-level product designers sometimes don’t even overlap.
Studio work requires flexibility, speed and originality. Each project is different from the previous one, deadlines are always tight. A designer in such a company can draw an application concept in a week. Clients are different, each needs a different approach. The main task: to come up with something new and bring it to life with minimal means.
The product implies methodical, routine and long-term work. A designer must think systematically. Business indicators are a priority. The designer is deeply immersed in the technical features of the product, in the market situation, and knows how to work with metrics. Skills in working with large design systems and tokens help the designer not to break processes. Beauty and creativity give way to A/B tests and research. A product designer is aware of the work of other designers and neighboring teams, and knows how his decisions will affect the product as a whole.
Salaries
A product designer will most often earn more than a similar level specialist in a studio. It's about unit economics.
The Studio's income is proportional to the designer's labor costs. So we sold the project for 1 million rubles, subtracted costs, taxes, set aside a little for the future and paid the designer the remaining 100,000 rubles. The more projects, the more costs. The studio owner cannot pay the designer 200,000 rubles, otherwise the projects will become unprofitable.
The Product's income is not proportional to the designer's labor costs. The bank makes money on credit cards and mortgages. The cost of maintaining 10 designers for a bank is not much more than maintaining a hundred. If a successful design solution increases the conversion rate for issuing a credit card by 10%, then the bank will earn an extra ten billion. Such a designer can be paid at least a million a month.
Who is suitable for working in the studio?
If you value novelty and are ready to try yourself in different areas of design, then the Studio is suitable for you. This is where your font folder and 3D skills come in handy. The work here is dynamic, the degree of uncertainty is high, and your decisions are unconventional. Lower wages are compensated by creative freedom.
Who is better to go to the product
If you love consistency, complexity and scale, go for the product. This is where your saved files with articles on research and tests will come in handy. You'll make small, iterative changes in the Product that will impact millions of users. Analytics systems will allow you to measure the results of each of your layouts.
Don't rush to change your profession
Expectations from future work do not always coincide with reality, which makes fresh designers quickly burn out.
In most cases, the problem is not in the profession, but in the specifics of a particular company. Some designers are oppressed by corporate culture, while others cannot handle uncertainty and chaos.
If you're already thinking about quitting design and buying a video making course, then slow down. Ask yourself a few questions first:
— What tasks did I do when design still motivated me?
— Which designers inspire me? What projects are they doing?
— Which part of my work drives me, and which part do I do because I “have to”?
— At what moments does procrastination begin? Is there a common pattern?
-What do I want to learn? What do I want to try?
— Do I feel the significance of my work?
— What need am I trying to compensate for outside of work?
Thirty minutes of conscious internal dialogue will suggest the direction of further action. Often it is enough to change the project within the company, in some cases it is worth looking for another job. It happens that designers completely change the profile – it was interface, now it is graphic.
Should you become a product designer?
I'm sure there are no product designers, no UX designers, no alpha/beta/gamma designers. There are strong and weak designers.
A strong designer by definition understands business and economics, and knows how to measure the results of his work and research. You don't need the “Senior Product Designer” badge to be in demand. There is always a shortage of smart and versatile personnel.
Becoming a product designer is not necessary. If you want more analytics, go to the product; if you don’t, that’s okay too. Your expertise and experience will be no worse. You will not become a less valuable specialist without the “product” attribute.
Which neural network designers will be replaced first?
Ilya Birman once said that if a designer is afraid of artificial intelligence, then the designer is clearly doing something wrong.
The greatest strength of AI is the automation of routine, template actions. If you do the work according to the algorithm, then the neuron can handle it too. If you make decisions based only on numbers, then the machine will be able to do the same. Don't try to compete with the computer in math.
For a snack
I recommend Birman's podcast with Misha Nozik “Design departments with pipettes”. This article is partly inspired by ideas from the issue.
