Product Designer Career Path & Resources
Design is one of the most popular majors in the world. Right at the top of the pyramid – Product Design. The highly analytical and yet creative career is highly in demand.
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Why should you become a
Product Designer?
Every year, thousands of students graduate from a design degree. Yet, only a minority of them will ever work in a design-related field. Not so in product design. The cross-disciplinary field of work combined creativity, design, product analytics and business thinking to generate a career that's highly in demand.
And the growth of the product designer is not looking to slow down. As UI and UX work becomes more important, so is the role of the product designer.
Best books to build Product Design understanding.
A well-written and thorough book can be an amazing path to build deeper understanding and also act as a
handbook as you discover the internet's vast resources.
These are our and our experts top picks to get
started building career-relevant skills.
The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
Design doesn't have to complicated, which is why this guide to human-centered design shows that usability is just as important as aesthetics. Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
In Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, the celebrated innovation and design firm, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject. Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don’t Make Me Think a classic–with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read. If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.
The Laws of Simplicity
Ten laws of simplicity for business, technology, and design that teach us how to need less but get more. Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.
The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made
Embrace Open Engineering and accelerate the design and manufacturing processes. Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Organizations should be drawing on the creativity of engaged customers and outsiders, but instead they rely on the same small group of internal "experts" for new ideas. Designers and engineers should be connecting with marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and most importantly, customers. The Art of Product Design explains the rise of "Open Engineering," a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes. Explains how to establish open flows of information inside and outside an organization, increasing the quality and frequency of input from different groups and stakeholders. Hardi Meybaum is the founder and CEO of GrabCad, the largest community of mechanical engineers and designers in the world
Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design
As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book’s contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.
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Courses to deepen your Product Design skills.
These days, courses are no longer a sequence of videos. They are usually accompanied by projects and a
learning community, keeping you accountable and on the path.
Our experts recommend these courses, from free
selections to paid programs.
RIT Design Thinking Capstone
The capstone course, part of the Design Thinking MicroMasters program, will be a cumulative experience incorporating all aspects of the design thinking process, from end to end. In this course, you will be asked to solve a problem using the design thinking process. You will demonstrate your understanding by submitting a final project, along with documentation to support your findings.
Product Design by Google
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. This course is designed to help you materialize your game-changing idea and transform it into a product that you can build a business around. Product Design blends theory and practice to teach you product validation, UI/UX practices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for setting and tracking actionable metrics.
Complete Product Design From Home Course
At Home Engineering The Course has helped thousands of people worldwide to learn CAD and product design. This is the course to learn CAD, product design, and engineering fundamentals. I have over 8 years of experience designing and building in industry and research, and I have a Masters of Science in mechanical engineering from the U of MN. I was a mechanical engineer at Google [X], and I've worked with multiple world-leading researchers in technology. After taking this course, you will be able to make custom parts from almost any material, including metal, plastic, ceramic, and composites, enhancing you through tools and knowledge. Using modern, professional, and free tools, I bring together the best of the internet to get you designing and building in 2021.
Getting Started with Agile and Design Thinking Course - Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
Get an introduction to agile product development and design thinking so you can build better digital products. Discover how to create useful digital products using agile and design thinking. Despite everyone’s good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many projects end up creating unneeded, unusable, and unsellable products. But, it doesn’t have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different and effective approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this course, you’ll learn how to determine what’s valuable to a user early in the process, to frontload value, by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective.
Free Online Product Design Courses
Learn product design for free. We have created a learning path so that even if you have no experience, you can learn on your own, studying all the proposed resources to get into your dream job. No bullshit.
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The Product Design must-reads you shouldn't miss.
Key articles and posts of industry experts can help you get a better picture of what you are getting
into.
In our opinion, these are some must-reads you really shouldn't miss.
The Ultimate Guide to a Product Design Career
The hottest design role is also the most misunderstood one.
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How To Become A Product Designer in 2022
Learn how to become a Product Designer with no experience in 2022. Get expert insights on how to launch your Product Design career.
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What does a Product Designer do?
A product designer is responsible for the design and development of consumer products. Duties of this position include improving existing product designs and analyzing working concepts launched by competitors of similar products to match quality and performance. Depending on the industry and company, product designers may progress to a senior, executive or managerial role.
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The recipe for developing your career as a product designer
Picture this: You’re a product designer with a handful of years on your career path. You’ve cut your teeth on a few big launches and earned your stripes as a solid “mid level” product designer.
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What is a product designer, and how is it different from UX design?
The role of the designer has changed massively over the past 20 years. What used to be a job primarily about arranging colors, fonts, and images has branched off into multiple disciplines — most of which focus on interactive design.
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Opportunities and projects in the Product Design space.
In the end, advancing your career is all about getting the right opportunities at the right time and a
good portion of luck.
These are some interesting things going on in the Product Design space and you
probably don't want to miss them.
Product Design Project - TU Delft
Following is the final presentation video of the project done for the coursework of Advanced Embodiment Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft. The project was completed over the duration of a semester as a team effort and a new concept and working prototype being developed for it. The project was much appreciated for its level of detailing and novelty by both teaching staff of TU Delft and the designers at Philips.
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Sustainable Product Design | Final Year Project | Luke Meller
Sustainable Product Design BA(Hons) graduate, Luke Meller, discusses his final year project. Chompa is a food caddy designed specifically with composting and vermiculture in mind. The caddy aids in the process of recomposition from waste into highly nutritious food for our food! It does this by increasing the surface area of waste as it deposited into the caddy.
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Related career paths
If you like Product Design, you might also be interested
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