Digital design changes names — the work remains

Two early perspectives on UX: analyzing or creating

Before I started studying Interaction Design at Chalmers University of Technology, I studied Cognitive Science in Skövde. It was an interesting education that provided a deep understanding of perception, cognition, and human behavior. We read classics like The Design of Everyday Things, conducted heuristic evaluations, and ran user studies.

But something was missing.

The focus was largely on analyzing and identifying problems in existing solutions — less on actually creating new ones. It felt like a program that prepared you for the role of a usability engineer: someone who could point out issues and needs, but not necessarily shape solutions.

When the Interaction Design program at Chalmers launched the following year, the contrast was clear. There, design was primary. We were expected to create, build, test, and iterate. Research and usability were present, but as support for design — not as goals in themselves.

That tension between analysis and creation has followed the UX role ever since. It still exists today.

UI engineer — when digital design was close to the product

In 2004, I started working at Sony Ericsson as a UI Engineer. The title reflected a time when design and implementation were closely connected, especially in mobile product teams before touchscreens became standard.

We were a design team of around 10–15 people, each with end-to-end responsibility for specific applications in the phones. My primary responsibility was media applications — music and video players — at a time when MP3 files were just becoming common on mobile devices.

The role carried significant influence over both design and functionality.

By creating clear design visions and prototypes, we could drive what functionality was needed, in close dialogue with product management and development. The constraints were clear: no touchscreens, only buttons and softkeys. That required careful prioritization of actions, navigation structures, and ways to manage complexity.

User research was a natural part of the work. We ran classic usability studies with lab observations, often with product management and developers observing live. We also conducted phone interviews with users in test programs, for example during the launch of the first Walkman phones.

Still, most of the time was spent shaping a functional and efficient interface: interaction patterns, structure, and UI design. Visual polish and iconography were handled later by a separate Creative Design Center once the solution had been defined.

Despite the technical title, the responsibility was clearly design- and user-centered.

When the UX title appeared — without changing the day-to-day work

Somewhere around 2006–2007, the title UX designer started to gain traction. For many, it represented more of a title change than a new role. That was certainly the case for us.

The work itself didn’t change much. It was still about structure, flows, interaction, UI, and product-level decisions. What changed was how organizations talked about design. UX became an umbrella term that made it easier to communicate the value of design at a more strategic level.

This is a recurring pattern in the history of the design profession: when organizations change, grow, or need to legitimize new perspectives, the language shifts — not necessarily the work.

BlackBerry: UX design and UX research

At BlackBerry, the organization looked different, but the core design role remained broad. As UX designers, we worked with design and prototyping, proposed and evaluated required functionality, and had strong influence over the final solution — even though product managers held a clearer mandate for defining requirements.

One notable difference was how user research was organized.

During our initial period at BlackBerry, we worked within an explicit buddy system, pairing each UX designer with a UX researcher. The researcher handled preparatory studies, ongoing testing, and synthesis of insights, allowing designers to focus more on shaping solutions — structure, interaction, UI, and overall coherence — based on a solid research foundation.

After about a year, this one-to-one model was discontinued. Instead, the organization moved toward a more flexible collaboration between UX design and research. Teams still worked closely together, but without fixed pairs. The buddy system worked well in some contexts, but proved limiting as products, teams, and needs varied.

This shift didn’t mean less focus on user insight — rather, it reflected a more mature balance between roles. UX design and UX research remained clearly defined competencies, but collaboration became more situational. Designers retained responsibility for the holistic solution, while research was scaled and applied where it delivered the most value.

Product designer — a new name for an existing responsibility

When the title product designer began appearing more frequently around 2016–2017, many designers immediately recognized themselves in it. The role described a combination of UX and UI with a clearer responsibility for the product as a whole — including prioritization, trade-offs, and alignment with business goals.

The timing was no coincidence.

Product organizations had grown more complex, design had become more central to product development, and the need for roles that could bridge multiple perspectives had become clearer. Product designer became a way to articulate that broader responsibility.

In practice, the role was rarely new. In many teams, designers had long been working at the intersection of user needs, interfaces, and product decisions — including in setups like the one we had at BlackBerry. The new title better captured the breadth of responsibility, but didn’t fundamentally change what experienced designers were already doing day to day.

Rather than introducing a new profession, product designer largely functioned as a relabeling of an existing responsibility that had previously been harder to describe using narrower titles.

What this says about digital design today

Looking back over two decades of digital design, a clear pattern emerges. Titles change alongside technology, trends, and organizational models. The core of the work remains surprisingly stable.

Understanding people, shaping effective interactions, and taking responsibility for how a product is actually used have always been central to the design role. Problems arise when titles are treated as precise specifications rather than approximate descriptions of responsibility.

For organizations and clients, this means focusing less on what a role happens to be called — and more on the responsibility and capability that’s actually required. For the design profession as a whole, it’s a reminder that the words we use are secondary.

Digital design changes names. The work remains.