What does a day in the life of a product design engineer at Shockoe look like? It depends.
Key Takeaways:
- The product design engineer job description spans the entire development pipeline
- One day’s activities may differ from the next depending on the stage of a product’s lifecycle
- Generally, these professionals will spend most of their time researching, conceptualizing, building the product’s architecture, prototyping, and testing, but they can also take on other responsibilities
- The role of a product design engineer is one that requires collaboration with users, product managers, and fellow designers and engineers to achieve success
The product design engineer job description spans the entire development pipeline. Professionals working in the field research markets to identify gaps, define problems, and work across business, coding, UI, UX, and sound design to bring a product idea to life. It might be a new browser function, an app, or anything else that solves user pain points through digital design.
This article looks at how Shockoe’s experts spend their day helping businesses bring quality products to market. Let’s dive in.
Scope of product design engineering at Shockoe
The day-to-day life of a product design engineer at Shockoe typically includes activities such as researching competitors and new product features, brainstorming ideas, running analytics to prove theories, conducting SWOT analyses, concept planning, chatting with business teams and end users to gather insights, sketching out designs or wireframes, coding user interfaces, and testing products.
You can think of these pros as the conductors of your digital orchestra. They pull roles together, often collaborating with users, product managers, and fellow designers and engineers to deliver quality products within time and budget constraints.
However, no two days are the same for Shockoe’s product design engineers – activities may vary depending on the stage of a product’s lifecycle.
Research, ideation, and brainstorming
In the early stages of product development, Shockoe’s product design engineers work closely with clients to understand the project goals and problems they are trying to solve. This ensures they have a roadmap of what’s coming down the pipeline and that they’re prioritizing the most valuable work – whether it’s for the business, end-user, or other stakeholders.
At this point, they’ll typically spend most of their time researching customer needs and preferences to ensure they’re building the product concept around the target market from the start.
The research might include studying industry news, digging through reviews shared on forums and social platforms, collecting user feedback through interviews/online surveys, or analyzing competitor designs to better position the client’s product.
In addition, the product design engineers may look at your portfolio to see if you have any existing products that address similar customer pain points. If there aren’t, it’s time to explore new viable design opportunities.
Brainstorming and design thinking sessions come in handy when generating new ideas. Here, the product design engineers may substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to a different use, eliminate, or rearrange the product concept to develop a unique solution.
Want to become more innovative in your product ideation? Schedule a call to learn how our team’s unique idea-generation techniques can give you an edge.
Building the information architecture, sketching, and wireframing
How you sort out the available data, functions, and features significantly impacts user experience. Therefore, it’s essential to create a digital product that’s easy to navigate so users can perform tasks faster without getting stuck.
A significant part of product design engineers’ time is spent on forming a strong information architecture – the blueprint for the design structure. They’ll create a categorization and hierarchy of the information obtained from the product design process to build a coherent, meaningful, navigable system.
Hard copy or digital design sketching clarifies the problem and makes team idea sharing easier. It helps the product design engineers narrow down ideas, flows, and possible layouts to develop the wireframe – the skeleton of the upcoming prototype that will soon evolve into a refined design.
By this point, the engineers have a clear concept of what it’ll take to design the product successfully, which strategy they’ll use, and the top priorities. The focus now shifts to building a minimum viable product (MVP) through prototyping.
Prototyping
Prototyping typically occurs at the latter stages of product development. During this period, Shockoe’s product design engineers often spend their days building prototypes to test/validate their hypotheses. It’s at this point that they’ll add visual attributes, images, shadows, icons, and colors, refine the look and feel of the product, and align the design language with your brand’s vision.
The focus here is on making the digital product intuitive enough that users can answer three essential questions on each page/screen: where they are, what they can do there, and how they can move forward.
Therefore, the product design engineers will spend most of their time evaluating the product’s ease of navigation, key user flows, and usability of layouts to find and resolve usability issues before building the initial design. This saves time and eliminates unnecessary reworks in the future.
By its very definition, prototyping is an iterative process. That means product engineers must test and refine prototypes until they’re comfortable that they’ve ruled out every usability risk. Even after launching the final product, these professionals must continue usability testing to ensure the product works as it should at all times.
Testing
At Shockoe, we believe the best way to test a product’s functionality and intuitiveness is by getting it into people’s hands. This means enlisting the help of beta testers, target users of the product, and even team members to assure quality in the development process.
In addition to one-on-one testing – showing people a product and asking them for opinions – our product design engineers also use methods such as A/B testing, fake door testing, and Wizard of OZ testing to collect feedback to create well-rounded digital products.
Searching for the right digital products agency?
The ability to build intuitive user-centered products is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity in today’s competitive digital space. Often, products that make life easier for users become their favorite. While building products around value creation is the way to win, it isn’t necessarily an easy journey, especially if you don’t have an in-house product development team.
Partner with Shockoe
Partnering with a digital products expert like Shockoe can ensure you have all the help you need to impress your users, grow your business, and stay competitive. Our team includes experts with unique and varied backgrounds who work to give your digital solution an edge. We can help you develop high-level product concepts and see them through to implementation.
Schedule a time with our team and let’s discuss your current challenges. Shockoe’s experts are ready to assist with your product strategy, design, development, growth, and other digital product services needs.