Design Levels for Product Designers
Job titles
Job titles can sometimes appear very confusing and make us question where to position ourselves. Although it might change from company to company, here’s a basic hierarchy ladder to serve as a rough guide.
Google Design Levels
- Intern: User Experience Design
- Lvl 3: Interaction/Visual Designer II
- Lvl 4: Interaction/Visual Designer II
- Lvl 5: Senior Interaction/Visual Designer
- Lvl 6: Staff Interaction/Visual Designer
- Lvl 7: Senior Staff Interaction/Visual Designer
- Lvl 8: Principle Designer
Facebook Design Levels Example
In Julie Zhuo’s article “How to Work with Designers” she describes how the designer responsibility increases while working on a profile design:
- Designer Lvl 1: Design a form for people to edit their profile, very scoped.
- Designer Lvl 2: Design the best interface to edit their profile.
- Designer Lvl 3 (broad): Design a system for editing across everything profiles, posts, settings, etc.
- Designer Lvl 3 (deep): Design a way to get users to want to update their profiles. A designer should ask questions to understand the users’ motivations and needs when updating a profile.
- Designer Lvl 4: Design a solution to increase the authenticity of users among your app. What’s the ultimate goal? Maybe profile design is not the right way to answer it.
- Designer Lvl 5: Identify the biggest product problem with your app/ company/site and design a solution. At the highest level, the best designers drive the vision for a product.
