What’s it like being Product Experience Designers?

Aurore Firtion and Manuel Zepic | Hands & Minds

Our Product Experience Designers are the mavericks behind some of our most visionary work. From idea to conception, they’re always at the ready…

What do you do as a Product Experience Designer?

Aurore: Our job is to design products that offer users the best possible experience with the product and at the same time authentically represent the brands of our clients. The spectrum of product developments ranges from a facelift to completely new, innovative design developments.

Projects often start with an analysis of the market situation, figuring out the potential ways to differentiate from the competition. This may include participating in research conducting interviews to understand consumer expectations and create accurate user journeys. All of this helps us to generate outstanding ideas and concepts, pushing the quality and performance of a client`s product offering.

As we often deal with smart products, we closely collaborate with KISKA’s Interaction Designers who work in the same space. This leads to constructive discussions in which the different expertise and perspectives contribute to creating excellent products and user experiences.

Describe your day-to-day work.

Manuel: Aurore and I focus on the actual product design, so we can concentrate fully on the creative process. For now, we stay away from organisational activities as much as possible.

For us, it’s all hands-on industrial design work. Processing the design brief and researching. Then concept development and brainstorming ideas with a lot of hand sketching or digital sketching (depends on the designer; I like hand sketching). And finally creating 3D concept models and renderings up to the refined final design.

We regularly have alignment meetings with our Design Lead, where we check the status of the design development and decide which ideas to further pursue and which directions to refine.

How would you describe the dynamic on your team?

Aurore: We are lucky to have lots of inspiring people in house with different expertise and experience backgrounds who are happy to help you out any time.

Manuel: We are a team of highly ambitious designers who strive for “excellence”, so there is always a chance to inspire each other, and space for the individual designer to realise their ideas in a project.

What’s the best thing about your job? And, the most challenging?

Manuel: The variation is unlike anything else. Every project is a new challenge that you have to deal with in order to be able to design it. You need to adapt your process depending on the task, which may also affect the use of the design tools and the visualisation style.

Aurore: The best and most challenging part of my job are the same, which is being able to realise a product from idea to production, all while exceeding client expectations and maintaining the same level of enthusiasm throughout.

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