What the title covers
Deciding how something should work for the person using it, then showing what it should look like. In practice that splits into three activities. Research means watching people use something, interviewing them, and testing whether a change helped. Interaction design means the flows, the states, and what happens when something goes wrong, which is most of the real work. Visual design means layout, type, colour and the reusable components a team builds from. Almost every job is a mixture, and the mixture depends far more on the size of the team than on the words in the title.
A second use of this title
On a large team the three activities are separate jobs. A researcher may never open the design file, and an interface designer may work entirely from someone else's findings. That is the version where the title tells you something, because the company has enough designers to specialise.
A title with a slash in it, or a single designer at a small company, means all three plus whatever else needs doing, which regularly includes marketing graphics and the occasional slide deck. Neither is better. The first builds depth and the second builds range, and the first is much harder to enter without either the second or a degree behind you.
Where it is found
Anywhere with a screen between a company and its customers, which is now most places.
Typical entry requirements
- Education
- Bachelor's degree, though this is one of the few fields where a strong portfolio genuinely outweighs the degree
- Expected
- A portfolio that shows your reasoning, not only finished screens
- Frequently required
- Figma. It has become close to universal
- Often listed
- A written case study walking through one problem from confusion to solution
- Experience
- Zero to three years. Career changers and self taught designers are common and are taken seriously here