Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Design Specialist

🎯 Role Definition

A Design Specialist is a hands-on visual and product designer who translates business goals and user insights into polished, accessible, and on-brand digital and physical experiences. This role combines UX research, interaction design, visual design, and production-ready deliverables—working closely with product managers, engineers, content strategists, and marketing to build scalable design systems, prototypes, and assets that improve usability, engagement, and conversion. Strong candidates demonstrate proficiency with Figma/Sketch/Adobe Creative Cloud, an understanding of HTML/CSS, and an ability to advocate for accessibility, consistency, and measurable design outcomes.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Designer / Junior UX Designer transitioning from agency or in-house visual roles
Graphic Designer or Marketing Designer with digital experience
Product Designer Intern with portfolio of web/app projects

Advancement To:

Senior Product Designer
Design Lead or Design Manager
UX Lead or Head of Design

Lateral Moves:

UX Researcher (with additional research focus)
Front-end Developer (with stronger technical focus and HTML/CSS/JS skills)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead end-to-end visual and interaction design for web and mobile features, creating wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and interactive prototypes that communicate UX decisions, design rationale, and measurable objectives.
Develop and maintain a modular design system and component library (tokens, components, patterns) in Figma/Sketch that ensures visual consistency, accelerates product delivery, and scales across platforms.
Collaborate with product managers and engineers to translate business requirements into user-centered design solutions, ensuring feasibility, performance, and alignment with KPIs such as conversion, retention, and engagement.
Conduct user research activities, including contextual interviews, usability testing, remote moderated/unmoderated tests, and participatory workshops to validate design assumptions and inform iterative improvements.
Produce pixel-perfect UI assets and export-ready files for development, including detailed specs, redlines, CSS snippets, and interaction notes using tools like Zeplin, Figma Inspect, or Storybook.
Apply accessibility (WCAG) best practices to design accessible interfaces—auditing designs, recommending semantic structure, contrast, keyboard navigation, and working with engineers to implement ARIA attributes.
Create responsive and adaptive layouts that prioritize mobile-first experiences, ensuring graceful behavior across viewports and devices through flexible grids, constraints, and breakpoints.
Define user flows, information architecture, and navigation models to simplify complex journeys and reduce friction for multi-step processes such as onboarding, checkout, or account management.
Run A/B tests and collaborate with analytics teams to set success metrics, instrument experiments, analyze results, and iterate on designs based on quantitative and qualitative evidence.
Facilitate cross-functional design reviews, stakeholder presentations, and design critique sessions to gather feedback, align priorities, and secure buy-in for design direction and roadmap items.
Design marketing assets, landing pages, email templates, and campaign visuals that maintain brand integrity and convert prospects while ensuring handoff compatibility with marketing automation platforms.
Mentor junior designers and interns by providing constructive feedback, design guidance, and career coaching to elevate team quality and consistency.
Translate brand guidelines into digital-first visual language—typography, color systems, iconography, illustration, and motion—while ensuring implementation fidelity across product touchpoints.
Map and document UX research insights and personas to guide design decisions and maintain a repository of user needs, pain points, and behavioral patterns for the product team.
Collaborate with content strategists and copywriters to ensure microcopy, CTAs, and UX copywork together with visual design to create clear, persuasive, and usable interfaces.
Design interaction patterns and micro-interactions (motion design) that communicate system status, reduce cognitive load, and increase delight while adhering to performance constraints.
Troubleshoot visual and UX issues in production by conducting design QA, reviewing bug reports, and coordinating fixes with engineering to uphold quality standards.
Participate in sprint planning, estimation, and backlog grooming to ensure design work is scoped, prioritized, and delivered on schedule with appropriate acceptance criteria.
Advocate for data-informed design by partnering with analytics and customer success teams to surface user behavior, pain points, and opportunities for conversion optimization.
Own project documentation—specifications, acceptance criteria, design decisions, and version history—to ensure a clear audit trail and fast onboarding for new team members.
Partner with localization and internationalization teams to adapt visual layouts, typographic systems, and UI patterns for global audiences and right-to-left languages when applicable.
Evaluate and recommend design tools, plugins, and workflow improvements to streamline prototyping, designer-developer handoff, and cross-team collaboration.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc design requests and rapid prototyping for hackathons, executive demos, and internal tools.
Maintain and update brand asset libraries, photo libraries, and icon sets for marketing and product teams.
Provide periodic training and best-practice sessions on design tools and accessibility for cross-functional partners.
Conduct competitive design audits and heuristic evaluations to surface feature gaps and opportunity areas against industry benchmarks.
Contribute to the organization’s product design roadmap and help prioritize design debt and system improvements.
Assist in vendor management for external agencies, freelancers, and creative contractors to ensure deliverables meet brand and UX standards.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proficiency with design and prototyping tools such as Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision, and Framer for producing high-fidelity mockups and interactive prototypes.
Strong knowledge of visual design fundamentals: typography, color theory, layout, composition, and iconography tailored for digital products.
Experience building and maintaining design systems, reusable component libraries, design tokens, and documentation for cross-platform consistency.
Practical understanding of HTML, CSS and responsive web fundamentals to communicate effectively with front-end engineers and create production-ready assets.
Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1+), assistive technologies, and methods to design inclusive user experiences.
Hands-on experience conducting usability testing, synthesizing qualitative data, and translating insights into actionable design improvements.
Ability to produce annotated design specifications, redlines, and developer handoff documentation using tools like Zeplin, Figma Inspect, or Storybook.
Competence with motion and interaction design principles and tools (Principle, After Effects, Lottie) to craft micro-interactions and transitions.
Knowledge of analytics and A/B testing frameworks (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely) to measure design impact and iterate on outcomes.
Experience with version control for design files, collaborative libraries, and plugin ecosystems to streamline workflows in distributed teams.

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management and communication skills to present designs, influence decision-makers, and align cross-functional teams.
User-centered mindset with a bias toward action and iterative improvement based on research and data.
Critical thinking and problem-solving skills to break down complex user journeys into simple, elegant interactions.
Collaboration and teamwork orientation—comfortable working in agile/scrum environments and partnering with product, engineering, and marketing.
Time management and prioritization skills to balance multiple projects, deadlines, and shifting priorities.
Empathy for users and teammates, enabling effective facilitation of design critiques and user research sessions.
Attention to detail and a strong quality-first approach to visual execution and production deliverables.
Adaptability and continuous learning to keep up with evolving design patterns, tools, and industry best practices.
Coaching and mentorship ability to develop junior designers and raise overall team capability.
Persuasive storytelling skills to translate research, metrics, and design rationale into compelling narratives that drive action.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Visual Communication, Product Design, or related field — or equivalent professional experience with a strong portfolio.

Preferred Education:

Master’s in HCI, Human Factors, Product Design, or related advanced degree, or specialized certifications in UX, accessibility, or design systems.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Graphic Design
Interaction Design / UX Design
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Visual Communication / Multimedia Design
Product Design / Industrial Design

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of professional experience in digital product design, UX/UI, or visual design roles (agency or in-house).

Preferred:

5+ years of product or UX design experience with a portfolio demonstrating end-to-end projects, design systems, accessibility outcomes, and measurable business impact.
Prior experience working in agile product teams, collaborating closely with engineering and product management, and shipping customer-facing features at scale.