There is a design pyramid which unfortunately build on top of each other for the majority of business use cases:
Graphic Designer -> UI Designer -> UX Designer -> Product Design -> Service Design
These are the levels of the pyramid at which the design process revolves around, depending on the need, for most products or services:
Visuals -> Web -> Experience -> Product -> Service
The narrative of it closely mirrors the history of many orgs:
Visuals: Hey our website looks like a database written by engineers, maybe we can make it pretty?
UI -> hey, we really need it to look like it belongs on the web, not just a RISD grad's art project, let's get someone who understands web design
UX -> okay, now our site looks like every other site. But no one uses it because it's still just a database with lipstick. Let's get some experience designers in here to make it better.
Product -> Okay, now our site has some nice experiences... but they are all disjointed and random and don't account for business needs... Let's get some product designers in here.
Service -> Okay, our product now is pretty cohesive and quite good... but there's a whole realm of things we have to do outside our product (Customer Service, service processes) that suck and are bringing the user experience down as a whole. Let's get some service designers in here...
In my opinion, this is the way most businesses think about design.
The key is that you're far along enough in your career that you should never be applying blind. Always try to get a warm intro and always try and schedule an informal meeting with the hiring manager before you go through the formal interview process. That way, they're not just reading pages of user research, they're seeing how that user research affects your process & how you think about problems.
Almost nobody who is currently being hired to work on big wicked problems are getting there by throwing their resume into a pile so the process isn't designed to see those people out. The way to get those jobs is to be the only person they were ever even considering for that job.
They are getting closer, but not quite. Consider two analogies:
1. Craigslist v. AirBnB to get a short term rental apartment. Both are arguably the same "product", the differentiation is that AirBnB has a much better UX experience.
2. eBay v. Sothebys to put goods on auction. Here, it's not really UX that differentiates them, it's product-market fit.
In the second example, a product designer would arguably be a better fit for differentiating the technical and business processes. A UX designer would then implement those ideas in the precise user flow.
To me product designer means someone who's a hybrid, an alrounder - basically a UX designer with following traits:
- good research and analytical skills
- decent or great visual design skills
- ability to create sophisticated prototypes (not just creating hot-mapped images)
- someone who has good technical knowledge, so they don't design something that's going to be really difficult and expensive to build
- someone who considers product and business matters, i.e. ability to strike the balance between user and business needs.
What are you hoping a PhD will give you?
I'm not sure where you are, but if you want to use your skills for something good, why not try to help your government - improving their online services etc.
See for example what the UK did to their government sites - a great investment that made it easier for millions of people to understand and use their online services.
One example: https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles/
edit: formatting issues
For the most part, HCI professors don't care about healthcare and healthcare mostly doesn't care about HCI, for non-obvious reasons.
If you want to work on self-driving cars, maybe get a MS in machine learning and HCI (or human-centered AI if you can make that happen)? If you want to improve healthcare, maybe get a healthcare degree.
(Update: if I were a professor in HCI I might actually tell you yes, come work with/for me ;)
We need more people with these ambitions. Maybe you should be looking to create a forward-looking design firm focusing on the hard problems, rather than looking for a “job”.
Having said that, I know folks with master's degrees and PhD degrees who are great UX and product designers doing cool work on autonomous vehicles, drones, etc, so the path really depends on what you're most interested in as well as how lucky you are in finding a good match.
Material Design is especially bad on just about every level, including taste and animation accessibility. (People should do more research on animation accessibility before making things move on the page.)
I see this transition in titles all over the place at big SF companies like Adobe, which is disheartening because now I'm expected to have a dribblesque visual/graphic design skill set (least interesting aspect of design imo) with less emphasis on design thinking, more on delivering assets, front-end code and letting UX researchers focus on generative (most interesting)/evaluative (mostly interesting) research to inform us designers on what visual assets to design for developers (so much for that HCI degree!).
I feel like a commodity more often than not when competing with generic 10-week General Assembly UX grads that can throw together a sleek graphic heavy portfolio while my HCI degree is collecting dust because no hiring manager is going to read the pages of user research that back up my design decisions and because I lack the flashy, material designed dribble UI polish that is largely an exercise in branding, typography, and basic color theory than actually understanding user needs through traditional UX methods based on best practices.
The exception is at larger companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who appreciate HCI grads but their projects often relate to advertising or some obscure product platform I could care less about. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel? Maybe I'm burnt out working on the usability of legacy products and making it look nice with the latest material design trends on top.
I'm interested in working on/solving big, "wicked" problems through UX design like self driving cars or improving healthcare. Should I get a PhD in HCI and focus on something fulfilling rather than improving the UX of boring SaaS CRUD apps?