Product Design & UX · Chapter 1 of 5
What design postings ask for
185 postings, and AI appears in 93% of them — the highest share of any field measured here.
Product design is a smaller field in this corpus than its visibility suggests, and the term frequencies are unusual.
| Named | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| cross-functional work | 93% | Design here is embedded with engineering and product, not a service function |
| AI or LLM | 93% | The highest of any field measured. Designing for probabilistic systems is becoming the job |
| user research | 83% | Research is expected of the designer, not delegated to a separate researcher |
| prototyping | 64% | Figma fluency assumed; the artefact is an interactive prototype rather than a static comp |
| accessibility | 51% | Half of postings name it explicitly, which is higher than most designers expect |
| design systems | 48% | Systems thinking rather than screen production |
| metrics | 41% | Design is increasingly measured |
The finding worth acting on
AI at 93% and accessibility at 51% are the two that most portfolios do not address. A portfolio piece showing how you designed for a system that is sometimes wrong — confidence, correction, escape hatch, disclosure — is currently rare and immediately differentiating.
The same applies to accessibility: a case study that treats it as a design constraint from the start rather than an audit at the end reads very differently from the alternative.