Do UX designers need to have domain knowledge?

Domain knowledge or functional knowledge is absolutely a critical aspect in any product life cycle. Generally a business analyst is an individual equipped with such sound knowhow of domain, however having said that UX designers can team up with them to learn the domain at any given point of time.

However, in certain scenarios there is no business analyst present in the product team. Ever wondered how UX designers solve complex business problems catering to a specific domain in the absence of business analyst. UX designer is one such professional who collaborates a lot within a team, not just with developers but with engineering, product team, sales and stakeholders. They have crucial role to play in a product journey. Hence, when they undertake any project where the domain is relevantly new for them, they first take corrective measures to understand the domain. For example let's say Amit is a UX designer who has no past experience in healthcare but has got an opportunity to work in a healthcare product. His approach would involve understanding the users who are using this product. He has to connect with his users more often. But here is another challenge what if he cannot speak to the users directly or if its a B2B product, what approach he should take. Well in that case, Amit needs to connect more often with the stakeholders like product owner, sales and support team more often. Product owner will know in and out of the product and Sales team will give you real insights as to where the product stands in the market while support team will let Amit know about user's pain points. By collaborating extensively with cross functional teams, Amit will not only know about the domain but also about the persona for whom he is designing for. By iterating on his ideations and concepts, he can get them validated from the leadership to get the ball rolling.

So to conclude I can definitely say that UX designers can work in any domain, because they need to relearn from the eyes of the users and build on it. Thorough collaboration help them to learn new terminologies confined to a domain.