Over the past decade, the field of User Experience (UX) design has become profitable, popular and in demand. In fact, “UX Designer” is one of the most promising careers right now and offers you tremendous growth and opportunities. The need to diversify skills is clear. Here are 10 essential skills for UX designers.
What skills do you really need to become a successful UX designer?
A UX designer must have a combination of formal skills including knowledge of the UX design process, and analysis; As well as soft skills. And in this article, we’ll look at the skills you need to develop to make a career in UX Design.
I’ve put together a list of exactly what a good UX designer needs in 2020.
1. Interpersonal, collaborative, and communication skills.
Whether you work for a small startup or a large full-service company, you need to interact and collaborate regularly with coworkers, stakeholders, and customers. Understanding how you work in a team environment and how you communicate with others will help you determine what types of jobs you want to apply for and whether you are a good candidate for the team. Huh.
2. Learn to Accept Criticism
It is not possible that your work is always great. Get rid of your ego so you can analyze what went wrong and keep improving. It’s also a lot of fun working with humble designers and improving them over time.
UX as a discipline changes every day. There is no place for a “know it all” mentality. What you have to learn is that you have to keep learning if you want to stay in the game.
3. Stop reading theories. Start practicing.
You can draw hundreds of diagrams and read all the UX laws, but the real learning comes from improving real products.
I often work on projects started by other UX designers, who have spent weeks, sometimes months, researching, illustrating user stories, and documenting endless interviews and user tests. Thorough user research is only worthwhile if it is successfully translated into live products. You won’t get away with citing clever theories in front of a whiteboard.
4. Get familiar with the data
Product and data analysis capabilities will have a huge impact on your project results and represent a huge competitive advantage. Most designers are still intimidated when they hear the word “data” and struggle to translate product information into meaningful design decisions.
5. Work on your UI skills
The best user experience design is created with the end product in mind. Understanding typography, colors, visual hierarchies, and interactions is critical to creating a simple user journey.
As a UX designer, you don’t have to be a great visual designer, but you do have to be at least a good UI designer.
6. User Testing
Gathering quality information from your users as they interact with your product is an important skill for a UX designer to develop. Creating a useful product requires learning to test and extract the needs of your users. By seeing how people interact with your design, what they like, what they don’t like, or where they get stuck, you can be sure that your final product is exactly what users are looking for.
7. Team Collaboration
“Man is a social animal” goes the old adage. This is more true for a UX designer than for most other fields. Every designer needs to collaborate with other professionals to do their job better. It is humanly impossible for the individual designer to know all the skills necessary to carry out a design job efficiently. Having a collaborative spirit actually helps the designer to constantly learn from his fellow designers.
There are many other skills that a UI/UX designer might find useful or useful in their job, but the most important ones are listed above. Any designer with these skills will prove indispensable and sought after in the corporate world.