UX designers need a wide range of skills
Skills a UX designer needs are vary from role to role. For instance, a “UX / UI designer” would need interface design skills. Another UX designer’s skills would focus on research and user testing.
UX designers conduct research
The first and most important skill a UX designer needs is research. For instance, being able to conduct user interviews and interpret data. Above all, they should be able to think critically. The focus here is understanding the behaviours, motivations of their users. There is no right way of going about this, but a great UX designer includes their team in this process. Of course, having an understanding of who you are designing for is vital. Consequently, if you don’t you; might not be designing the right thing.
Research skills you need for UX design:
- Interviewing
- “Active listening” and asking good questions to get the best out of your research participants.
- Critical Thinking
- Objectively analyse the facts to form a judgment.
- Initiative
- Follow through with a research plan and take action to get in front of your users.
UX designers create “design artefacts”
The second skill UX designers need is being able to create meaningful design artefacts. There are lots of things a UX designer actually designs. To illustrate, UX designers produce “design artefacts” such as wireframes, prototypes and interfaces. These are all activities that lead to the finished product. Design artefacts are communication tools. For example, a content wireframe tells us about the structure and content. A prototype can presents a big conceptual idea.
Other design artefacts include personas, job stories, and experience maps. These help product teams identify user needs from the research. In summary, a digital product is the sum of all these design activities and artefacts.
Design skills UX designers need:
- Articulation
- Talking clearly about your design decisions, and being able to justify them.
- Analytical Thinking
- Use critical thinking and problem-solving skills in order to find a solution.
- Prototyping
- Be able to put together a convincing façade to test your assumptions.
- Design activity facilitation
- Running activities such as card sorting, experience mapping and persona mapping.
- Web development basics
- Understanding the building blocks of the web is vital, if you are going to design for it.
- Graphic design principles
- Design theory underpins the quality of your work. It is massively important for form and function of your design. Type hierarchy, grid systems will make your design more purposeful.
UX designers test their work with real users
The third skill a UX designer needs is user testing. When testing users, you are actually testing your assumptions. Assumptions can take many forms. For example, a high fidelity prototype has many assumptions within it. To illustrate, you are assuming the words you use in a prototype will make sense to your users. You test your design in order to prove or disprove that assumption. Similarly, a position of a button or an interaction could be an assumption you are testing.
Of course, a designer knows most of these assumptions are correct from user feedback. In fact, a high-fidelity prototype is the result of many iterations of testing. The process of design is evolution. Again, the testing part of a UX designer’s job is essential to that evolution. A saying to live by is “design like you’re right, test like you’re wrong”. We have to believe in what we are designing, but remain humble in knowing it could be wrong.
Skills UX designer need for user testing:
- Observation
- Paying close attention to what a user is doing. What they aren’t saying is usually more important.
- Empathy
- Trying to understand a user’s behaviour and translate that into usable information.
- Note-taking
- Your notes from the testing session need to be clear to other people in the team.
- Organisation
- A user testing session has to be seamless and simple for the participant.
- Impartiality
- Understanding that you have a bias, and not influencing the user in a way that skews results).
