10 must have skills for UX designers

No serious UX designer wants to be a jack of all trades, master of none. But there are a number of UI-UX designer skills that will set any budding designer up for success.

Food analogies aside, UI-UX design is a diverse industry and it’s not uncommon to find people who have specializations in various competencies. This can lead to a little confusion, especially if you’re just getting started out in UX design and don’t know what knowledge you need to be a success.

So, if you’ve asked yourself: what skills do you need to be a good UX designer? Look no further. Here are 10 must-have skills for UX designers, in no particular order.

1. UX research

From cognitive psychology to computer science there’s always something for the budding UXer to learn and use in their research process. We could in fact consider UX research to be an umbrella term for both user research and user testing.

No man is an island. And it’s the same for UXers. Unless you know how to code, design, manage projects, understand product and marketing, you’re going to need to collaborate with others in the design process, especially if you want to be successful.

Research can only take you so far. But collaborating is your opportunity to work in other areas and apply what you’ve learned with different people whose skills complement your own.

Collaboration is an important UX designer skills as it helps you communicate more efficiently with clients and stakeholders, to ensure the resulting product meets both business goals and user expectations.

As working in close quarters with developers and content strategists is also the norm for this type of job, collaboration skills will be invaluable when the time comes for handing off your designs to other departments.

If you want to convince people of your UX acumen, you need to get used to wireframing and prototyping.

App prototyping is a great way to understand key functionality of your design before being built by developers. Justinmind is perfect for iterating those sparks of genius that come to you in the middle of the night and just for getting an idea of the direction your app or website may be going. Using a prototyping tool can be a great way to impact investment, too. They allow you to test those assumptions you arrived at from your user research, then validate them with subsequent user testing. For this reason, this UX designer skills is a great way to get buy-in from stakeholders and managers.

Most importantly, though, wireframing and prototyping are a no-brainer when it comes to design as they help you catch mistakes before things go South and you have a lot of expensive coding to fix.

Writing is the unsung hero of UX. People speak highly of coding, which is a skill that shouldn’t be dismissed, but writing is a talent that can be nurtured over less time to create brilliant user experiences. Pick up your phone and look at any of your apps and it will be filled with perfectly crafted words.

So brushing up your UI design skills will help you when you need to create interactive prototypes and mockups that will have a real impact on users.

In design, visual communication covers everything from white space visual hierarchy, to making elements look clickable and minimizing the need for written instructions.

Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes means understanding their problems. When you understand someone’s problems better, you’re more equipped when it comes to finding a solution to their problem.

That’s why empathy is such a vital skill within UX design. When you’re detached from your end users, you fail to design for their needs and feelings which can create a terrible user experience.

A good way of developing UX designer skill is to practice those important research skills we mentioned above. Garnering qualitative data through user interviews and quantitative data through user testing methods like card sorting and heatmaps helps put us in the users’ shoes.

Interaction design is more concerned with how a user interacts with a product or service, which is why interactive prototypes are a great tool to combine when iterating interactions.

Interaction design is a UI-UX designer skill which means more than being able to add in fancy animations. It means knowing things like whether your users expect to have to scroll, rather than swipe through a list.

Most UX designers are multidisciplinary, and in a world that’s starving for tech designers maybe design-developers are the answer to this need.

Learning some of the coding languages necessary for front-end development may be all you need. Languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery can help you understand what’s possible from a technological perspective and help ease the transition between design-developer handoff.

So, understanding numbers, percentages and ratios is a real must when you want to get your head around the performance of your design. Many UXers fear numbers but there’s nothing to fear — they’re there to help you.

Applying analytical information to your design can help you iterate better designs, backed up by real numbers. After all, knowing how to perfect your product ain’t easy, and requires a real foundation of data.

Having core skills like research or design is really important — so are business skills like project and time management. But aside from these, UXers can really stand based on their communication skills.

Think public speaking and presentations. Trying to convey design ideas to non-design people is already tough — this escalates even more when you add investors and financing into the equation. Grasping design concepts can be tricky, and as a consequence, communication is an important UX designer skill.

But knowing how to present and speak confidently to audiences can really help you avoid communication pitfalls and make a positive impact. Being articulate and descriptive doesn’t come naturally to many of us, but luckily is a skill that you can build on over time.

To get a feel for the type of thinking involved in UX design, there are a few starter books you can read. These books will act as an introduction to user experience design and give you a better idea of what it all entails.

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