[Top] 96 Top 10 must have skills you need to become a UX Designer.

Top 10 must have skills you need to become a UX Designer.

Over the past decade, the field of User Experience (UX) design has become lucrative, popular and in demand. Infact, ‘UX designer’ is one of the most promising careers right now and presents you with tremendous amount of growth and opportunity. Here are 10 must have skills for UX designers

Well, getting into entering this industry requires you to have diversified skills and understanding of the fundamentals of UX Design.Companies have specific responsibilities and requirements under the responsibilities of a UX designer.

A UX designer needs to have mixture of Formal skills which includes knowledge of UX Design Process, analytical; as well as soft skills. And in this piece we’ll run through skills you should build to build your career in UX design

So what are the core skills that someone is likely to need in any UX design job?Before we begin Lets get a quick understanding of UX Design and UX Designer.

What is UX Design?

UX refers to User experience (UX). User Experience (UX) refers to the interaction a user has with a product or service and the experience they have with it. It is in fact a person’s feelings, attitude and emotions they feel while using any product or service.

A great User experience (UX) is rooted in having a deep understanding of users. It focuses on, what they need? What are their abilities, and limitations? The beauty of a great User experience (UX) is that it even takes into account the business goals and Strategy.

And UX Design is all about designing a great User experience UX to build a great user interaction with product and services.

User experience (UX) design is an Empathy driven process of designing a product or service that are useful, easy to use, and delightful to interact with.

Who is a UX Designer?

Since decades Design has been associated with the graphic design which mostly includes How the Product Looks. However, a Good Design is not only about how it looks but also includes the experience that a user has while interacting with a product.

So from touching the physical product with your hand and feeling it; to navigating through an app; to purchasing a T-shirt on a website and being able to do a smooth checkout; User experience (UX) Design is about creating a design that makes an easy, efficient and Pleasant experience for the user.

From Functionality, to Graphic Designs,to the emotions, to Usability of the Product and so on, a UX Design is an integration of all these aspects.

And a UX designer seeks to design products so as to create a Great User Experience (UX) through design thinking process .

What a UX Designer Does?

A UX designer first seeks to understand and observe the User by conducting Empathetic research and studying competitor as well.

And then they use the observations to build User Persons by identifying user’s goals, emotions, pain-points and behaviors.

After identifying the Design Problem, UX Designers Brainstorm with the Team to form solutions and then creates wireframes and prototypes of what the final product might look like.

In addition to that, UX designer also conduct user tests with target users to learn about validity of the solution and use the feedback to iterate the prototypes unless UX designer has built something which is loved by the Users.

So, now you know that a UX Designer essentially has to wear multiple hats in the Design process however, in large organizations a team of designers are hired to complete a specific part of the process.

1. Conduct UX Research – A UX designer first seeks to understand and observe the User by conducting Empathetic research and studying competitor as well.

A UX designer does UX research with the help of a UX researcher in bigger organizations, or even independently in smaller organizations.

2. Create User Persona– They use the observations to build User Persons by identifying user’s goals, emotions, pain-points and behaviors.

3. Brainstorm to build ideas- After identifying the Design Problem, UX Designers Brainstorm with the Team to form solutions.

4. Create Prototype– UX Designer then creates wireframes and prototypes of what the final product might look like.

5. Conduct Test – In addition to that, UX designer also conduct user tests with target users to learn about validity of the solution and use the feedback to iterate the prototypes unless UX designer has built something which is loved by the Users.

So, now you know that a UX Designer essentially has to wear multiple hats in the Design process however, in large organizations a team of designers are hired to complete a specific part of the process.

10 most important UX Design Skills

Technical Skills

1. User research

Good Research is the Foundation of Good Design and be the deciding factor between a bad and good user experience. User research in the early stages of the design process can infact save your time and money.

UX Designer has to study the market and research the Competition. A Good Market Research includes Researching the Direct Competitors, who are offering similar Value Propositions. Hence, Study Indirect Competitors, whose Primary Product doesn’t exactly offer the same Value Proposition but Secondary Product does.

To sum up, User Research helps UX Designers to learn about user behavior, goals, motivations, and needs. All of this helps to identify opportunities for the product in a given area.

Moreover, data collected is in the form of quantitative and qualitative data which is then synthesized to get Insights. These insights are used in various stages of Design thinking process to make design decision.

User research plays a pivotal role in discovering user needs and building empathy. Hence, step up your skills in UX research if you want to be taken seriously as a UX designer.

2. Information architecture

UX design means much more than making a design beautiful. UX designers aims at making a product which the user feels comfortable and pleasant while using it .

In order to ensure a smooth User Experience, UX Designers logically organizes and structures the various Visual, interface and navigational elements, this is called designing the Information Architecture.

Information architecture focuses on organizing content so that users can easily understand the functionality of the product and could find everything they need. For Example, knowing things like whether users expect to find a particular information by clicking on a button or simply scrolling down.

And in order to do this, UX designers must understand how the smaller pieces fit together to create the larger picture. Additionally, UX Designers must learn how items relate to each other within the system, all of this by keeping user’s goals in mind.

Good information architecture is a foundation of efficient user experience, having a good Information Architecture (IA) skill is essential for the designers.

3. Wireframing and prototyping

A good Design in UX is User Focused. A User Focused Design is highly driven by User Feedback from the initial stages of Product Development. Wireframing and prototyping is the best way of gathering effective user feedback and catching flaws earlier on.

A wireframe is a static representation or blueprint of the initial product concept however, prototype is a working model of an app or a webpage. Wireframes and prototypes can be low/medium as well as high fidelity.

Wireframing is the stage where you take a concept or design and shape it into something tangible so that you can thoroughly review your work with users and stakeholders and ensure it makes sense.

Creating Wireframes gives Designers the flexibility to play around and do lot of Experimentation . Prototyping helps to review and refine it with the help of User Feedback to turn it into a Polished version that can be Developed to an End Product.

This is often when UI designer comes into the picture to design the high fidelity mockups of the product. It is important to mention here that though UX and UI design needs different skill sets, however Sometimes UX and UI are done by the same person.

If you are working with a startup or as a freelancer then UX and UI is done by the same person as budgets are often tight. Hence having a good understanding of creating wire-frames and prototypes is a must.

4. UX writing

Be it any physical product or website or an application; it will be filled with perfectly crafted words including lot of microcopy. A microcopy is snippets of text that guide you through an interface written by someone.

From writing microcopies to writing headings/subheading, to labeling the various UI elements like buttons/menu bars etc, UX writing is a powerful tactic for engaging your users and create better user interaction.

It is not very uncommon to see UX and UI designers only worrying thinking about UI, flows, fonts, animations however, there’s nothing better than actually speaking to your user one to one.

Infact, UX writing is about speaking to your users’ mental models and helps them to understand your product better. Moreover, Writing is playing an ever growing role in UX, and many companies are hiring people purely for UX writing.

See, you are not writing a book so dont get worried into the intricacies of writing. You can simply improve you writing skills by reading up and checking the already existing work on Dribble and behance. Infact start writing articles on Medium.

Business Skills

5. Decision-Making Skills

For Most of the time UX Designers have to examine how can they make the most optimal decisions while working on Design Projects. Infact, UX professionals need strong decision-making skills in order to navigate through the complex challenges they are striving to solve.

Throughout the design process, UX Designers are working off of on several main problem statements that are based on their users’ needs. Equally, they work in loops of testing prototypes, getting feedback from target users and improve on their ideas.

Determining how to allocate resources, How to carefully pick up a problem statement, how to decide on the design solution to be tested with users, and how to implement it; are all decisions that need careful consideration.

Every design is the product of hundreds (or thousands) of decisions. With their effective Decision making skills, UX Designers can fuel entire design processes with valuable insights to make data-driven decisions; Instead of settling on a first instinct solution.

6. Critical Thinking

UX designers are always on the job of questioning assumptions, presupposition, and are always analyzing the problems deeply. And Critical Thinking helps a UX designer to identify gaps in reasoning and assumptions.

Critical thinking is a method of analyzing ideas, concepts or data in order to evaluate the situation from different perspectives, and then arrive at an unbiased solution.

Additionally, critical thinking also promotes group ideation and task execution. It should be kept in mind that critical thinking is not about criticizing someone else’s ideas or work. However , critical thinking is all about questioning assumptions and deducing consequences in order to strengthen a theory, process or a solution.

Furthermore, as a UX designer you must define project goals and timelines, manage expectations, handle conflicts and work collaboratively with a team; and the ability to think critically helps you to manage everything smoothly.

Critical thinking is undoubtedly the most desirable trait of a professional of any kind, but particularly in the field of user experience it is ‘the must’.

Soft Skills

7. Collaboration

While working on a design project, UX designers have to work with many people which includes stakeholders, UX researchers , product managers, developers and users as well.

For example, While learning about users and their requirements a UX designer has to closely work with UX researcher. When working on design solutions they need to have effective conversations with product managers and other stakeholders. Equally, When doing user testing they need to work closely with users and so on.

By Collaborating with people you would get the opportunity to work in other areas and learn from different people while leveraging each others skill which complement your own. Infact, you can learn many skills by collaboration and repetition.

See, No one is self-sufficient; everyone relies on others. Of course, you need to have the required skills to work on things however, if you want to b successful then collaborating is your key.

8. Communication Skills

Major chunk of time of UX designer goes on heavy tasks like Conducting design workshops with Team members and stakeholders, presentations on the findings and design solutions, conducting tests with users and so on.

All of this requires a UX designers to be able to articulate their ideas in a clear, crisp and concise manner. Hence, having a good written as well verbal communication skills can really help a UX Designer stand. Moreover, just by being able to communicate with other, you can get buy in from stakeholders in difficult situations.

Not just that, often a UX Designer act as a mediator during design workshops. Conducting workshop is not an easy task, they are required to handle conflicts which sometimes arise while discussing product ideas. Handling this tension requires very strong communication skills.