10 Most Important Skills for Designer
Designing is an extensively large and diverse field with multi-faceted backgrounds and various skill sets. With the growing popularity of careers in designing, it can be challenging to determine how to set yourself apart from other prospective applicants while applying for a job.
Adding on to this, since a UX designer's position can still be difficult to comprehend to potential employers, the designer skills you own must demonstrate your full potential as a UX designer. In addition to hard-core UX skills, designers should have much other soft skill attributes, enabling them to secure an advantageous position on a design team.
Further, in this article, we will go over different skills required to be a successful UX designer and the tools that will enable you to do so.
10 Most Important Skills for Designer
To become a successful UX designer, you need to acquire specific skill sets known as hard industry skills, while soft skills are equally important. Below given are skills for designer divided into soft and hard for a better understanding of the job attributes. Let's touch on a few of the essential skills that are required to become a UX designer.
Soft Skills
These skills are often related to personality traits, empathy, emotional intelligence and how to react in different situations. These skills don't usually require formal training, but it's essential to have them.
Interpersonal and communication skills
Working as a UX designer, you will have to communicate a lot. You would have to interact and collaborate with colleagues, clients, stakeholders regularly. How to express your designs, share your ideas, and have a chain of communication with your clients requires you to have excellent communication and interpersonal skills. Therefore, having this skill will be a perfect addition to your portfolio.
Curiosity
Designers are always on a quest for ways to improve the usability of things that are surrounding them. This continuous curiosity and desire to learn more about how can they better user experience is an integral part of the profession. Designers must be willing to learn new things and search for ways to enhance their users' lives without having to explain to them how to use the product.
Empathy
One of the essential creative designer skills that a UX designer should behold is having empathy towards users and clients. It's critical to understand people's frustrations and being able to step into their shoes. This can make you better equipped at finding a solution for their pain points, and you can find meaningful solutions to their issues.
Critical Thinking
The process of analyzing, conceptualizing, observing and reading in between lines, evaluating information is better known as critical thinking. UX designers must gather essential and significant information and put these data into use in a purposeful and relevant way. Critical thinking helps in developing superior foresight.
Hard skills or industry skills
These basic design skills are acquired and have to be learnt. It is specific to UX designer's career, and understanding these skills will consist of essential knowledge and abilities a UX must hone and sharpen to be accepted as a world-class quality designer.
Wire-framing
Wireframes are rough black and white sketches of your designs. You can make wireframes on a piece of paper with a pen and a pencil or use the software. It is a critical yet straightforward way of testing your designs, making any early changes, and improvising on your design before finalizing it. Prototype
The prototype is a final draft of your design. There are two types of prototypes: high fidelity prototypes, a complete replica of your app/website or design, and a low fidelity prototype. These are generally a more informal sketch of your design. It is essential that as a UX/UI designer, you can create simple, user-friendly screens with minimal user flows and confusions. Your designs necessarily don't have to be aesthetic or beautiful. Simple to the point design that can provide a great user experience is what is required.
You can create these prototypes using many software's. A great recommended software by experts is Wondershare Mockitt. With the help of Wondershare, Mockitt users can create high fidelity prototype designs. The software has many template bundles to choose from, which can help you design without any coding what so ever. It also has rich interactive effects, transitions and gestures to create a lifelike prototype. Therefore, if you have a tool such as Wondershare Mockitt, your prototype can be easily assembled without much hassle. It is reliable software with easy to understand user interface, many great features to play around with.
UX writing
Just creating a great design, is not it? Your skills designers need to brush up and learn the art of UX language. The way designers choose to phrase error messages, onboarding page, captions, calls to action, and app instructions will eventually determine How these instructions can quickly help the user navigate the interface and how likely they are to return.
UI and visual communication
Nowadays, a large percentage of people are turning into visual learning; therefore, it's vital that as a UX designer, you can significantly impact users through visual cues rather than auditory ones. Using the most suited typography, colour scheme, line spacing, and limiting the need for written instructions and visually directing the users through the screen is a great skill to have as a UX designer.
User Research
Before embarking on your design, it is of the utmost importance that you have done plenty of research and have gathered quality information from users with interviews and questionnaires. Understanding their pain points, frustrations, expectations, and how they interact with your product is an essential part of UX design. Observing your users and seeing what they like and dislike about your product, whether they are getting stuck in between while using your design. All of these are vital notes that need extensive research.
Coding and development
This skill is at the end because it's great if you can code so that you can send forward the design to engineers and communicate with them easily. Also having additional skills in a designing field looks excellent on your cv. Again this a great skill to have, not having will not affect your UX job opportunity.
Therefore, while hiring UX designer's employers will carefully read your portfolios, see your designs and skills before deciding. As mentioned above, prototyping or a blueprint of your design plays a large role in UX design. Therefore, having software such as Wondershare Mockitt can provide you with rich UI assets and templates. This cloud feature can help you sync your terms and access your designs a prototypes at any given time view your prototype in offline mode. Having such a great tool by your side while you're preparing to get hired into the competitive field of UX is a great help and support.
