The Skills Most UX Designers IGNORE
On top of continuing to master essential design skills, there are lots of other non-design things that designers can learn, these non-design related skills can help enhance or supplement your design abilities and career. Whether you've developed your design expertise with a certification program or are totally self-taught.
The Skills Most UX Designers IGNORE
So, what are some of the essential skills that most UX / UI designers ignore, particularly early in their careers? Becoming a great designer is a constant process of self-improvement and education.
Wondershare Mockitt shares insights into the skills that are often overlooked in the UX industry. We'll cover 3 auxiliary skills that can help make you a better designer:
Empathy
Too often, designers can get caught up in their own bias or their own desire for what a product should be, that they completely ignore who they are actually designing for.
The English word empathy comes from the Ancient Greek word empatheia, meaning ‘physical affection or passion.' Empathy allows understanding not only of other's beliefs, values, and ideas but also the significance that their situation has for them and their associated feelings
As designers' understanding of clients' emotional response grows, the more likely the designers are to deliver clients with the best user experience possible.
Image source: Kieran Blakey
Curiosity
Don Norman once said:"I question my own ideas and that's the only way to make progress, always curious, always questioning."
UX is a consistently changing field. Curiosity leads to asking insightful questions, active listening, and engaging more deeply with problems. With those questions come answers through observation, research, and testing. So, UX designers who are curious will have the capacity to engage with clients, products, and challenges in meaningful ways.
Developing a sense of curiosity helps designers keep up. UX designers who are curious will be fascinated with human behavior – how people think and act in different situations. It will ingrain in the designer a habit of learning something new every day. The learning process will teach designers how important it is to keep an open mind to different viewpoints or design ideas.
Image source: Kieran Blakey
Psychology
Knowledge of psychology can lend a hand to many diverse professions, including marketing, healthcare, education, and, of course, design. Some people are used to thinking of design as a purely artistic job but there is much more standing behind it. A sense of beauty and inspiration is not enough to create a proficient design. That's why UX designers should possess the psychological skills to do their job right.
When you ask someone, "Why'd you do that?" there's a high chance they won't be able to answer or that you'll misinterpret their response. User Experience (UX) is all about understanding the behaviors (ex. pain points) that the users have, identifying and predicting what their users need, and approaching them if necessary to help design a better experience for them.
A good design of any kind takes a great deal of human psychology into account. Understanding basic psychology principles helps give you an idea of common human motivations as well as consumer behavior and can help make creating that enjoyable, user-friendly product a bit easier.
Image source: Kieran Blakey
They also said:
Aivaras Bončkus
I can suggest a very crucial skill for agency/company prosperity that a lot of upper level (senior, lead etc.) designer lack: teaching skills. When new designers come to work for a company, most of the time they depend and rely on senior level designers as the main source of valuable knowledge in their work environment. If the company's senior staff lack skills to pass on knowledge, then it will be hard for the company to develop top level talent.
Yacoub Yassin:
Empathic Listening. Basically it's about actively listening to the client and asking the right questions to make them keep talking and reveal to you what they really need. The key is to relay their words back to them so that they feel understood. It does wonders for building trust.
Michael A. Degtyarev:
Taking good notes (especially in design review sessions) is a must. I've seen too many junior designers forget to change elements of design just because they didn't write them down.
What skills would you recommend people take another look at? Whether you've developed your design expertise with a certification program or are totally self-taught, just let us know in the comments!
