UX designers need a mixture of applied, technical, and soft skills to get the job done. Having a strong grasp on these UX designer skills sets you apart from the competition and provides an edge when trying to land your next UX role.
1. Professional skills
As designers, we often cite design skills as the key to professional growth and success. But according to survey data of more than 13,500 designers around the world, professional skills are actually one of the required skills for a successful career path.
Of course, "business skills" is a rather vague description. Consider the skills that can influence design projects and how successful they are. This may include the following:
1.1 Analytical skills: Ability to analyze problems and potential solutions.
1.2 Sales and marketing skills: To be an excellent designer also needs to understand the psychological skills behind marketing. Although some projects do not require cost and do not have physical products, design services always face the public.
1.3 The ability to solve problems: Design is to serve the market and solve related problems such as market needs. Having strong skills in this field makes you a designer who delivers better solutions and becomes a more creative designer.
1.4 Resource management skills: the ability to manage resources in a team, both time and financial, enabling you to complete projects on time and within budget. These are all important factors that affect how non-designers perceive you.
Learning and expanding these thinking skills can sometimes make having a design skill even more rewarding. They also provide value to potential clients and can go a long way in helping you succeed as a designer and your career path.
2. Communication skills
Communication skills are crucial to advancing your design career for two reasons. Communicating with the person who put forward the requirements, how to explain your design concept is extremely important.
The second reason is more interesting: all design is communication. Every design project you work on conveys a message in some way. Knowing how to effectively communicate and present the nuances of your designs will give you an edge over designers with average or poor communication skills.
“Your communication has to be consistent. Designers are often quick to forget and stray from what they heard a week ago. The same applies to your design process. Other designers don’t know what you do and don’t How you work. There is often a need to communicate and explain what you are doing so others can trust you." - Eugen eanu, Product Designer
Communication skills are best improved through deliberate practice. Taking the time and effort to make sure you fully understand what the other person is saying to you, whether spoken or written, and then making sure you answer in a way that is clear, logical, and thoughtful is a great place to start. As you continue to communicate intentionally, it becomes easier and more natural for you.
3. Motion and animation
The application of animation and motion graphics in the field of design is gradually increasing, from product requirements and advertising videos, and even user experience and interaction. Motion graphics can make boring content more attractive, understandable and engaging. Learning some graphic animation can give you an edge in recruiting.
4. Illustrations
Illustration design has been very popular in the early days. Now that more and more design tool libraries for drawing illustrations have been developed, it is easier to learn illustrations. Improving illustration skills brings many opportunities for designers' career development.
Proficiency in illustration skills can make your design career a choice to focus on illustration development, or just another tool in your skill arsenal. Even basic illustration skills can go a long way in your career – just look at all the simple illustration accounts on Instagram with huge followings. They understand that it doesn't matter if the illustrations are "perfect", but the message those illustrations convey. This is also an important point when using illustrations in product design.
5. User Research
This may have changed in recent years when many companies neglected the importance of user research and insights and instead dived directly into the “design” part of the project, making design choices based on assumptions about user needs.
Before we start making designs, we need to understand the deep part of the project we need to make that involves users. It is a part of insight, like insight into people's hearts. Only when we get the right insights can our designs be deeply rooted in people's hearts and impress users; many People think that making an eye-catching design is considered a success, but it is often forgotten after being browsed, because the connotation is not enough, and the ideas, concepts, and thoughts held are not deep enough, so you must think about why you are designing before designing. For whom to design, who will look at the design, the purpose, process and meaning of it, etc.; every pixel of the picture must have its own value!
Let these neglected skills be displayed in the design portfolio
Summary: No matter which skill you decide to focus on horizontally expanding in 2022, and hope that this will be discovered, then the above related skills can be displayed and sorted out in the portfolio.
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