5 soft skills every UI/UX designer should learn

As a designer, there’s a lot to learn to be able to communicate effectively. A User Interface or User Experience design project is never straight to the point, it comes with a lot of ambiguity and challenges at different aspects in the design process. These challenges can only be tackled if a designer has certain soft skills to back one’s technical knowledge.

These skills ranges from Effective Communication, Feedback, Presentation Skills, Adaptation Skills and Practice. The good news is, most of these skills can be developed and refined with a lot of drill and self-motivation.

Effective Communication

What does it mean to be an effective communicator? Effective communication is more than just exchanging information. It’s about understanding the emotion and intentions behind the information. As well as being able to clearly convey a message, you need to also listen in a way that you can gain the full meaning of what’s being said and makes the other person feel heard and understood. These are things to always take note of which will help you become an effective communicator;

Empathy

“Empathy” is the first stage of the Design Thinking process, it means putting yourself in the user’s shoes which can also be used within the design team and clients. As a designer, you should be able to feel for other people — both passive and active. How are you going to solve a problem if you cannot step into your client’s (or even their clients’) shoes? Having empathy means that you are able to understand people’s feelings, emotions, thoughts and goals.

Now, that’s what makes you a great designer because you will be able to incorporate those understandings/findings into your work to make great experiences that are relevant and valuable to the people that will use them. A great way to get an understanding of the audience you’ll have to serve with your design is by communicating with them via User Interviews, Surveys and Usability Tests which will enable you gather the feedback you need to start designing.

When practicing the Art of communication, you should learn to be an Active Listener this is the ability to be able to conduct a listening session in which you focus on the other person and not think about things that pop in and out of your mind.

Feedback

Feedback as a skill means being able to express your thoughts about a particular thing in a way that won’t make the other person feel like their ideas or work is useless. Giving or receiving constructive feedback generally shapes your mind and helps you achieve great results. In design, there is a lot of feedback that you would need to give or receive from other people so you might want to know how to do it the right way, in a non aggressive way.

For instance, when giving feedback instead of saying “This won’t fly, work on it again” you might want to say “in this situation, I think it won’t work because…, and I think you can improve by doing…”. Something that is actionable for the person is real feedback.

One of the things you must take note when receiving any feedback is your “Ego”. As a designer. you should be detached from the work you are doing, when somebody gives feedback or comments on the design you are doing, it does not mean they are commenting on you or judging you. Lose your ego.

Ego is also the combatant of Empathy. If your ego is too big in your design work, if you only think about your ideas, or the things you want to implement. You will never be able to respect other people’s opinion so it’s very important to be able to put your ego in a cubicle, close it off atleast for the time when you are at work.

Presentation Skills

There is a lot of presentations in User Experience Design, you may want to present your discovery research findings, you may want to present your designs to your stake holders or to your clients. So it would be important for you to have atleast some presentation skills to enable you construct an effective presentation and to know how to defend your work and how to present it in an effective manner.

So think about how you can improve your presentation skills before you start any presentation in your daily UX design work. Part of your Presentation Skills should be Meditation and Facilitation because they both help you know how to command the people in the room, how to keep to time and go through the lined up activities.

Practice — Practice — Practice

When you progress as a designer, remember that hard skills are important, but soft skills are what makes you great. It doesn’t require you to read or do more than what you’re already doing. All you need to do is to accommodate this practice into your everyday work. And by so doing, you will soon see how you not only grow as a designer but also as a person.

Adaptation

Adaptation simply means change. The process of changing or evolving into something new. It’s no longer a secret that the digital and physical world is constantly evolving.

This means that Designers constantly need to familiarize themselves with emerging products, technologies, trends etc. Not being able to adapt puts you at the risk of being displaced or missing out on opportunities and ideas to improve our product’s experience

Being adaptable and having the initiative to educate ourselves about emerging technologies will put us ahead and ensure that we still have a job through the unavoidable modification our industry will encounter.

The formula to being an effective User Experience Designer is not only about how skilled you are at using any design tool. It’s about how you interact with various clients, how involved and keen you are at trying out new ideas and concepts, how you react to feedback and how much of creative ideas you can bring to a technical product design process.

As designers, can you think of any other soft-skills that have been instrumental in your growth? Please enlighten other readers by commenting below or discuss with me over Twitter.

Designfully yours,

Mfonobong Umondia