Soft skills in UX — what makes a mediocre designer great
If, like me, you keep up to date with many design and technology blogs, you find tons of articles about how to design for mobile, what is Lean UX, how to be pixel-perfect, which prototyping tools are the best, yadda yadda yadda. Be honest, after how many of that you actually stopped reading most of it and started to think “oh my god, not the same topic again”? What I recently started to think, especially after reading this awesome article about the broken education of UX designers, is that many people seem to think that UX design is mostly about hard skills, knowledge and some talent.
And I would like to completely disagree with that. You know why? Because UX design is not some black magic, and actually many people can learn about it pretty fast.
Let’s be honest, it’s not medicine, AI programming or biochemistry. Yes, you need to develop your skills in many areas, such as psychology, technology, business and many more. But still, it’s pretty easy knowledge, and all you really need to be better at UX design is to read a lot and practice even more by taking part in many different projects. Don’t get me wrong — I know it takes a lot of time and hard work to become a good UX designer and you do need some talent for that. But what I think, and many seems to agree, that there are even more important skills here — soft skills.
Top soft skills in UX Design
If you’ll ask 5 different people which soft skills should a good UX designer have, you’ll probably get 5 different answers. But I think there are some things that are just crucial and without them, you will never be great at this job. Some of them may be super obvious to you, and if so, that’s great — but please take some time to think if you really remember about developing them on a daily basis.
I will also give you some tips on how you can practice those skills.
Flexibility
I don’t mean being able to do splits or yoga poses, but an ability to quickly adapt to the new environment, new ideas, new requirements. As a UX designer, you should put your ego aside, and design for people. Which means that not all your ideas will turn out to be good (at least not those first ones). It’s not about what you think is the best or which idea you like most. It’s about users and their needs, and designing great, usable products requires a lot of ideas shifting, exploring and changing directions, researching what works and what doesn’t. If you become attached to your ideas too easily, you’re forgetting what your job is about.
How to practice flexibility? 🤸♀️
First, you should stop thinking about your designs as yours. Your goal is not to design the best interface on earth, it’s to help your user as much as you can, and design is only a mean for that. It should always evolve and even completely change if your ideas were just bad.
When you have this mindset, then the best thing you can do is generate as many ideas for every design as you can. If you already do this (I hope!) then great. If not — try sketching at least 8–10 ideas for every small thing. Or treat the elements of your design as Lego blocks — put them together in many different ways and note the advantages and disadvantages of every solution.
Okay, small steps are done, probably most of you already do things like that. Here comes the next step — asking for criticism. Remember, at this point, you should already have your ego set aside. So now take your best ideas and ask your colleagues or users for honest opinions. What they like and, more important, what they dislike and why. Take all this feedback into consideration and implement changes!
The final step is to incorporate this mindset into your everyday work.
Being a mediator
I believe that at least 10–15% of UX designer’s job is trying to find a compromise between user needs, business goals, and technology restrictions. Thus, you need to be good at finding solutions that will accommodate all those things into your solutions.
One of the worst things you can do as a UX Designer is to treat users as a Holy Grail. Repeat after me: Business and technology are equally important. Unfortunately, this is something that many designers seem to miss. You’re not hired to only create delightful experiences. Unless you do it pro-bono, someone pays you to do your job, hence you need to help him make money. Again, if that’s obvious to you — awesome. If not, repeat the bolded sentence until it sticks 🙃
It is not easy to be a good mediator. You need to be empathetic, flexible, humble, patient, good listener, able to draw out of people their needs and fears, and above all — be great at dealing with difficult situations and resolve potential conflicts.
Sounds complex and daunting? Don’t worry. Just approach situations like that as the negotiation process. Along the way, it will become more natural for you. After all, it’s just a skill to learn.
Practising mediating (NOT meditating 🧘🏻♀️)
- Do solid research to make sure that you understand all points of view. You can use methods such as in-depth interviews to understand users needs, workshops or stakeholders interviews to understand the business side, and meetings with developers to understand technical constraints. While doing all this, you practice your empathy and listening skills.
- Summarise the main points of potential “conflict”. Find areas in which sides may have different needs or goals. For example, your users may desperately need some specific feature, business wants to do something else, and developers say they can’t do it the way business wants due to technology or time constraints.
- Analyze and note how different solutions may affect:
a) Usability and user experience
b) Business goals and conversion
c) Development time
If you don’t have enough knowledge to do all that, ask the right people for help. - Present your findings to the stakeholders and engage them in discussing and deciding on the best solution. Remember to be patient and don’t get carried away by emotions. If you disagree with them, present your objections, but remember that in the end, you’re not the one making the decision.
Alternatively: Quickly draw a few discussed solutions and base the discussion on something more tangible, not only your analysis. Sometimes an idea may sound great until it’s actually drawn. - Make a note of what has been decided and create a solution based on that. If there were still some concerns about potential solutions, prepare some low-fidelity versions and discuss it once again.
Yes, it requires some work, but doing that can guarantee you that you’re accommodating every perspective into your designs.
Although a little humility is always a good thing, it is important to remember that mediation might not always work, and that it’s not always the fault of the mediator if it doesn’t.
Love of learning
On a personal note: I was always a mediocre student in primary, middle and high school. It all changed when I went to college. Suddenly, I grew to love learning. Right now I love to gain new knowledge on topics I never cared about, learning new skills, finding new topics to read about. I found out that it largely depends on your mindset. If you don’t feel like a child hypnotized with all the world’s knowledge — trust me, you can find it in yourself.
Love of learning is an important character trait in many different professions. You can’t be a doctor who once learned about medicine and then stopped reading about it. You won’t be a good scientist if you’re not interested in new scientific discoveries. It’s the same with design.
I’m not saying that to be a good designer you need to know everything about it. You don’t have to know all about typography, colour structures, usability & UX, business, coding, research, writing, psychology, etc. It’s okay to be a specialist, but you need to at least know the basics of many disciplines to be good at what you’re doing. If you don’t like coding that’s fine, but if you have no idea what HTML and CSS are, and not know at least some of the front-end technologies constraints, how can you be a digital designer? I’m not a UI designer, but I learn UI to create better prototypes and understand and judge the visual solutions better.
A big part of your job is also switching context all the time. You need to skillfully manoeuvre between different industries, target groups and business environments. It’s especially true if you work in an agency — one day you design an app for parents and the next day you work on a tool for data visualization. This part of our job requires a lot of curiosity and willingness to explore new topics. Without it, you may find yourself overwhelmed and tired. You can’t create a good experience for different target groups if you’re not interested in understanding them as much as you can.
How to find your inner curiosity?
What I found to work best is to find something that deeply interests you and the rest will come. It not only worked for me with learning (Psychology was something that started all this) but also with sport — I hated all sports until I found one that I loved. After that, I tried at least 10 different sports and can’t get enough.
Explore many different topics and find one that particularly interests you. Go from there — read about it and then start to slowly broaden the topic. But remember — don’t get overwhelmed by trying to learn everything there is about what interests you. You have time!
Communication and articulation
A great part of your job is to collaborate with other teams and people. To do that effectively, you need to be good at communication. Explaining the process and ideas behind your design in a way that everyone understands, requires some skills. Even the best ideas may be rejected due to the lack of proper understanding. This means that you have to learn to explain complicated concepts in an accessible way — the same thing you do when designing digital interfaces.
Being skilled at storytelling will also help you to design more compelling experiences, show off your work to recruiters and other people in an interesting form, or write a better copy for your product.
How can you practice communication skills?
- Make a presentation. Attend some small or bigger events as a speaker. The pressure to keep a presentation short and on point works as a great exercise.
- Write! And write a lot. Writing tremendously help in putting your thoughts into words. Try writing about something you know well, this way you won’t have to do thorough research before.
- Ask for feedback and critique. One part of the good communication skills is being able to receive (and give) feedback. Ask your peers to give their opinions on your designs or something else you’ve done. Try not to treat it personally, ask questions, and remember to thank your colleagues for feedback.
- Engage in discussions. If you’re having a hard time to be assertive or defend your ideas, stop avoiding the discussions. You can even act as a devil’s advocate sometimes to practice your argumentation skills.
Practice makes perfect
When progressing 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. You just need to accommodate this practice into your everyday work. And by doing so, you will soon see how you not only grow as a designer but also as a person.
