Strengthening your UX soft skills
Don’t overlook these 5 valuable skills
So you’re looking to get into UX and not sure where to start? Or, perhaps you’ve started your journey or completed a bootcamp or degree program, but aren’t feeling confident about your skills and readiness to tackle real UX work.
If you’ve started studying UX, I suspect you’ve been learning the technical skills, also referred to as hard skills — design principles, processes, software and tools — but you’ve overlooked strengthening your soft skills. This is to be expected since most messaging about how-to-get-into-UX talks about hard skills, and bootcamps tend to build their curricula around teaching hard skills.
The takeaway up front
If you haven’t started your UX education journey, I suggest making soft skills your first step. It can strengthen your resolve to pursue a career in UX or it can reveal that UX is not right for you, before you make the educational investment.
If you’ve already started your UX education journey, this is your next step. Building your soft skills will take you from checking hard skill boxes — learn design principles, create some personas, build a prototype in Figma — to acquiring skills that will be applicable to every project with every employer. And, frankly:
- Design principles don’t address all design challenges since they don’t account for contextual use cases.
- Personas aren’t always necessary and they can introduce, or perpetuate biases, making them problematic when created without extreme care for inclusivity.
- Figma may not be the prototyping software your employer uses and in a few years some other software might be all the rage.
Of course you should learn the hard skills, but you could be short-changing yourself if you overlook these critical soft skills.
1. Active Listening and Empathy
Without going too deep into it, recent neuroscience research has found that empathy activates physiological changes in the brain that are associated with feelings of distress, because empathy can invoke first-person negative emotions. Whereas, compassion invokes positive feelings of concern and a desire to help, so those same areas of the brain are not activated. So, I typically speak of learning compassion instead of empathy, but most books and courses use the word empathy.
Active listening is giving others focused attention with the intent to understand and empathy is an umbrella term for having sensitivity for others and seeing things from their point of view. From grasping business needs and goals, to working with colleagues, to gaining actionable insights from user research, I can’t overstate the importance of active listening and empathy/compassion in a UX career.
Strengthen your active listening and empathy skills
- 10 ways to have a better conversation [Ted Talk]
Celeste Headlee suggests always entering conversations assuming you have something to learn. As a radio host who has interview many guests, she offers 10 solid rules to help you be a better listener and conversationalist. - Active Listening: You Can Be a Great Listener [Udemy course]
Gain techniques to improve your listening skills so you have more productive conversations, truly hear others, and build trust with others. - The art and design of empathy in everyday life [Ted Talk]
Jason Kehrer discusses the differences between empathy, sympathy and compassion, gives real life examples, and shares some actionable steps you can take to be more intentional about designing with empathy. - Deploy Empathy [book]
This book walks you through the details of conducting user interviews including tips on how to pose questions and actively listen with empathy. You’ll also learn things to avoid, how to handle the unexpected and how to analyze your findings using journey mapping. - Empathy in UX design [LinkedIn course]
Gain an in depth understanding of empathy. Get tips for applying empathy to your work with colleagues, customers, and users so you can go deeper than design best practices to create products that are based on research and empathy for users’ desired experiences.
2. Problem Solving/Critical Thinking
Design decisions should never be arbitrary or based on personal preferences. Every design decision should solve problems, take alternatives into consideration, and map to something — user research findings, established conventions, design principles, business goals, etc.
Critical thinking is a vital aspect of problem solving. It’s the process of gathering, conceptualizing, analyzing, evaluating, and applying information to guide our beliefs and actions. As designers, we need to know how to ask questions that provide real insights so we can identify applicable design opportunities and risks.
Strengthen your problem solving and critical thinking skills
- 5 tips to improve your critical thinking [Ted Talk]
Get a quick overview of what critical thinking is and key steps in the process. Definitely follow this up with the more in depth resources provided. - The Art of Asking [Questions] [Skillshare course]
Understand the importance asking well-formed questions, get tips for how to structure effective questions and learn how to ask questions in design research. - Thinking, Fast and Slow [book]
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses our two systems of thinking and how we can move beyond our visceral, impulsive thinking (system 1) to slower, effortful, critical thinking (system 2), so that we question our system 1 thoughts and create opportunities to reduce the biases in our decision-making. - Using Questions to Foster Critical Thinking [LinkedIn course]
This course addresses critical thinking broadly, but the instruction is very much applicable to design. Learn how to check your assumptions, increase your curiosity, and pose the right questions to get more informative and actionable answers from customers, users, and colleagues.
3. Collaborating and Negotiating
Unless you’re a startup company of one, design is a team sport involving people who come to the project with varying expertise and perspectives. You’ll have to work with most, if not all, of them at various points throughout a project.
You’ll want to learn how to collaborate with people who have different communication styles, deal with (and learn from) opposing views, and negotiate design trade-offs so that decisions account for various constraints, opportunities and risks.
Strengthen your collaboration and negotiation skills
- Collaboration for Creatives: Make Your Project Better [Skillshare course]
Learn aspects of the collaborative process, how to approach collaboration and gain insights from three guest industry professionals who share their experiences and lessons learned about collaboration. - Creative Collaboration [LinkedIn course]
The word “creative” here refers to the process of cultivating new ideas and not the design role. The course encourages you to ignore your inner critic since every idea can evolve and spark new ones. You’ll learn techniques to gain insights from others, share your ideas and remove creative blocks to work towards creative solutions. - Getting to Yes [book]
I read this book about negotiating, over a decade ago, and it made a huge impression on me and how I address tough topics (like salary negotiation) and deal with opposition. I don’t want to tarnish your UX career dreams, but there is often opposition to deal with, so the advice in this book is essential.
4. Communicating and Presenting
Communication is key throughout every aspect of UX processes, and being able to present ideas and facilitate discussions is innate to UX careers. You don’t have to be an extrovert, but you do need to be able to build rapport and trust and have productive discussions with a variety of people and roles.
Strengthen your communication and presentation skills
- Articulating Design Decisions [book]
Tom Greever tackles some tough challenges that UXers and designers face with communicating the value of UX, understanding others perspectives, dealing with rejections, building trust, facilitating productive design reviews, and getting buy-in. - Communication Foundations [LinkedIn course]
Learn how to deal with awkward situations, tailor your message to your audience, and pitch your ideas with exercises to put the suggestions into practice. - Presentation Design for Smart People [Skillshare course]
This is a thorough course for learning how to create impactful, narrative, presentations from concept to delivery. - Public Speaking: A tactical approach [Udemy course]
This course feels like it’s teaching you how to give a Ted Talk instead how to present designs, but it offers some practical techniques for approaching public speaking, overcoming common pitfalls, and keeping people engaged.
5. Time Management
Having multiple concurrent tasks and dealing with changing and conflicting priorities is typical in the day-to-day life of many UX professionals. Learning techniques to be successful in planning your work, dealing with distractions, and adapting to changes can have a significant impact on your ability to meet deadlines and maintain a good work/life balance.
Strengthen your time management skills
- Atomic Habits [book]
James Clear doesn’t address time management directly, but his recommendations for making small changes to break bad habits can be applied to improving time management, as he discusses how to have better self-control and overcoming procrastination. - How to stop languishing and start finding flow [Ted Talk]
Adam Grant’s talk is a great motivational talk for tackling procrastination. He discusses feelings of stagnation and lack of motivation, then suggests ways to break through and find ‘flow’. - Scheduling for Creatives [LinkedIn course]
Learn how to deal with tight schedules, unexpected changes, and effectively adapt while accounting for your work style and your team environment. - Time Management Fundamentals [LinkedIn course]
This course approaches time management by focusing on principles and tools for increasing your productivity.
Final Thoughts
Strengthening UX-applicable soft skills like active listening, problem solving, collaborating, communicating and time management will equip you with skills that will improve your ability to adapt to different projects, people, and problems. These soft skills can boost your confidence and will prepare you to meet the diverse challenges of UX work.
Thank you
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