They’re not soft skills – they’re really hard skills
I recently remembered an article in which I’d been asked what skills I thought good UX practitioners need to have. Off the top of my head I came up with 3 Cs. But in hindsight I’d say there are 4 of them:
- Curiosity
- Creativity
- Communication
- Collaboration
We’re often told these skills are the ‘soft’ side of design. I disagree. Tools, methods and techniques can be learnt. It’s much harder to learn the Cs. Here’s why I think they’re important, and my tips for sharpening them up.
Curiosity
To solve a problem is to understand the problem. I’d say 90% of solving it is in the understanding. As Einstein once said:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
But to identify the real problem means getting to the root cause, not just the surface issue. Luckily researchers and content designers are particularly very good at asking questions. A lot of us haven’t grown out of the ‘Why?’ phase we went through as toddlers! It’s also the reason I think many content designers started out as journalists. We didn’t just want to write – we were nosy!
So how do you become more curious? Of course you can ask questions, and some people recommend the ‘5 Whys’ technique, where you keep asking ‘why’ to delve deeper. But sometimes it’s hard to get direct answers.
Personally I love interviews – with users but also with internal stakeholders. Finding out their different perspectives on a problem or challenge can often help shed light on the reasons things are the way they are. When you get someone to relax and open up there’s often a background story they’ll share which reveals far more about the political environment, culture or technical constraints than asking ‘why’ ever would.
Becoming more curious also means learning more about the world around us in order to be more empathetic. Watch people, really take in the small details of what they do, and ask them about it.
When you go back through research notes, hone in on what your users said, I take as many verbatim notes as possible. It’s often the most interesting quote that is the real gold nugget of insight you can shape your solutions or product proposition around.
Creativity
Being creative doesn’t have to mean having artistic flair. In fact Steve Jobs said:
“Creativity is just connecting things.”
I buy into this 100%. Spotting connections to make things simpler is what we are paid to do. I can’t think of a single project I’ve worked on that didn’t require connecting people, ideas, concepts, products, systems, user journeys, words, or visuals. Connecting things makes you look at things in different ways and identify opportunities you may not have thought about.
While some people are naturally great at ‘systems thinking’ and making connections, others have to work harder at it. I find drawing diagrams can help me to see connections as well as making sense of tricky concepts. If you’re not naturally a sketcher (and I’m not!) it doesn’t matter…even spider diagrams or mind maps help.
The other thing I’ve found really helps is watching and learning from people who are really good at spotting connections.
Even when you don’t think you’re making connections or being creative – affinity mapping for example – you’re often spotting themes that can spark new ideas.
Communication
As a content designer, written communication skills are vital. But I think for any design discipline being a good communicator is key to your success. Every user experience we create is a form of communication.
Adding to that, presenting work, explaining the process and rationale, influencing, and providing feedback all rest on effective communication.
If you need to work on this skill, I’ve found these three things to be the most useful:
- Confidence-building courses, such as presenting or coaching workshops
- Books (such as Radical Candor) which help you understand how to be more effective (without being aggressive)
- Setting expectations about what and how you’ll communicate, and when
Spending time observing the style of the people you’re working with (or need to influence) is really useful. Knowing whether someone is visual, reflective, or highly numbers driven will help you adapt your style to meet theirs.
Practise your listening skills (I’m still working on this one), take time to absorb what’s going on before you jump in. That way you’ll have something to say rather than just be saying something.
And at the start of any project, set out how you plan to share updates, and when you plan to share them, so there’s no mismatch in expectations.
Collaboration
The effectiveness of a team is down to everyone being stronger as a collective group — the sum of its parts bringing different skills together.
Being truly collaborative means accepting shared responsibility and trusting each other enough to relinquish control. Trust is vital so that you have emotional security. This enables you to speak up — even when you don’t agree, share work — even in it’s rawest state, and feed back — honestly.
To foster trust, a team needs to get on well, so spend time really getting to know your teammates, even if they aren’t people you’d usually hang out with. In fact, especially then.
Be brave in volunteering your skills before they’re asked for, and go out of your way to help your team mates.
Open up your design (and thought process), if you’re the designer you don’t always need to hold the pencil, and if you’re the content designer, you don’t need to come up with every word. Every team member has ideas and valuable perspectives, so build on each other’s thoughts, and lift each other up.
Collaboration goes wider than your immediate product team. Open up and allow others into your circle. Don’t be guarded about your working processes, new people bring fresh ideas. Invite stakeholders to ideation sessions. or enlighten them by taking them to research sessions. All these things will strengthen your work. And by bringing others along the journey with you, you’ll find influencing becomes a lot easier too!
While these skills might not be things we can ‘prove’ when applying for jobs, any good manager will be looking for clues we have them when they interview, so think about how you can hint towards them when you share your work and processes. And if you think you’re great at all of them right now, well…there’s always room to improve. We continue to build and adapt these skills all through our working lives, and well beyond too.
