UX Designing is an area that needs creativity, flexibility (in thought and action), and a data-driven approach. It’s an area of art and science that includes interpersonal and functional roles.
It requires more than the mastery of some useful wireframing tools, interaction design, visual information architecture, visual design, and human-computer interaction. UX design is all about a user-centric approach and excellent problem-solving skills.
A UX designer’s skills are a different growth area and need consistent fine-tuning as you progress in your career. The essential qualities mentioned below help in enhancing these skills.
As a UX designer at Radiant Digital, I’ve had my ups and downs that define my work and contributions in this field. The following “areas of growth” have personally shaped me as a designer, and I hope you’ll find them helpful.
Keep Learning
A UX designer should be a good and flexible learner that never stops, even if it is built. From cognitive psychology to computer science, there’s always something for budding UX experts to learn and use in their learning process.
Small things like learning keyboard shortcuts, re-using symbols, and sharing/tracking design iterations can increase your productivity and speed up your workflow.
Also, staying updated with trends and news, learning new design tools, and designing outside of your day-to-day work helps me stay inspired and engaged. For UX designers, users, their experiences, and learning from them, that makes all the difference.
Being Resourceful
There may be instances where you feel you’ve done everything right. In the research, you’ve asked the customers the right questions, designed an excellent interface prototype, and checked all the boxes.
But last-minute contingencies always become spoilers. One product that you design may have multiple kinds of users. This is why keeping plan B and plan C under your sleeve is essential. Product managers, investors, developers, and operational staff will question your designs from their perspective.
It’s essential to roll out different options that reflect on your thoughtfulness, spontaneity, and resourcefulness. A UX designer must learn how to be efficient in small and big ways.
Be Holistically Driven
Having a global view is always a boon in your career growth chart, especially if you’re a designer. Many of my UX design colleagues are successful because they have a sense of responsibility and can take the whole product flow into perspective.
The key to this is data and user-driven. It’s more effective when you can present data to support a decision from a universal point-of-view rather than having it driven by personal bias or limited vision.
A scenario-based approach and complete flexibility while incorporating the lessons learned from upstream and downstream departments in your daily work are essential.
User Empathy
This is both a quality and skill. Understanding the users’ problems means enhancing your design and making it usable for them. When you know someone’s problem better, you become more equipped to find a solution to it.
When you’re detached from your end-users, you sometimes bypass their needs and aspirations, creating a wrong or unacceptable user experience.
Continuously listening to users, experimenting, receiving, and applying feedback become more comfortable with user empathy. The user-designer relationship is also improved when the designer is a good listener and an even better storyteller.
A designer must garner qualitative data through user interviews and quantitative data through user testing to lend perspective to your endeavors.
Open-mindedness towards Feedback
Being a liberal thinker offers a balanced view of the boundless creativity of a UX designer.
This includes learning how to take and also give constructive feedback to team members and customers. Valuing others’ opinions is essential, knowing that you are part of a team. Gathering, analyzing, and utilizing user feedback can take customer investments in your design to the next level.
Feedback from customers will give you their honest take on your design. This is what helps designers grow, innovate, and flourish.
Accept Change Gracefully
As technology influences design trends and vice versa, change is the only constant in a UX designer’s lifetime. Accept that designs will change, decisions will change, and people will change with time, becoming more evolved and focused.
Sometimes work profiles may change with trends that must be accepted to deliver exceptional designs. Taking that design is an evolutionary process, and mistakes are a part of it that helps get changes quickly to drive quality design outcomes.
The user and product relationship can be enhanced when changes are handled strategically.
Analytical Approach
Being analytical helps gauge UX’s real impact on a business and its performance in the market.
Numbers, percentages, and ratios derived from a design help achieve better design iterations proven to have worked.
Communicate Effectively
Communication gaps can fuel misunderstandings and misconceptions in the field of UX design. Being in an area that consists of presentations, creativity, and translation of discussions to designs, effective communication is a great UX tool.
In design, well begun is half done when you make communication core to the process. It helps you become more transparent about your design’s intent, and your plan can save many headaches, heartaches, and dollars in the design process.
Radiant Digital has talented UX designers who epitomize the above qualities to deliver design excellence to customers. Connect with them to share your thoughts and views for a productive career in design.
