Design your way

UX designer skills are highly diverse and one of the most multifaceted skills a designer can have. One of the biggest challenges you will face as a budding UX designer is how you would market yourself. Do you understand the employment market and the skills you need that will make you stand out from other UX designers?

UX designers in the marketplace are looking for ways to attract attention to their UX design portfolio. It is a crucial aspect in the UX marketplace as employers are looking for UX design experts that are masters in their field. Unfortunately, design skills are not the only important aspect employer are looking at.

You need to stand out from other UX designers that are more than experts in their field. You are the gateway that a business needs to build its brand and exceed its goals. Therefore, is it important that besides excellent design skills, you have other outstanding attributes too.

Other skills that contribute to an outstanding portfolio are listed here to give you a jumpstart to a UX design career. With this list, you will be able to craft a UX designer resume that is worth a second look.

The UX designer skills you should have

Analytical Thinking

A UX designer deals with data and while intuition and empathy will get you somewhere, it will not help much when faced with the raw numbers from Google Analytics.

In product development and marketing, data is increasingly important, therefore is the ability to extract information from data and setting up proper KPIs invaluable

Wireframing

An actual design process starts with a wireframe which is simple a simple enough to enable you to start from scratch, but with adequate complexity to act as a solid foundation. This mapping is the backbone -structure – of an entire project that makes it easy to add individual parts later.

Static wireframes enable a UX designer to quickly create low-fidelity prototypes and add interactivity in seconds. It is a simplified outline of a product which can be done on a piece of paper if you do not want to use tools like Balsamiq or Adobe Illustrator.

Empathy

An essential UX design trait is empathy. You must be able to view products through a client’s eyes and be the voice of your users. What do they want, what are their goals, how will they approach a problem and how can you as UX designer solve and prevent problems. Consider any potential problem that your customer could experience and prevent it.

User Research

Excellent examples of an incredible UX are Amazon and Google. These principles have easy to use and straightforward end-user results with strong UX design. As a skilled UX designer, a major attribute is UX research which is a job in itself.

Since a UX designer’s primary responsibility is to create apps, websites, and technology that is as easy to use as possible, the target market must be understood. What turns them off and what do they want and need?

This is where UX research comes in. A UX researcher is akin to data scientists that instead of hypothesizing what a consumer would like, they form data-drive insights by analyzing consumer behavior.

As a competent UX researcher, you replace guesswork with insights and incorporate it into UX design that turns the insights into a consumer-centric result which resonate with consumers. Good tools to use include Five Second Test, UX Recorder and Usabilia.

Rapid Prototyping

UX design rapid prototyping is the interactive approach to UX development. It follows on wireframing where you have the website’s basic structure and layout, which is now emphasized on a quick iterating design that enables efficient development of the website or app. The prototype typically behaves like the end product. You can use tools and processes like HTML and CDD or Adobe Sketch as well as InVision.

Ability to twist the rules

As a UX designer you know there are times that limitations prevent you from delivering a great product. You might not be able to find the best animations and time could stand in your way and force you to deliver lowered standards. If you encounter limitation, you will as an experience and innovative UX designer push for the best solution by questioning and moving around limitations.

It is not a sign of ignoring limitations, but instead, create their next best solution while still delivering a top design. It acts as a trump card where you work around a limitation and solve it by coming up with something even better. You will as UX designer find a solution and inspire someone else to do it too.

Thick skinned

When you deliver a project, you are faced with the tough part which is getting feedback which could be negative. You presented the best possible design and expect to be praised but your client finds aspects of your design that you didn’t consider. In most cases, a designer would be defensive because the design was thought through and many hours were spent.

As a professional UX designer you need to be thick-skinned, you must look at your own design with a critical eye, be prepared to take negative critique as the client isn’t attacking you, but a design that is not understood or elements overlooked. This is how you will evolve and improve on your ideas and designs

Negotiation Skills

As a UX designer, you must possess strong negotiation skills. Communication is key and you must have the ability to encourage and convince team members and fellow designers to use a chosen approach even though they might feel different about it.

Reasoning and Logic Skills

A UX designer uses logic and reasoning in modern design applications by anticipating problems and using logic to compare and contrast solutions.

Logic and reasoning are the foundation to form ideas, create designs, wireframe and prototype to follow up with testing, failing and iterate. You need reasoning to prevent going around in endless circles but accept that failures encourage better understanding, acts as a learning curve which creates an experience.

Rationalization will enable you to discern between what is happening and what should be happening. You must be able to reason with logic why something works and why it doesn’t or wouldn’t work.

Coding Skills

You do not need to an expert coder, but diversified skills including coding is a benefit when employers look at a pile of resumes. You will stand out as you will be able to understand the potential limitations of projects which you create a solution for.

Visualization Skills

To understand how data is visualized is an important UX design skill. In the modern world which is fast-paced, there is no time for intricate data but instead easy to understand and functional.

There is no need to complicate data to emphasize your design skills, that is something which would be evident in the end product. You want to empower the user with an enjoyable and efficient project. Only provide a user with what is required to make the product valuable like username and password.

Curiosity and Empathy

Curiosity is one of the important UX designer skills as it shows you are constantly seeking to learn, explore and investigate through observing.

You are ideally forward-thinking and naturally inquisitive with a desire to know more in order to improve your own skills but also a desire to grow outside your area of expertise as well. Empathy combined with curiosity is how you create a masterpiece.

You will give people only what the need or ask for when you have empathy without curiosity. However, the moment that you add curiosity you will dig deeper and deliver better and more innovative projects.

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