UX Designers are an integral part of almost every product team these days. UX design has established its importance in not only the digital products field but also in the field of physical products. The user experience is no longer an additional thing for a design team but an essential one.
This has also increased the roles and responsibilities of a UX designer. Now a UX designer is a very specific role that companies look for. But what are the skills that a UX designer must possess? This is exactly what we are going to discuss in our article today. But before that let’s start with some basic terms.
Skills for UX Designers
What is UX Design?
User experience refers to the overall experience of a customer or a user using a product, platform, or service. Especially in terms of how simplistic and pleasing it is to use. UX design or User Experience design is the process of creating the experiences or the interactions that a user has with a product. The basic principle of UX design is to keep the needs of the user prior and improve the interaction of the user and the product keeping this in mind.
Who is a UX Designer?
A UX designer, referred to as a User Experience Designer is a professional who is responsible who creating meaningful user experiences for a better interaction of the user with the physical product, digital product or service. The goal of a UX designer is to improve the overall experience of the user when he or she uses your product or service.
Why UI/UX Design?
- Low barrier to entry: Degrees are not required for frontend development for most of the companies. Skills matter the most therefore barrier to entry is low.
- Awesome job prospects and increasing demand: Thousands of websites are being created every year and most of the professional websites require a UI/UX designer to create the design.
- High salaries: average salary of a UI/UX designer is about $90k in the US.
- Can be a great launch pad for other tech careers.
Skills Required for Becoming a UX Designer
- User research: User research is the key responsibility of a UX designer. A UX designer has to prepare for the research, write the interview guidelines and scripts, and create documents that outline how research should be conducted step by step. A UX designer also then has to conduct the research therefore, interviewing people in-person or remotely is also the task of a UX designer. This makes user research a very important skill that companies look for.
- Research analysis and presentation: For becoming a good UX designer, you must be proficient at analysis and presenting data. This is because it is the responsibility of a UX designer to take detailed notes of the research. there’s a lot of information that will be gathered so the role of UX developers is to analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data. Then the UX designer has to create reports and presentations to present that complex information to other people in the team.
- Collaborating with the stakeholders and analyzing the customer: Collaboration an empathy is another important skill for a UX designer. This is because the role of a UX developer is primarily a people-focused role. Therefore, UX designers work with lots of other teams – business stakeholders, developers and visual designers for conducting research, running workshops, analyzing data, running tests and experiments and doing a lot of communication with presentations and creating diagrams. A UX developer also acts like a connection between the users or the customers and the business
- Communication skills (Conducting workshops): In most of the companies, workshops are a responsibility for a UX designer where people from different areas of the business to come together and generate ideas and decide where the focus should be. For this a UX designer is expected to have decent Communication skills.
- Wireframing and Prototyping: As a UX designer, you are expected to be proficient at Wireframing and Prototyping. Wireframes are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept. A wireframe for a digital product is similar to a blueprint for a house. Wireframe clearly illustrates how the product functions and the core elements of its design. Whereas Aa prototype is a sample of a final designed product that is used to test and gather feedback so that we can make changes in the design.
- Staying updated with the latest design trends and new tools for UX design: As a UX designer, you are expected to know what’s happening in the field, what are the latest design trends and new tools in the market. This is an informal responsibility, no company would ask you to do this, rather this depends more on your passion for UX design but companies do mention this while they are hiring.
Conclusion
UX Designers are professionals who specialize in creating meaningful user experiences for a better interaction of the user with the physical product, digital product or service. UX design is a evry lucartive field after all the high pacakges offered to professional UX designers. But anything that is fruitful doesn’t come easy – there are quite a few skills that a required to become a UX designer.
Do focus on the skills we mentioned in this article and you will have better chances for performing better in your interview, your next job or your current work.