As a UI/UX designer, your responsibility extends more than just pushing pixels behind your screen. The UI/UX discipline encompasses many umbrellas and you could be looking at fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI), usability, visual design, information architecture, interaction design and maybe in the future, more towards conversational design — especially the rise of chatbots and AI. Furthermore, a good UI/UX designer need to also be able to look not only at users’ perspectives, but also from a business’ end goal(s). 

It’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Personal attributes — as opposed to core skills — while might seem secondary, they could elevate yourself and your skills as a UI/UX designer, what’s with more and more companies been hiring waves of designers. They can help designers in large aspects of their work, from satisfying users, working with team members and dealing with stakeholders. These attributes can be learned, developed, encouraged and sharpened — provided you are up for them.

Personal attributes

Empathy

Realising empathy Four inter-related yet distinct processes that has to work together to make this process possible. By Seung Chan Lim.

Empathy is more than just a buzzword floating around. Empathy is described as the ability to understand and share feelings of another person — in other words, being able to put yourselves in other people’s shoes, thus being able to understand their feelings, motivations, limitations, biases and many others.

As a UI/UX designer, you need to be able to develop a sense of empathy to get very far in your career, as you need to be able to understand your users, your clients as well as being able to work with your teammates. Having a sense of empathy will lead to an improvement in a lot of areas. The book Design Collaboration for the Enterprise mentions that by having empathy, you can also improve collaboration.

Seung Chan Lim wrote a wonderful article on a thoughtful examination of empathy in life and in the context of design.

If you want to learn to become more empathetic, here are eight tips to do so.

Critical thinking

Connecting the dots The stage of critical thinking, from data accumulation all the way till wisdom formation. Photo from Gapingvoid.

The best designers are often thinking. More than just that, they know how to think effectively.

We now live among unprecedented abundance of information. The Internet offers us more than we could ever consume and shops offer us more choices than we could ever process. This information glut, coupled with our fast-paced lifestyle, contributes to our inability to filter information effectively, leading to lack of value in the work that we present ourselves in — because we tend to include everything in!

While this skill takes time to develop, there are some small steps you can take to sharpen it. For example, you may start to distinguish between user complaints or feedback during UX testing. During initial project briefing, start making small notes about the nature of the project, and why it would be different from the previous or current ones you are working on. For example, if the new project would require a new interface for a ridesharing app, you may start to think of why the UX would be different from the UX for a recipe sharing app you are currently working on.

Critical thinking is more than just filtering information. Two more subskills of critical thinking you could start to practice are being perceptive and having an eye for details. Technically, if you begin to start questioning “why?” to a lot of things, it is a good start. While surfing the web, you may also start to question why a certain website behaves the way it does, and how they do it. You can start by noticing microinteractions and compiling them, as the folks at Little Big Details do.

Lynda has a good short, one-hour course for critical thinking you could start on.

Hunger for knowledge

There is no prescribed path to becoming a good UI/UX designer. Some people we know do have the qualifications for them, some don’t — but what sets them apart is their willingness to always learn and improve themselves. The industry is constantly evolving and revolutionising. What’s good is that with Internet at the tip of our fingers these days, it is very easy to keep up with the trends.

One tip we often tell budding designers is just a one word mantra: read. There are many books out there offering UI/UX lessons from basic, technical all the way to the psychology of users. The only thing you have to do is keep looking.

Here are some good UI/UX books to start with:

• The Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman
• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
• The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett
• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design – Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel
• The UX Book – Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla
• Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience – Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
• The User Experience Team of One – Leah Buley

Patience

The initial section was to be called ‘passion’ — but I changed my mind. Very often we emphasise on the importance on passion for us to pursue what we want, without realising that like supernova, passion burns brightly and full of energy, only to burst and fade slowly. 

If you are a new UI/UX designer, there will be many occasions where the learning curve might get too steep you feel like quitting. Having the patience to know that any worthy skills take time to master will keep you grounded and put you back on track on your endeavour to become an excellent UI/UX designer.

Having the patience will also help you to be more grounded. In return, you will be more open to learn more (hunger for knowledge), understand others (empathy) and being able to fill in the gaps (perceptive) while constructing your solutions (critical thinking).

Don’t forget to also check out: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer: Part 1 – Core Skills.

The post So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer: Part 2 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

It has also been one of the biggest contributors to many success stories, for example — Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon, and AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business.

More so than ever, we are in need of more UI/UX designers to carry on this challenge. Undoubtedly not an easy role, UI/UX designers need to equip themselves with a certain sets of skills. Which brings to the next question— what sort of skills?

From our experiences, we could list down these skills in two categories — core skills (technical skills needed to excel as a UI/UX designer) and personal attributes (might seem secondary, but they are actually important to level yourself up to be a better UI/UX designer each day).

This week, let’s talk about core skills needed to become a UI/UX designer. Onward!

Core skills

User research

Bigger companies might have a dedicated team to perform user research, but it is important for a UI/UX designer to get herself involved in the research from the beginning. This could give her more insight into the nature of the business, get herself acquainted with the clients & their problems and how they behave — which actually could help with the direction of the design later.

Wireframing

Wireframing is the step which allows you to define the information hierarchy of your design, making it easier for you to plan the layout. It is as MVP as it can be in the design process, especially if you want to start designing and you want to confirm with the client or the team on the layout.  Once it is confirmed, it is actually faster to start designing since you already have the structure.

This beginner’s guide to wireframing is very helpful for you to start building your own guidelines.

Visual design

In order to transform the wireframes into mock ups, suffice to say you will need to have basic visual design skills. Our designers use Photoshop for this before getting the designs signed off and handed over to the development team, but best to check with the team you are working with on their preferences.

You might be thinking — “but I started with print design and I wanted to get into UI/UX, is it too late?” Absolutely not! There is an abundance of free UI/UX courses online you may find on Coursera, Hackdesign and many more. You may only need to start adapting your existing design practices to UI/UX. 

Prototyping

Prototyping can be defined as ‘a simulation or sample version of a final product, used for testing prior to launch.’ Prototypes are used to test products, fix issues and confirm requirements before sinking further into development. Prototype testing can save time and money since it can be used to identify earlier usability issues and reveal areas to be improved.

A lot of apps can be used to develop faster prototypes. Our team swears by InVision, but there are many others such as UXPin, Atomic and Sketch.

If you’d like to read more, UXPin here has a good article on a guide to prototyping.

Basic coding

We all hear of all these arguments floating about — “should designers learn how to code?”. The answer would be, “yes, but as much as possible to understand how development would work later.”

The designs done by UI/UX designers are eventually going to be translated into code, so it is helpful for UI/UX designers to know basic front end and programming knowledge. This is so that you could know what’s possible to be done before sending your design files to the developers without risking on their timelines or resources. It is vitally important, according to this discussion, that “UX folks have (at least) a theoretical understanding of “FE-related things”, including semantic page structure, optimization techniques, impact of JavaScript, graceful degradation/progressive enhancement, accessibility etc.”

Metrics and analytics

There is a possibility that user research will not be included in the scope of a project, so how do you start designing? First off, UI/UX designers do not design blindly. Your design decisions should be informed from experiential and data-driven decision.

UI/UX designers need to have some basic understanding on translating data so that we can use them to accomplish goals and achieve customer’s satisfactions. InVision has this good article on how to design with data.

Writing

In his annual Design in Tech report lead by John Maeda, he suggests that besides coding, the other one “unicorn” skill a designer should have would be writing. While many designers have noted the value of leading design with content, there are some others who are still persistent to start writing more due to many reasons. Well, we should not have.

Writing could also help immensely in articulating your design justifications to clients, or your team members. Furthermore, when you write, we empty up our mental estate in order to make way for more information to come through. We also remember better!

There is no magic to writing, and if you would like to start, here are some simple but powerful UX writing tips for designers.

Moving forward

Evidently, there is no shortcut to become a good UI/UX designer. Depends on your organisations or whether you work alone, sometimes not all of these skills are needed but it would be helpful to branch into all of these core skills as much possible.

After all, user advocation doesn’t take a day!

Next in Part 2: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer : Personal Attributes.

(Thank you WOCinTech Chat for photos!)

The post So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.