Having empathy

UX wouldn’t exist without empathy. In UX, users are at the centre of everything we do. From empathising with a user’s motivations to knowing why they use a product in a certain way, a UX designer’s objective is to make sure that the product is useful for their users. This means truly understanding the end customer. Don’t, however, go chasing after clients like Tom Cruise did in Jerry Maguire. He kinda had the right idea but fell short in execution.

If UX designers didn’t understand a user’s real context, we’d just be making decisions from an air-conditioned room without a real grasp of the real situation. To ensure that we truly know what our users go through, we conduct ethnographic studies by experiencing the real contexts in which our users use the product.

Once, on a Stampede Oil & Gas project, we shadowed workers in an oil refinery over their 12 hour shift. We learned that we had to take into account the long and exhausting hours, hot conditions and clunky equipment. Would we have had any idea of what it was like without literally stepping into their boots? Probably not. But because we took the right steps to empathise with the plant workers’ unique challenges, we gained significant insights that informed our work.

Emotional intelligence

I’m sure you know a couple of people who magically know when you’re feeling rotten and how to make you feel better. Those friends probably have some kick-butt EQ. Having good or high Emotional Quotient (EQ), a.k.a. emotional intelligence, is useful for navigating relationships with people from different backgrounds, industries and roles.

Being able to quickly parse a person’s drives and concerns allows you to adjust your approach to them accordingly thus optimising your interactions with them. This becomes increasingly important the further you go up the UX totem pole as managers need to organise their clients and teams.

Besides the obvious benefits in day-to-day work relations, UX practitioners with high EQ can glean the truth by reading between the lines of what users’ may actually mean as opposed to what they say. This is especially useful during usability tests and user interviews where the interviewer has to dig for proverbial gold from users. Similarly, by sensing the general mood of the interviewee, the UX designer can control the flow of the conversation to unearth more insights.

Ability to articulate

Ever wondered how some people are just so good at explaining really hazy and confusing concepts? Just a little secret, it takes a lot of practice and plenty of linguistic elbow grease. UX can seem mysterious simply because it’s a broad category. The subjects it covers ranges from how a product makes you feel to the change in ROI when a button’s colour is updated. It’s therefore the job of the designer to explain these abstract concepts to the clients or workshop participants in understandable terms.

Designers also need to be able to weave together disparate narratives from multiple sources to create a coherent story. This goes hand-in-hand with articulating what a client is trying to express. Here, from the input of the clients, experts and workshop participants, the designer has to tease out information and identify where and what the pain points and opportunities.

Persuasive

Us UX designers are a charming bunch! We constantly use our persuasive [hypnotic] powers to evoke the right emotional experience and encourage users to complete specific objectives. From the business side, getting buy-in from relevant stakeholders is paramount.

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When proposing a solution, designers need to make sure they’re solving the stakeholders’ problems while communicating the benefits and risks clearly. The ability to effectively repesent both the business and user interests is important to win stakeholder’s support. Doing this for different parties means speaking their language to keep the whole team focused on the end goal. It’s not always easy to tap dance your way through the Minefield of Differing Opinions™ but this is why a designer has to be persuasive enough to keep everyone onboard and on-track. This special ability especially will go a long way in cross-functional teams.

Persuasion doesn’t just stop at stakeholder management. Designers use persuasive design constantly to nudge users to stay motivated and complete their goals. Techniques such as progressive disclosure and some aspects of gamification work to encourage long-term engagement and the formation of habits as is often the case with e-commerce and health insurance.

Humility

In today’s culture that fetishises egocentricity, it’s easy to forget the importance of humility. This especially applies to UX designers who shouldn’t breeze in as experts shooting off design thinking sound bites. It’s usually the client or the business who are the experts as they’re the ones who have been working in the industry and on the product.

My role as a UX strategist, especially during workshops and design sprints, is to listen keenly and steer the conversation rather than dominate it. Designers bring a fresh perspective and reframe the questions and potential solutions after parsing the input from various parties. This enables us to facilitate discussions and only step out when necessary to highlight important elements.

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Now, as you probably noticed, a lot of these skills aren’t mutually exclusive. Emotional intelligence and empathy form the foundational soft skills upon which being articulate, persuasive and humble are built. Because UX as a field is constantly evolving and follows in the wake of technological developments, it’s more important for aspiring UX designers to have the right attitude and soft skills rather than technical know-how as those can often only be developed over time. At least at first, UX designers need to tap into their soft skills and get used to wiggling their toes in other people’s shoes.

By the way, we’re hiring UI/UX designers! Check out the job description here. The application deadline is Friday 30 November 2018.

The post People Smarts: 5 Essential Soft Skills for UX Designers appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

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.

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