Essential Skills Required for a Successful UX Career in UX Design

UX design or user experience design is a concept that deals with making the interaction between computers and humans easier and more intuitive so that it leads to improved customer loyalty, user satisfaction, and utility derived from the experience. It usually involves multiple dimensions like usability, visual design, interaction design, information architecture, etc. UX design jobs, though a relatively new concept, are very much in demand and promise to be extremely rewarding for those with the necessary skills and passion. A quick look at the essential skills required for a successful career in UX design:

Ability to Conduct Wireframing

Websites need to display properly on a large range of screen sizes these days where the interaction with the web is more on portable devices like mobile phones and tablets rather than laptops and desktops. This makes the responsive design of websites necessary, which in turn requires UX designers to be competent in wireframing to create a proper hierarchy of information on the website. Wireframing is also required to retain the focus of the purpose of the project in a typical scenario where multiple objectives have to be kept in mind and the influx of ideas and concepts can be completely chaotic during the web design process. Wireframing also allows UX designers to make the flow of information and website features more logical and usable.

Ability to Conduct User Research

Since UX is all about giving users a pleasant and satisfying experience, a UX designer must be able to understand and appreciate what users really want. Most often, users are not able to communicate very well in writing what they really desire so good UX designers must be always ready to step out of the office to talk, discuss, and find out what it is that customers and users really want so that the design can be customized accordingly. Interacting with actual users is also a very good idea to find out whether a particular design idea is actually going down well with them.

Ability to Perform Rapid Prototyping

Prototyping is considered as an essential skill for every UX designer because of the need to evaluate and iterate the UX designs. A rapid prototype can be executed in many forms right from a simple paper format to something with elaborate computer code. The point to be appreciated is that UX design is actually about interaction rather than visuals so typically prototyping needs to be more evolved for better communication and evaluation. This has given rise to a whole host of software for prototyping and as is usual in this domain, changes and developments take place at a furious rate. Those looking for UX designer jobs are required to be extremely agile and be able to conduct rapid prototyping in the latest versions of the software for faster and better design results.

Ability to Delight Users

As may be expected, merely researching users for design concepts is not the aim of UX designers. The real intention of UX design is to offer an experience that will truly delight the users so that they are encouraged to spend more time on the site and come back more often to offer their business. UX designers should be ready to find out how they can offer a truly wonderful user experience and how this intention impacts upon their design goals. Keeping an enhanced user experience at the back of the mind should enable a better user experience to be designed. UX designers require being more obsessed with finding out ‘how’ the user can be delighted rather than the typical ‘why’. The better the UX designer is able to describe that process, the higher the chance of being able to undertake a successful design project. UX designers have to be completely familiar with the domain of the website so that they can give their UX objectives that clarity and accuracy required by users.

Ability to Forge Unique Designs Driven by Data

The last thing as a UX designer that you should do is to follow the crowds and deliver a me-too user experience as that is bound to disappoint users. All your design decisions should be derived from continuous experiments and be justifiable with actual data. When these design principles are not followed, it may lead to the development of designs that are extremely boring and may also go against usability standards that are well established and known. A simple assumption that drop-down menus work very well may lead to a UX design that actually performs very poorly when measured by actual data.

Ability to Handle Responsive Design

Surfing the Internet is no longer restricted to desktops and laptops; indeed, more web browsing is done from portable devices than from conventional desktops. This requires the website design to be made responsive so that it displays properly on screens of various sizes. As a result of this paradigm shift, UX designers require to be highly skilled in the design of user experiences delivered on small screens of mobiles and tablets. However, more than just designing for small screens, the UX designer will need to understand the context as well as the environment in which the portable devices are used, the difference in relationships that users have with their mobile phones compared to desktops, and the radical difference that touchscreens have ushered in that makes shoehorning existing UX designs into the new environment infeasible.  

Conclusion

By now it will be very clear what sort of skills a UX designer will require for a successful career. As is evident, it is a varied array of technical and non-technical attributes that will need to be learned and honed to perfection so that the UX design ultimately delivered to the client is spot on not only as far as fulfilling the requirements go but also in delivering a very high level of user experience satisfaction. This makes it imperative for UX designers to have a very well-rounded personality so that they are comfortable in handling the development process as well as interacting with both clients and users to find the perfect solution that will give very high levels of satisfaction.

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