What makes a great UX/Product designer?
Apr 7, 2020
2 Comments
I’m currently HCI Master’s student trying to refine my skills. The advice that I’ve been given has always revolved around being user centric but nothing beyond that. I’m trying to find some more in-depth advice on how to expand my skillset:
- What makes a great UX designer?
- What are some key characteristics that are usually missing or lacking from UX designers?
#ux #uxdesigner #productdesign #career
comments
- backs decisions with data (be that qual user research or quant metrics). The purpose of your work becomes more likely to be irrefutable.
- aligns work to clear success metrics (OKRs) defined at the beginning. Your work is optimized for ROI and isn’t just expensive fluff.
- thinks about how their product design contributes to a bigger framework or ecosystem and connects with other designers. You aren’t designing in a black box, you’re thinking about how your work can build on/push forward/change an existing pattern, and if it’s new, you can justify why it should be new.
- has a sense of visual design. Doesn’t mean you need to be an expert (design systems and components help a lot these days) but you should have a clear understanding of visual design principles. Stuff should look good enough to inspire and delight.
- has a sense of interaction design. There’s a lot of little states that lie in between the major steps of a process. All engineers I’ve worked with have really appreciated when I’ve at least thought about, if not actually mocked up, what the user+system error and empty states are. Animation too, but unfortunately this has always been less of a priority at the teams I’ve been on (too expensive :(). It helps to learn how to proto what you’re thinking bc that helps your team really visualize the whole interaction. Check out Figma for super fast proto’ing or trial Principle (tip: as long as you don’t close the program it will not count toward your trial day total hehe) for more complex, fancy, realistic protos.
- can succinctly describe what the problem is that they’re solving for. Especially needed when you’re bringing stuff to critique and you need to context-set everyone in the room so you get the feedback you need.
- is able to sell their work well. Getting credit and visibility for your work is a crucial skill.
Usually missing (IMO from reviewing candidate portfolios):
- link to data and metrics. You showed your design flow and all the research tactics incorporated. Great! How did it actually end up performing in the real world?
- link to development. Maybe this is based on the companies I’ve worked for so far, but rarely does development completely match the spec I turned in. That might be because of changing roadmap priorities, eng ran into unforeseen problems, I didn’t think of a use case, the customer requirement changed midway... These things inevitably happen. How agile were you in reacting? What did the final product end up looking like? (it’s okay if it doesn’t look as good, that’s reality!) What tradeoffs did you need to decide on and how did you prioritize? Basically, how do you work when stuff goes to live development bc product design is never / shouldn’t be just a one-and-done handoff.
Eek that was long. Hope at least some of this was useful to you! Comment back if you have questions or want to challenge something :)
And I don't mean this facetiously. I mean it!
What does "great" mean? Great in making lots of money? Great at making a company more money? Great at improving NPS scores from consumers? Great at getting peers to think your work is great? Etc.
And our field is too wide, both in terms of industries and even the spectrum of what UX/PD can encompass.