Creative design services: top 5 UX designer qualities
Your company is only looking to hire the best UX designers – but what qualities do you need to look for? Role requirements and responsibilities have drastically evolved over the last few years and you need someone with the ability to adapt to the ever-changing role.
If you plan on hiring a UX designer, be on the lookout for a mixture of hard and soft skills. These should help your company achieve its goal. You need someone with that is able to quickly adapt to new briefs, requirements and targets. With all this in mind, let’s delve deeper into the top qualities that you need to be screening for.
1. Curiosity and empathy
Both considered soft skills, curiosity and empathy are two standards that each UX designer should possess. While curiosity allows a person to boldly step into the unknown, it’s the empathy that allows them to recognise and identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Therefore, a professional UX designer should have a combination of both as this allows them to see a bigger picture and understand the needs of their clients. This quality is an acquired competency that enables the designer to provide different solutions to the same problem by actively considering all factors.
Their creative design solutions are a direct result of gathering objective research data about client’s requirements, needs, and experiences with a particular product. Through active listening and problem-solving, these professionals can emotionally empathize with their clients to anticipate their desires and issues.
2. Critical thinking
UX designers need to analyse problems and question assumptions frequently. Like curiosity and empathy, critical thinking is one of the UX designer’s most important qualities. Critical thinking allows a UX designer to:
- Search for hidden presuppositions or assumptions in a proposed project
- Question how and why something is happening
- Find reasons to provide multiple solutions to a problem
- Make numerous changes when needed
- Identify errors
- Use logic, common sense, and reasoning when everyone else is biased
- Always sense-check ideas and solutions
- Instantly find weaknesses in a project or a proposed solution
- Analyse the complexity and simplicity of things
- Push for logical clarity
- Connect the pieces of the puzzle that seem far apart
3. Communication and collaboration
UX designers must work with developers, product managers, users, partners and stakeholders. Therefore, the quality of communication and collaboration is paramount for such a professional.
Both communication and collaboration are crucial elements of cooperating with other participants. It allows a UX designer to gain their trust and tap into high-quality data and all additional relevant information about their wants, desires, and needs.
This quality greatly contributes to the designer’s ability to get extra productive and develop the most extraordinarily creative design solutions. However, they won’t be able to do so if they fail to understand how their skills fit the bigger picture and the essential business needs.
To fit their work into an existing project, a UX designer must engage in an effective conversation with the staff, seniors, and product managers. Thanks to this fantastic quality, designers get a chance to learn every day.
Since the creative design is a strict discipline that requires time, effort, and self-investment, designers must upgrade their knowledge with each project and person they work with. Every experience is an opportunity to learn something new and useful.
Suppose we take the fact that the UX industry is continuously evolving, developing, and shifting. In that case, UX designers are constantly required to know new conventions and standards and use new devices, platforms, and tools to remain competitive and relevant.
4. Analysis and research
Analysis and research are both considered formal skills, and they help UX designers get ahead of things, understand new trends, explore competitors and handle problems. The only way to do this effectively is by doing structured qualitative and quantitative research.
The main point is to ask the right questions. This allows a UX designer to work their magic and put all that knowledge to good use. While there are well-proven practices for doing user research – such as observations, questionnaires, and interviews – great UX designers go a few steps further in gathering and collecting all relevant data about a project.
None of it would be possible without critical thinking, curiosity, and the ability to communicate the most critical aspects of a project.
Both analysis and research help UX designers to organise information and build an information architecture to be able to manage and prioritize complex data and pieces of information. This is simply paramount for creating useful, purposeful, and user-friendly digital products.
5. UI and Visual Design
Last in line but equally important is UI and visual design. You can’t be a UX designer without these essential competencies. Front-end design and visual skills make for the most crucial qualities a UX designer should have today.
Although things may have been different a decade ago, this is one of the main requirements modern companies ask for. Both UI and visual design abilities allow a designer to understand how to incorporate the best development practices to create creative design solutions that are efficient, modular, and economical.
Conclusion
Professional UX designers must have all of these quaities to be successful in their careers. When screening applicants be sure to test for all of the above skills to ensure that you are only hiring the best. With all these qualities, your new co-worker will be able to overcome any obstacles that might get in the way of developing a user-friendly and visiually astounding product.
The more qualities a UX designer has, the more effective they are. Modern companies hire such talent to get ahead of the competition curve and set new industry standards that make them stand out from the rest. It all comes down to being able to look forward, explore new things, understand how things work, and use that knowledge to get ahead of the others.
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