If you’re looking to become a product designer, but you’re overwhelmed by all the skills you think you need to know to get started, then this is the video for you.
Let me take you back to my first design role…
I started my journey as an interface designer. I spend most of my time focusing on how to create visually attractive products. My days would be full of tasks looking at grids, typography, icon design, animation.
These skills have certainly helped me along the way to becoming a well rounded designer, but if I was starting again, I’d spend more time on the soft skills, since these are the things that will really help you adapt to the challenges you’ll face throughout your career.
Getting into product design can seem quite daunting. You may be coming from another design job, moving from a more technical space, or new to the field entirely. Regardless of how you entered the role, there are some core skills that will really help you in your day to day tasks, and can give you that boost to get to where you want to be.
I’ve been working in UI and UX roles for the past 10 years, so I remember exactly how you feel if you’re just getting started.
Which is why I’m going to share with you the 3 core skills that have helped me to develop and progress as a designer, so you can really understand what’s involved in the role.
If I was to start again today, these are the main skills I’d want to develop.
The first skill is:
Communication
Being able to communicate effectively is a crucial skill for anyone to work on, but especially for a designer, no matter which level you’re at.
Finding the right product solution means speaking to many people. This includes your peers, stakeholders and the end users of the product that you’re designing.
Here’s a tip for you: I’ve found that it makes a huge difference if you talk about the things each of these different people are interested in.
Let’s break that down.
If we take internal stakeholders.
These could be people in management positions, executives, basically anyone in your company who has a vested interest in the success of the product you’re building.
In my experience, It can help you hugely to find out what kind of things interest them and what are the few keys areas that they actually care about. Once you know this, you can then start to talk about how your design output will have a positive impact on the business, focusing specifically on the areas that they are concerned with.
Use data to back up your decisions making it easier to get people on board with your ideas.
In his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnagie said “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you”.
Now, while you’re not looking to create friendships with your stakeholders, the point still stands that if you take an interest in people and ask about the things important to them, you will most likely start build better relationships and you’ll get far more valuable insights to help with your design solutions.
Speaking from experience, this approach may well help you further down the line when you’re looking to get significant people in your company on board with an idea.
Similarly, for end users, I’ve found that asking open ended questions about their experiences and preferences leads to valuable conversations. This also makes them feel heard and part of the process, which can result in them being open to helping you out in future with user research.
The second core skill is having perspective.
You’ll probably hear a lot about building empathy towards your users in the product and UX space. This essentially means that you need to understand enough about the people you’re designing for so that you can see things from their perspective. On a deeper level, you can benefit from knowing how they respond to certain things emotionally, so that you can provide a solution that solves their problem in a satisfying way.
Learning to see things from the perspective of someone else is really important if you’re going to provide them with a product or service. Remember, in 99% of cases, you are not the user.
It’s also helpful to see the longer term vision of product development, as you’ll often find that you release a small part of a much larger solution into the world, to validate your decisions. This is known as an MVP or minimal viable product. So it helps to be able to have an accurate perspective of how things might play out in future, while also designing for the here and now.
As previously mentioned, you’ll also need to keep in mind the perspective of the company, and the targets they are trying to meet. Design can play a large role in this, so it’s worth learning to think about both user needs and business goals when making decisions.
And the third core skill that has really helped me develop is:
Being open to collaboration.
It should come as no surprise that building a successful product requires the effort of many different people, and not just the skills of a designer alone.
Collaboration typically starts with product discovery, meetings, and workshops with people across your company, to figure out the strategy of how to deliver the product or service that you’re offering. This leads into working closely with engineers, product managers and analysts, and in some cases external clients, to deliver a solution.
So try not to work in a silo. Be humble enough to admit to yourself that you don’t always have all the answers, and seeking out other people’s perspectives can sometimes actually result in you finding a more suitable solution to a design problem you’re facing.
During the lifespan of a project, your designs are going to be questioned. You need to be able to detach yourself from your work so you can take feedback constructively and take action to improve the experience. Don’t be precious about your ideas. Everyone has them, and everyone’s contributions are valid.
The main take away I want to give you about collaboration is to be open about your design process. Seek out feedback, run workshops, Invite your team along to observe usability testing. Try to initiate the collaboration yourself - this will be recognised and over time you’ll feel more comfortable if you can have some level of control over these situations.
Of course, we can’t forget about learning the theory behind design and the tools and techniques needed to create UX deliverables and visuals assets. But learning to practice these core skills should give you a head start when entering a product or UX role.