Boost Your UX Design Game with These Critical Skills #learnux #uxdesign

Hey there, hi, Anirudh here. Welcome to my YouTube channel. This is Roadmap to User Experience Design Episode 2. A quick recap: in Episode 1, we saw the most common questions that people have while they're looking forward to switch to a design career. We tried to understand all the answers with some examples and overcome the misconceptions around the same. If you haven't watched the video, the link is in the description. Today in Episode 2, I'll be talking about the most important skills that you should have to become a UX designer or to kickstart your design career in a simple way. Well, I'll be doing two important points over here. First, I'll be explaining all the skills that you require to become a UX designer in three important buckets, and at the same time, I'll be providing a free curated best resources to learn the same in the description so that you can spend some time and help yourself. So without any further ado, let's get started. Three important buckets of skills that you should have to become a good UX designer. Each of this bucket will have have some different skills that you would want to learn to become a good UX designer. Bucket number 1: Basic skills. Basic skills as a bucket would have at least 4 to 5 other skills that you should understand to become a good UX designer. Communication. Well, not just UX field, be it any domain, communication is must. For example, if I can't communicate efficiently, I won't be able to share my ideas and thought process with you. Simple as that. So yes, communication is one of the most important skills to become a UX designer or success yourself in any of the domain. Second, collaboration. Well, irrespective of your knowledge and expertise, collaboration is yet another important factor to become a successful UX designer. For example, to solve any given problem statement, you will have to collaborate with different people for different reasons. For example, with stakeholders to understand the problem statements, With product managers to understand the actual product requirement. With users to understand their problem statements and pain points. With design team to collaborate for ideation and brainstorming the solution. With dev team to give them the final designs for development. That's why I said collaboration is one of the most important skills, just like communication, to become a successful designer. Third skill: Presentation and storytelling. One of the most crucial parts of your job is to sell your idea and thought process to your stakeholders, to make them understand that the solution that you're looking forward to a problem statement is the right solution to overcome all the issues. Well, and that's where the presentation and storytelling comes into the picture. Fourth skill: Empathy. Well, this is my favorite and one of the most used word in the UX community. Empathy is basically understanding the actual problems of a user, which is pain points, and providing an efficient solution for the same. It is very important to understand the right problem statement to provide a right solution. That's why empathy is very important as a UX designer. Problem solving and critical thinking. Yes, having problem solving and critical thinking is again important. And what does that mean? For example, if I visit your home and I ask for a glass of water, the simple human brain will go ahead and bring a glass of water. But a UX designer over here will take this as a problem and try to solve. For example, he would ask me the requirement before giving the solution. So ideally, a UX designer should ask, what's the reason I need a glass of water? Am I thirsty or something else? What is my preference? Cold water, normal water, or something else? So this way I am not only solving the problem, but I'm making sure that I understand the problem statement and then I solve it. Bucket number 2: the technical skills. This bucket will have all the important skills that will directly impact your deliverables as a UX designer. First, the research. Research is a huge bucket that mainly involves Market research and user research. This is where all your competitive analysis, ethnographic research, qualitative and quantitative user research come into the picture. Second, wireframing. Wireframe is nothing but making sure to convert your ideas into visual. You have a solution, draw it. Wireframe can be just as simple as early-stage sketches or a high-fidelity representation of your solution. Third, prototyping. Prototyping is basically a clickable demo of your product before making sure that you develop the actual product. Prototyping has many benefits. For example, presenting the complete solution to the stakeholders using the end-to-end flow as a prototype. Prototype can be also used for usability testing from user to understand the actual feedback and early stage issue on your product. The entire prototype can also be shared with the developers to help them understand the entire flow for development. Fourth skill: Visual Design. Visual design is basically all your UI design, which is more like making sure that you make your product aesthetically appealing. Just two buckets and so many skills already, right? Well, before you demotivate yourself and think that it is very difficult to become a UX designer, let me introduce you to a simple principle. Principle or a rule. The rule says that it's very easy to become good at something but very difficult to become great at certain things, which simply means that with spending least amount of time on something, you can become very good at it. But to become great at certain things, you will have to spend a lot of time, maybe good number of years of experience. So let's just follow that simple principle. To become a very good UX designer, I bring back to you bucket number 3. That's the only bucket you need to focus on to kickstart your design career. I promise. The bucket number 3 is what I like to call good to get started with bucket, and this bucket has 3 important skills. First, the communication skills. Second, the collaboration skills. Third, the problem-solving skills. We have discussed about all these 3 skills in the starting of the video. You can go back and see it again. Well, these are the only 3 skills I promise that you need to know to kickstart your design career. To help you with that, I'll be sharing all the curated list of best free tutorial that is available on internet. All you need to do is go back and reach out to the links and help yourself. Just study for some amount of time and you will understand that it's not that difficult to kickstart your design career. That's all I have for you in episode number 2. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them into the comments and I will revert back to you quickly. This is me, Anirudh Palaskar, signing it off. See you in episode number 3 where I'll be talking about the life of a UX designer. Bye-bye.