6 Hard skills every UX Designer should master in 2024

Hello everyone, welcome back to the channel. In today's video, I'll be sharing 6 hard skills that you need to master as a UX designer, either as a beginner or someone who's looking to improve their craft so they can stay ahead of the competition. This video is an excerpt from a longer video I made on what I'd do differently if I was to start all over to become a UX designer in 2024. My name is Samuel Fabayo and I'm a senior product designer helping designers achieve their highest earning potential fast. With that being said, let's get into it. The first one is being able to conduct user research yourself. You shouldn't be dependent on a user researcher before you can be able to uncover some problems that the user might be having. This is where you need to understand how to ask questions and the kind of research methodologies to use. Because when a company is hiring a UX designer, and let's say the company is hiring their first UX designer, or it's a team of 3 or 4 UX designers, which you find in most companies, and they're trying to hire like a 3rd UX designer or a 4th UX designer, there's a chance that there's no user researcher in that team, right? So you need to step into that role to conduct some user research that can help you provide the right solution. That is how you bring value into the company. So the hard skills that you need to learn as a UX designer is to understand what kind of user research methodology to use for the problem. It's not every time that you have to send out a survey, or it's not every time that you have to interview the users, or it's not every time that you have to do a diary study, right? You need to understand the problem and think about what is the fastest way that I can be able to uncover the problems that users are facing with this product. When I started out as a UX designer, I would just get into my designs straightforward. I just start designing immediately, right? Because I didn't understand that I always had to lead with the questions. So whenever you are faced with a challenge or a design challenge or a problem, start to list out a couple of questions. First of all, the things that you don't know, right? Who is using this product? How do they get to use it? In what scenario do they get to use it? What are the kind of actions that they want to complete? Why are they completing those actions? There are a lot of questions that you can ask. And when you approach your projects in this manner, you're going to be able to understand the kind of research methodology to deploy to solve that problem. The next thing is to learn a design tool. Of course, it is very, very important for you to know how to use a design tool. When you are solving the problem, one of the ways that you show that solution is through what you have designed. And that is why you need to learn how to use a design tool so that you can quickly think about ideas and iterate on those ideas in the tool and you can quickly prototype a solution. I would always recommend Figma because that's a tool that is industry standard. That's a tool that most companies use. That's a tool that we use at Mondzo. There are several places that you can learn how to use Figma online. One of my favorite YouTube creators that teaches how to use Figma is Miss Cool. You can check his channel and you can see lots of videos on how to use Figma. I also have a couple of videos on Using Figma, the next thing you need to do is to learn how to write. I know that of course for you to be watching this video right now, or for you to have even come here to come and say you want to learn about UX design, you probably know how to write. But yeah, there's a difference between knowing how to write and being able to communicate properly in writing. It is very very important for you to level up your writing skills as a UX designer because you're going to need them and it's going to come in handy. Whenever you're designing, you always have to prompt the user about the actions that they're about to take. And writing is a key part of UX design. That is why global tech companies have UX writers or content writers. But you might not have the luxury of a UX writer when you start out as a UX designer. So you need to add writing to your arsenal of skills. Also, it is going to become very, very important when you want to start creating presentations or when you want to start communicating your ideas, especially in the world where we are right now, where everything is remote, right? We don't have like the in-person communication as we used to before. So now you need to be able to write your thoughts and articulate your thoughts properly so that you can influence your team as a designer. This is one of the things that I wish I also learned early, right, in my career. At the beginning, I didn't like to write. I didn't like to write. One of the reasons why I have this YouTube channel is because I don't want to be writing blog posts about the things that I want to share. That's why I'm in front of a camera right now. But I've also realized that it is very, very important to be able to use writing to communicate with people. The next one is to leverage AI. Of course, we have to address the elephant in the room— AI. Now, how can you leverage AI? How do you use AI and how can you introduce it into your workflow? The last point I spoke about writing— AI can be your writing buddy. AI can help you generate content that you can use on the product, at least before you have a content writer or UX writer look at the product. Instead of using dummy text like, you know, Lorem Ipsum, do not do that. You can ask AI to say, hey, could you generate a text for this website that I'm working on? And give AI the context of what you want to do. You can do this on ChatGPT. You need to learn how to write very, very good prompts. If you're able to write very good prompts, ChatGPT will be able to generate writing for you that you can add as part of your designs. Also, even with like the new models of ChatGPT, ChatGPT-4, you can upload images. You can upload a screen of a design that you have worked on or you can upload a screen of a design that you're working on and you can ask ChatGPT to tell you about the usability issues that it can see on that screen, and it's going to respond to you, right? There are so many things that you can do with AI. You can do competitive analysis, you can try to understand the competitors of the product that you're working on leveraging AI. The next one is to learn how to find inspiration. One of the things that you would need the most as a designer is to always find inspiration. A creative cannot survive without being inspired. One of the things that you can do is to be observant, look around you, find inspiration everywhere around you, and make sure that you always open your mind to be inspired by the things that you see. The world is a very, very beautiful place. There's beautiful nature around you, so you need to pay attention to your environment and let your environment inspire you so that you can put that inspiration back into your work. The last one under learning the hard skills is challenging yourself, right? This is where you start to put some of the things that you're learning into practice. There are lots of examples of challenges that you can do. The simplest one is having like maybe a 30-day challenge where you're just designing screens that you see on different inspiration websites. Speaking about inspiration, one of the places that you can get inspiration is mobbin.design. You could go through mobbin.design and see how apps are designed, the apps that we use every day. You can see an app like Coinbase, Airbnb, Twitter, all the apps that we use today, most of them are on Mobbin.design. You can see all the screens and you can even recreate them to challenge yourself. As part of challenging yourself, you can go on Dribbble, for example, and try to recreate some of the designs that you see, but you still need to take that just a step further. So instead of creating a design or challenging yourself with just a Dribbble design, one thing that I would have done then is that I would have thought about challenging myself with user flows, right? So instead of just creating one screen and saying, hey, this is a checkout page, this is a login page, I'll think about challenging myself with an end-to-end onboarding flow. I'll think about challenging myself with an end-to-end checkout flow. I'll think about challenging myself with an end-to-end flow for adding something to a playlist, right? So you have multiple screens that communicates an experience that a user would go through rather than just having like one screen and saying that, oh, this is your 30 days challenge. But yeah, very, very important to make sure that you challenge yourself and you would see that you're not the same designer that you were from the beginning of the challenge by the time you get to the end of the challenge. That'll be all for this video. If you got some value from it, you can watch another video I made on the design portfolio presentation that got me 4 offers. Hit the like button on this video, share this video with your friends and your colleagues, and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. I'll see you in the next one.