These 3 skills will get you ahead of 90% of UX designers

The reason why a lot of designers would not get promoted in the first 2 years of their career is because the company has not started seeing any signs of influence. Hey friends, I want us to do a quick exercise before we get into the meat of this video. Take a moment to think about somebody that you believe is exceptionally good at what they do. They should be in the top 1 to 10% in their field. This person could be a designer, or if you prefer, the person could be in a completely different field. I'm going to give you 5 seconds to make your pick. Great. Now hold that thought because we're going to need it at the end of this video. In this video, I'm going to be sharing the 3 skills that you need to be in the top 1 to 10% of UX designers globally. I'll be covering what these skills are, the timeline that you need to focus on each of these skills, and how to develop each of the skills. Let's get into it. The first skill that you need to develop is the skill of craft. Personally, I define craft as one's ability to be exceptionally good at something with a unique twist. The keywords here are exceptional and unique. You want to develop your skill of craft in the first 1 to 2 years of your career as a designer. So you're fresh out of a bootcamp, or you just got your first job as a UX designer or UI designer. New job, new roomies. The first 1 to 2 years is where you should focus on developing your craft. In this particular period, forget every other thing, abandon every other thing, and focus on developing your craft. This is the period where you do everything, literally, from visual design to prototyping to wireframing to speaking to users, copywriting, to trying to thrive in ambiguous problem spaces. And also, this is where you're strengthening your muscles on developing new ideas and finding ways to solve problems using different ideas. The reason why this is important is once you've been able to do all of these things, you will start to identify the things that you enjoy doing and the things that you don't exactly enjoy doing. Also, as part of honing your craft, this is where you get to define what being a generalist means to you. And why is it important to define what it means to be a generalist to you. This is the time and age where the generalists are the ones that are thriving. Design industry or the tech industry right now does not favor people that are specialized in particular skills anymore. Right now, you need to be able to combine a number of skills to provide value to the business that hired you because of the competition in the industry. So a business is more likely to hire somebody that is really good at speaking to users and that can come up with good design solutions and can maybe also write copies for those solutions than somebody that just knows how to visualize and prototype alone. So you need to identify what your definition of a generalist is and the things that you can do within that definition. Being able to have this combination of skills is where the uniqueness in your craft actually comes in, because you'll be surprised that The way you combine your skills is not the same way that somebody else combines their skills. So how do you develop your craft? First of all, do a bit of everything. Then secondly, identify the things that you enjoy doing the most, right? Identify a combination of skills that you enjoy doing the most. I would say a combination of 3 skills. So for you, it can be visual design and prototyping with maybe running workshops and maybe copywriting. Maybe those are the 3 skills that you really, really enjoy. And then the third thing that you need to do is to find how you can improve on these skills every day. So the first 1 to 2 years, you get to own your craft. The next skill that you need to develop is the skill of storytelling. I can't understate how important storytelling is to your career as a designer, because without mastering the art of storytelling, it will be difficult for you to sell your ideas. It is going to be difficult for you to sell the craft skills that you've developed. It is going to be difficult for you to advocate for your ideas and make sure that your ideas get built. And if your ideas don't get built, it's going to be difficult for you to progress in your career. So ideally, you want to start focusing on the storytelling skills in the second year of your career. So there's a slight overlap between you learning how to own your craft and you bringing the art of storytelling into that process. As you're learning how to own your craft and developing the key craft skills that you want to focus on, then maybe in the second year of your career, you can start thinking about how you can introduce storytelling, how you can tell the story about how you've been able to come up with your design solutions and how you can advocate for your ideas. The best designers that I know are also great storytellers, and one example that everybody's most likely familiar with is Steve Jobs. I consider Steve Jobs as a designer and a founder. He's one of the greatest founders of our time, but then he's also a really, really good storyteller. If you look at the Apple WWDC event of today, I hope we didn't keep you waiting.

Mother Nature. Mother Nature, welcome to Apple. How was the weather getting in?

The template for that WWDC presentation came from Apple's first ever iPhone, which was presented by Steve Jobs.

An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? These are not 3 separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.

This formed a foundation for how the products of the future are going to be sold to users through storytelling. But how do you apply this in the context of your work? First of all, understand your user needs, right? Secondly, understand what the business goals are. Thirdly, understand the needs of the key stakeholders that you're working with. So understand what the need of your product manager is. Understand what the goal of your product manager is. Understand what the goal of your other senior stakeholders is, up to the CEO of your company. Know what would appeal to them. Then when you understand that, you then need to find a story that connects the user needs, the business goals, and the goals of those key stakeholders as well. I know it might sound a bit overwhelming, but let me use a very simple idea to explain this. So say for example, you work for a fintech company and you've just designed a new feature that enables users to be able to hit their savings targets. Right? That is a feature that you've worked on. Now you want to sell this idea to the stakeholders in your team. Here's an example of a story that you can use to sell this idea. You can say that while we were conducting user research, we met with one amazing lady called Claudia. Claudia is a single mother of 2 that has been unable to meet up with her mortgage deposit because according to her, she always forgets to pay the deposit monthly into her savings pot when she gets paid. With this new feature, we're ensuring that Claudia and other people like her are able to get prompted whenever it's payday so that they can add money to their savings pot, or they could even set an auto deposit that automatically deducts money from their account and adds that to their savings pot so they don't have to remember. By implementing this feature, we'll be able to increase the total amount of deposits in our savings pot by By 5% if we roll out this feature to 50% of users. With this short story, you've been able to address the user need. You've been able to personalize the story to Claudia, who is one of your target users or one of your personas. You've also been able to hit the goal of your product manager or your senior stakeholder by talking about the feature that you're building. And then lastly, you've been able to introduce the business goal as well, which is— increasing the amount that is deposited into a savings pot. So this way you're able to connect the user needs, the business goals, and the goals of your stakeholders using one simple story. Using this would help you to really advocate for your ideas. And there are so many other ways that you can tell stories. Using movie references also works a lot. Basically, just find something that resonates with everybody that you're speaking to, something that puts everybody on a common ground and use that to advocate for your ideas. This brings us nicely to the 4th skill that you need to master, which is the skill of influence. You're probably 3 years into your career at this point. So now you can combine your craft and storytelling to sell your idea. Now what you need to master is the skill of influence. And basically influence means being able to make other people see your way of thinking. And being able to completely sell your ideas to other people, right? So mastering your craft and combining that with the art of storytelling really helps you to achieve influence. Once you start getting into the 3rd year of your career and beyond, you need to get more intentional about influence. You need to start understanding how you can start increasing your spheres of influence because influence is what gets you promoted again and again and again and again. The reason why a lot of designers would not get promoted in the first 2 years of their career is because the company has not started seeing any signs of influence. As soon as the company starts seeing the sign of influence, then they start to think about that person as being ready for the next level. And what's a sign of influence? A sign of influence is you being able to see a project through from the very beginning to the end until that project gets built And then they're starting to see the impact of what you have built on the users and on the business, right? So your idea that you developed in your mind, that you crafted with your skills, that you told the story to sell, is now being developed and built. Then that equals influence. Literally, from the 30 of your career and beyond, what you just need to like double down and focus on is how can I keep increasing my sphere of influence. So I believe that there are 3 spheres of influence, or there are 3 levels of influence that you need to grow while you're going on in your journey as a designer. The first sphere of influence is influencing your teammates, which is what you're basically doing at the early stages of your career. You need to position yourself as someone that your teammates look up to in certain aspects of their work. So your teammates could look up to you as someone that's able to think on their feet, that can easily come up with quick design solutions to any problem, or they could look up to you as somebody that is able to run very, very effective workshops. Just find something that you've mastered in your craft that your teammates look up to you for. Intentionally share that knowledge that you have with your immediate team. So have knowledge sharing sessions that you're sharing what you've learned and how you also solve your own problems with your team so that you can use that to be able to influence them. The next sphere of influence that you need to go is influencing beyond your team, and then now you're influencing your senior stakeholders. And sometimes in smaller companies, this could even be an organizational level of influence or a company-wide level of influence. But in bigger companies, it might be harder to achieve that level of influence. So you want to influence people outside your team first. At this level, once you have influence, you're not going to design presentations with 3 or 4 different kinds of ideas. You're going with one idea that you believe in, and your stakeholders are looking forward to you to present that idea to them and say, hey, this is the direction that I think we should head because of this, this, this, and this. When your stakeholders start to believe in you, then you've been able to achieve that level of influence outside your team. And like I said, in smaller companies, that could even lead to organizational-level influence because for some reasons, maybe a particular product feature that you worked on from the beginning to the very end has now been a major revenue driver for the company, then you've been able to achieve company-wide level of influence. Once you see that you've been able to achieve company-wide level of influence, the next level of influence is outside your company. So you're looking at industry-wide level of influence, and this is where your personal brand comes in. Industry-level influence is where you start to grow your personal brand by sharing what you know so that other designers Can learn from you. Now, I'd like us to go back to the very beginning of this video where I said you should take a moment to think about somebody that is exceptionally good at what they do. Now think about that person and try to see if they have a combination of these skills. I'm quite sure the answer to that would be yes, right? If they don't have all 3 skills, then maybe they're able to combine 2 of those skills at least. Now there's something else that I want you to do. I want you to score yourself on each of these skills. On craft, out of 1 over 10, honestly, what do you score on a scale of 0 to 10? On storytelling, on a scale of 0 to 10, what do you score? On influence, on a scale of 0 to 10, what do you score? Look at that, reflect properly. I would love you to also share that in the comment section because I'd like to engage with people to see what they've scored themselves. Now compare what you score with what you think this other person that you feel they are at the very top of their career or that you feel that they're exceptional, compare it with what you think they would score, right? And then start to see how you can bridge the gap between you and that person. So for example, if in craft you scored 4 over 10, in storytelling you scored 6 over 10, and in influence you scored 4 over 10, That means that on the average, you're probably like a 5 over 10. So you want to understand how you can move from a 5 over 10 to a 7.5 or an 8 over 10 so that you can start to understand what the gap between you and the person that you think is exceptional at what they do is. So this is your cheat sheet to be at the same level with that person. Trust me, it's going to take some time, but like with every other great thing, it always takes time. So you just need to Stick to it and be consistent to make sure that you're at the very top of your game. If you'd like to see how you can break down these skills into actionable steps that you can take, I made another video on things that you can start doing right now to get ahead of 99% of designers starting today. I'll see you in that video.