What does a UX Designer do exactly. (In 2023)
Samuel Fabayo, a UX designer with four years of experience, breaks down the job: user research, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing. You need hard skills like information architecture and visual design, plus soft skills like empathy and curiosity. The core trait that matters most is wanting to understand how people actually behave.
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Who is a UX designer? What do they do exactly? Can I become a UX designer? These are some of the questions that I get every day, and in today's video, I'll be talking about who a UX designer is, some of the tasks that they do every day, and the skills required to become one. If you're new here, my name is Samuel and I've been a UX designer for over 4 years. In this video, I'll be sharing insights about what it feels like to be a UX designer. But before we get into that, if you have any questions about the skills or attributes mentioned in this video, please leave a comment below and I'll be sure to respond. A UX designer is someone who creates meaningful experiences that enables users to interact with digital products easily. Think about navigating popular social media apps like Twitter or Instagram, or large e-commerce platforms like Amazon, or eBay. These apps and platforms have been designed by UX designers who have carefully thought about your journey as a user. The most important thing to a UX designer is to reduce or eradicate any friction that might ruin your experience when trying to use any digital product. For example, you're buying groceries online for the first time and you don't know how to find your favorite frozen yogurts. A good user experience would help you find that frozen yogurt in the shortest possible time. This means that a UX designer is someone who loves to solve problems, someone who is very curious, someone who likes to ask questions, and someone who likes to understand human behavior. So if you find out that you like to understand why people act the way they do, then UX design might be a great career choice for you. Quick one, hit the like button to see more videos like this from me and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already. Now let's talk about some of the tasks that UX designers do daily. UX designers perform a number of tasks that cuts across different stages of the design process. A lot of UX designers start their design process with user research, which involves understanding the pain points and the challenges that the user might be facing and empathizing with them. As part of user research, some UX designers conduct user interviews, have one-to-one interviews with a particular sector that represents some of the users. This way they are able to exactly understand what problems and challenges they might be facing. Also, UX designers analyze all this research data to find patterns and themes that might help them to actually understand what the root cause of the problem that the user might be facing might be. Then they create research documents that helps to bring every other teammate or every other stakeholder together to be able to understand what the problem is altogether. UX designers also organize workshops or brainstorming sessions where they come up with ideas that they could use to solve problems that have been identified at the research phase. Also, UX designers create a lot of wireframes and prototypes to show what the solution might be or what the digital product might look like. I'll talk about wireframing and prototyping later in this video. UX designers also conduct usability tests to identify the issues that users might encounter when they start using products that have been designed. Then they gather feedback from this usability testing session to improve the product before it is then shipped for development. Lastly, UX designers do a lot of design documentation to make sure that it's easy for any other designer to understand exactly what's been done and what needs to be done next. The skills required to become a UX designer is a combination of some hard skills and some soft skills. First, let's talk about hard skills. Number 1, user research. User research is very, very important to the design process because UX designers make a lot of design decisions And these design decisions need to be backed by research and data. So UX designers need to understand who their user is and what their problems might be through qualitative research method and quantitative research methods. Qualitative research methods involves understanding people's beliefs, behaviors, experiences, and attitudes through user interviews and field studies, while quantitative research method involves identifying patterns through numerical data mostly gotten from surveys and questionnaires. The second hard skill is information architecture. Information architecture involves organizing information in an understandable manner that helps users to navigate a mobile app or website easily. UX designers need to help users to clearly understand where they are, where they need to go, and what's next, and information architecture helps with that. The third hard skill is wireframing and prototyping. These skills are very, very important for UX designers. I don't think I've come across any UX design job posting or job ad that doesn't require some level of proficiency in wireframing and prototyping. Wireframing is basically creating a minimal blueprint of all the screens in a user interface, and prototyping is taking that blueprint further by introducing all the necessary visual elements and making it interactive, and also making it as close as possible to what the final experience might look and feel like. Think about creating a floor plan or a blueprint for a building and converting that floor plan or blueprint into a 3D model that people can see. That is exactly what wireframing and prototyping is. The 4th hard skill is visual design. Visual design is one of the most important skills for any designer, and UX designers are not left out of this. UX designers need to understand the the basic principles of design, design theory, and how to combine design elements like colors, typography, form, shapes, and design layout to create intuitive user interfaces. One of the best ways to improve visual design proficiency is by practicing. So practice, practice, practice. I can't stress this enough.
Now let's talk about some of the soft skills required to become a UX designer.
The first soft skill required is empathy. As a UX designer, It's important to build an emotional connection with your users because this helps you to empathize with them. This basically means understanding what their pain points are, understanding what the challenges are by getting close to the user as much as you can.
And a lot of this is done by understanding what to do in the research process, depending on what the scope of the project might be.
A deep understanding of the end user enables UX designers to design products that genuinely deliver a positive and engaging experience. The second soft skill that is required is curiosity. The best UX designers I know are very, very curious people.
They ask a lot of questions. They are constantly asking why. They want to know why the user is behaving this way. They want to know why the system or the product is acting this way. And it's very, very important to have this skill as well because curiosity helps you to uncover a lot of insights that might be hidden.
Insightful questions dig deep into the root cause of problems and it helps designers to proffer The right solutions. The third soft skill required is collaboration.
UX designers work with different team members and different stakeholders across the business and across their large teams or even small teams.
They're constantly gathering feedback from stakeholders and team members, and they have to also incorporate this feedback and ideas back into the design process so that they can make the product better. So typically, UX designers work with product managers, software engineers, business managers.
In cases of larger organizations, they even work with content designers.
And in order to have healthy working relationship with all these different people that have different kind of skills, it's important to have very, very good collaborative skills. The last but not the least soft skill that is required is communication.
UX designers have to explain the rationale behind their design decisions, and they need to communicate these decisions and ideas to different stakeholders across the business and across their teams.
And in order to do this, they need to be to communicate effectively. If they are not able to communicate effectively, there's a high chance that the stakeholders might not understand what their design decisions might have been, and they might not be able to build the right products for their users.
Storytelling is also a very, very important skill, which is, you know, under communication as well.
UX designers also need to become good storytellers because this helps them to carry their audience along and also paint vivid scenarios and vivid pictures that the audience can easily relate to whenever they are trying to communicate their design rationale or ideas to them.
For example, I am creating UX content on YouTube because I want to improve my storytelling skills so that that can also in turn make me a better UX designer.
So communication might be the last point, but it is as important as the other 3 soft skills that I've mentioned. Hopefully this video has been able to clearly explain what a UX designer does and the skills required to become one. If this sounds interesting to you and you're thinking about becoming a UX designer, can watch this video that I made on how I transitioned from a graphic designer to a UX designer in 6 steps. Don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this.
I'll see you in the next one.
