Essential skills for experience designers

Your job is 20% technical skills and 80% everything else

My goal is to have a blueprint to help me and others navigate our experience design career development.

I’ve been calling it the shape of an experience designer. I also published a few notes on the 7 technical design skills. I’d like to expand with thoughts on essential skills.

I’ve categorized them into professional and communication skills.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

Referring to basic professional behavior in the workplace, the critical thinking you should apply as you facilitate design throughout the process. Resulting in solutions that scale and ensure profitability for the company you are working for and helping your team deliver good solutions for customers faster.

BEHAVIOR & ACTIVITY

Basic professional skills – that many of us do not consider closely — until we have junior designers working closely with us.

When we notice them, it reminds us how important it is to do them all extremely well.

They are:

• Timely responses to emails and meetings

• Being at work on time and co-locating with your team

• You stick to working hours and enter them correctly if you do time sheets

• Timely notice for sick leave, leave and absence hours from the office

• Proactive versus reactive behavior

• General demeanor — e.g. sullen, helpful

CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking is the analysis of facts to form a judgment. The subject is complex, and several different definitions exist, which generally include the rational, skeptical, unbiased analysis, or evaluation of factual evidence. — wikipedia

As part of your critical thinking growth you should also look at logical fallacies and biases.

Except for the obvious value in the how stuff work part of experience design it is also valuable for personal growth.

FACILITATION

Pick up the whiteboard marker, practice active listening, use critique when you communicate — just some of the things you should be doing to aid understanding.

SCALE

Experience designers are responsible to design for the long term health and wealth or our customers and businesses. As a field we’re closely affiliated with human-centred design — meaning the systems or systemic thinking portion of the work is generally under presented.

So we should be mindful to consider scale when we’re knee deep in research, prototyping, writing, interaction or visual design. It's a bit easier with service design and information architecture — fields that inherently require thinking about scale as part of the technical discipline.

PROCESS

I believe there are two parts in the design process.

1. Your method as a designer — your preferred techniques and work order — throughout the life cycle of a product, project or business.

It leans on the late nights you worked and worried. A good method is earned through learning, experimentation and experience.

2. Process — how the business works, what it’s operating principles are and what life cycle it is in.

Your job is two-fold. As a professional your method should help you deliver repeatable experiences for your team, the business and your customers.

You should also be able to adapt your method and tweak the process the business delivers in. It is our job to ensure experience design is fit for purpose.

BUSINESS OF DESIGN

You get paid to do this rather amazing job. It’s what you do for a living. It’s your responsibility to understand the consequences of your decisions on the business’ bottom line.

You may not be in the position to understand the return on investment but you should be able to articulate the value of your work.

TEAM WORK

How collaborative are you, how do you work with other designers, other experts in your immediate team as well as decision makers?

You should also look at – how your relationships are with people in power, your peers and if you’re a leader — people reporting to you.

It shouldn’t be a popularity competition —the goal is to ensure that your relations within the entire team is sound.

Pay attention to areas where you struggle — that is the best areas for growth.

COMMUNICATION

We do not generally think about it. But everything we do is communication — it’s not just what we say but also how we interpret inputs. I classify it as:

General/ basic communication

Design communication — all of our artifacts and activities rely on a combination of our verbal, non-verbal, writing, visual and physical signaling abilities

— Visual — from Gestalt to colour theory

— Writing — from the basics of grammar to understanding when to edit, rewrite or proof

— Presentation — knowing which format you should present your work in to reading and reacting to your audience

— Communication design — understanding the theory, the practical understanding of how humans perceive and internalize information

— Framing problems and solutions — succinctly describe where you are in the process and prove enough context so that you can receive feedback

Active listening

Cultivate active listening as a skill. It’s a foundational skill for any designer at any experience level.

Critique

Requires active listening if you are giving critique. Or framing your problem and solution when you’re receiving critique.

Successful critiques also require a whole bunch of personality traits and cultivated habits — but that is a post or a book on its own.

Some examples:

Depending on your skillset some forms of communication may be your core skill — like writing.

Research and critique requires us to be experts at active listening.

Non-verbal — reading, signaling and amending body language.

The macro – like posture – down to micro facial expressions or how you control emotion in your voice.

I’ve been working on the overarching framework for the last year. I’m making solid progress and I’m steadily moving into new areas to critically assess. Please get in touch if you have any productive comments or amends.