Want to be a more effective designer? Practice these 7 skills.

As designers we all want to become better at our craft and as design leaders we want to help our people do the same.

Often we focus on all the things directly related to being a designer — tools, process, frameworks etc. These are definitely worthwhile pursuits but I’ll suggest that if we really want to get better at design then we should focus on soft skills. The skills that have nothing to do with design but they are skills that make us so much more effective in our practice.

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This is my list (in no particular order) of soft skills we should all get better at:

1. Achieving a State of Flow

Most of us have had the pleasure of getting swept away in our work. You know, it’s that thing that happens when all of a sudden you realize you have been caught up deep in your work for hours. This is called Flow and it can be hard to achieve. Great creatives (like great athletes) have a routine that allows them to get into a state of flow almost on demand. Find this routine and your productivity and effectiveness will sky rocket.

2. Public Speaking

We don’t always have to get up in front of a large group of people, but when we do its often high stakes and we need to articulate ourselves well. The art of public speaking and communication is not only useful in large public settings, but can also be applied to smaller venues like meetings, phone calls, or even 1:1 conversations with your team.

I suggest the book As We Speak which is an amazing resource on how to plan, structure and deliver effective communication. Master the art of communication and you will more effective when speaking with users/customers, presenting your work, and working with your peers.

3. Storytelling

More and more I am learning the power of great storytelling in my professional career. Whether its to bolster the way you communicate, improve how we talk about our products, or to convey a sense of meaningfulness in how we champion our users’ unmet needs. Story telling harnesses emotion and makes what we say and do memorable.

4. Facilitation

The ability to guide a group of people through activities that unlock creativity, collaboration and help to develop a shared understanding is one of those skills that tends to separate mature designers from the more junior or intermediate ones. As design teams adopt more tools and techniques related to things like design thinking — facilitation skills become essential in understanding what exercises to use and when to use them.

5. Mindfulness

Mindfulness and meditation can unlock a number of benefits for designers and creatives. First and foremost is the ability to focus. Not only focus in terms of concentration which supports the ability to enter a state of flow, but also focus with regards to the problem we are solving, which means we spend less time going down rabbit holes and being sidetracked solving problems that don’t really matter.

Be sure to read my full article on how mindfulness supports better creative outcomes.

6. Curiosity

If we, as designers, are going to be better at finding the right problems to solve for our users, then we need to develop a heightened sense of curiosity.

Curiosity definitely seems to be an inherent trait — either you have it or you don’t — and even if that is the case we can all do things that support the cultivation of more curiosity. Reading, meditation, learning new skills or languages… all of these things help to exercise those curiosity muscles and allow us to bring those skills to our practice.

7. Experimentation

One of the things that I have learned in helping to develop the Cisco Design Thinking Framework is that creatives need to be great at figuring out where we have questions and/or assumptions around our design work, and then we need to be even greater at designing quick experiments that allow us validate our current thinking or answer those questions that we have. Experimentation in design is very similar to experimentation in Lean Startup methodologies. Both of them ensure we are addressing real user needs in the best way possible.

What about you?

Are there any skills you practice that make you a better designer? I would love to hear from you.