UX Designer: Explained
A data-driven approach to understand the UX Design career.
Originally published at designcareer.co
In this article, I present a data-driven analysis of what it means to be a UX Designer. The analysis is based on job ads from companies such as Amazon, Apple, Eletronic Arts, Ikea and Microsoft.
When a company is hiring a designer, what do they look for? What do they expect a designer will do? What skills a designer should have?
Those are exactly the questions I will answer now, based on a data-driven analysis of job advertisements. If you want to know more about the method and what I mean by data-driven analysis, I wrote a separate article explaining it.
In short: Much has been said about what it means to be a Product/UX/UI/Visual Designer. Many designers have written wonderful articles before. I am taking a different approach: I look at what companies say in their job advertisements.
Now, back to UX design.
What UX Designers do?
UX Designers are generalists.
They work throughout the whole design process: They do research at the beginning to find out more about the customers’ needs, get involved in ideation, build prototypes, test it with users and oversee the implementation.
Moving to more specifics, I started counting how many times each request showed up in the data set. Here are the top 5 requests:
User Experience (UX)
UX Designers work with… UX! :)
UX Designers help shape User Experience strategies and deliveries. It is common to see requests for UX Designers to deliver journey maps, user flows and other outcomes that I'll cover soon.
User Research
UX Designers are deeply involved in understanding the users in early phases of the project. In doing that, UX Designers conduct and analyse User Research.
User Interface (UI)
UX Designers also deliver interfaces and other digital outcomes.
Prototyping
UX Designers develop prototypes to test and validate their ideas.
Design System
UX Designers build design systems. A design system, by definition, is a ‘a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications’.
What an UX Designer needs to know?
UX Designers need to have a varied range of skills to do their jobs. For example, UX Designers need to have ‘Visual design’ skills to deliver interfaces.
Think about these skills as some necessary layers (or mindsets) for designers to do their work. As you can see on the Top 5 below, not only design skills:
Communication
UX Designers work in diverse teams (engineers, users, etc.). For that, communication skills (verbal, written) are key for the job.
Business
UX Designers need to speak business and understand how their work affect their clients’ businesses.
Data-driven
UX Designers need to understand how to base their decisions on data gathered in early phases of the project.
User-centered design
UX Designers are advocate for the users. User-centered design is a method/skill to help designers put their users at the center.
Visual Design
UX Designers are designers after all, right? Fabricio Teixeira from the UX Collective already talked about how (some) designers are distancing themselves from ‘craft’.
What else is in the skill set of a UX Designer?
UX designers also work with motion design, illustration and storytelling, while having skills in design thinking and coding, for example.
What software UX Designers use?
UX Designers use mainly Sketch, while Figma and InVision are less frequent in the job ads.
Where do these answers come from?
I analyzed 50 job advertisements for UX Designers found on LinkedIn. These job ads came from 20 countries in the Americas (North and South, Asia and Europe. Some companies are very well-known (Amazon, Apple, Eletronic Arts, Ikea, Microsoft) while some others were new (at least to me). The full list of companies can be found here.
Take-away
#1 UX Designers are generalists
UX Designers have their plates full. They do a little bit of everything: Research, Prototype, Visual Design, User Interface, etc. In essence, a UX Designer will be a Designer who specializes in many fields.
#2 Every company is different and their recruitment needs are different.
Each company is different. A company hiring their first UX Designer have very different needs than one looking to hire their 100th UX Designer.
In this article, I have mentioned over 10 different skills/activities/software. But do not panic, not all companies will ask you to know it all.
To illustrate how companies might differ in their requirements, here is a comparison between some of the requests made by Amazon, Apple, Eletronic Arts, Ikea and Microsoft in a UX Design position.
As you can see, companies might emphasize some skills more than others when hiring. The recommendation here is to spend some time researching the companies you are interested and what they are looking for. Which skills do they look for? Then make sure to build those skills and not all the possible skills :)
If you liked this article, I recommend to check the other guides I wrote looking at the Product, UX and Visual Design careers:
I’m Paulo Dziobczenski, founder of designcareer.co, a place to help designers grow in their careers. Let’s connect on LinkedIn or Twitter. 😉
