User experience is as much your soft skills as your hard skills
Soft skills are indispensable for UX designers. Communication and “being human” are equally important as hard skills for a good UX designer. UX itself is communication: towards the users, but also to the people in your organisation.
A few months ago I pimped my CV. I started by updating and re-writing the descriptions of the different projects that I did. I wanted not only to explain the activities and skills involved, but also to show what my added value was to the project. I realised that my greatest value was actually in the ‘intangible’ work: regularly updating the development lead and explaining why it is important that the design should be done the way I intended and not otherwise, extra time in one-on-ones with the Product Owner explaining how the projects are progressing, checking in with the back-end developer to understand why my design was not feasible technically … only to find out together that it was possible.
Esther Perel, a world-famous relationship therapist, explains that the relationships in the workplace actually are very personal: “Everybody has a relationship résumé that they got from home, from their culture, their community, their society where they grew up. They bring it to work. It acts as an invisible force underneath all of the manifest dynamics that take place at work.” The content of your work is often logical, structured and ordered. Yet your soft skills ensure that you get things done.
Many of the communication skills I use every day are not necessarily exclusive to the UX field. It starts with connecting with the people around you: building rapport with new colleagues or customers, or feeling comfortable with small talk. In addition, the basic skills of survival in the business environment are also important: being able to explain your arguments, listen to others, find consensus and convince people. These skills are the basis needed for being able to function in a team.
So far so good. So what makes the soft skills of the UX designers different from the basic ones?
Interaction with the stakeholders
As a designer you play a key role in the organisation: all visions, input, opinions and technical limitations end up on your table. You need to be able to work productively with different types of personalities, roles, and hidden agendas.
You spend a lot of time explaining your process, coordinating the designs with others, keeping people up to date on the status of the project and just managing expectations. During one of the more complex assignments I did, it was normal to spend more time discussing my designs with different specialists involved than actually designing it.
However important your work is to the company, it is often not the most important item on the agenda for the stakeholders around you. You have to address your colleagues at the right moments and with the right information, at the right level of detail, or you will lose their attention. The trick is to communicate exactly enough, at the right time and ensure that everyone feels involved and heard to the right degree.
Co-creation and facilitating sprints or workshops are also ‘people skills’. Of course there are all kinds of facilitator tools to help you out with those, but “a fool with a tool is still a fool”. You have to feel the group dynamics and sometimes adapt the approach, hear what is said between the lines and let the conversation run productively. You do not learn that by reading an article online about a workshop.
You never do cool projects alone, and all these ‘soft’ communication skills make these projects possible.
Being vulnerable as a UX Designer
Your personal qualities make you a better colleague and a better professional. Kristin Neff and Brené Brown have researched vulnerability, happiness and relationships. One of their conclusions: your vulnerability only makes you stronger.
Being allowed to make mistakes, to let yourself be convinced, to admit that you do not know something, to dare give and receive feedback — this requires enormous personal growth. But you get better professional relationships and better results in return.
“The only failed experiment is the one you didn’t learn from”. Making mistakes, or actually experimenting and trying new things, is at the core of design thinking. And yet it is sometimes difficult to accept when it comes to your own mistakes, outside the “fail fast” mentality of a design sprint. It is essential to see your mistakes as learning opportunities and to move on.
You often spend several days working on your “baby” — the design. You put a lot of time, effort and analysis into it. Of course, you know best what is not correct and what is best. Yet I have never experienced a design presentation where there was no criticism of the choices and decisions I made. It is difficult not to react defensively to that and to let go of the idea that you have to be right. I have been able to achieve better results faster if I managed to change my mindset to “we are trying to make it better together” instead of “I have to win this conversation.” Surprising (and sometimes illogical) findings from user research also help develop the right mindset, and let go of the emotional attachment to your own ideas.
As a designer, you have to deal with multiple perspectives of the project and you work with different specialists. This sometimes gives you an unjustified feeling that you need to know more than what is actually need to. It doesn’t make sense intuitively, but admitting that you don’t have all the answers makes you a better professional, and shows your colleagues that you have a realistic view of the project, that you are modest and open to new input. Doug Collins from UX mastery says: “Equally important to admitting ‘I don’t know’ is following it up with ‘but I’ll find out’.“
Setting your ego aside, accepting that you are not always right or not having all the answers and that someone else (including non-designers) may have a better idea than you requires emotional maturity, but you also get a lot of satisfaction and resilience in the project there in return.
Navigating politics as a UX-er
Politics is a dirty word, but it doesn’t have to be. Anyway, if you have several people in the same room, you are dealing with politics.
In their book ‘Survival of the savvy: high integrity political tactics’ Rick Brandon and Marty Seldman give a definition of politics that is not judgmental: ‘Organisational politics are the informal, unofficial and sometimes behind-the-scenes efforts to sell ideas, influence an organisation, increase power or achieve other targeted objectives’.
As a UX-er you are involved in understanding what drives people, what their goals and frustrations are. This applies not only to the users, but also to your colleagues.
Insight into their motives and goals also gives you the tools with which you can influence people and, in the grand scheme of things, make better products. Politics is something you already do every day. But don’t worry, participating in politics doesn’t necessarily make you a ‘dirty politician’. Influencing only becomes manipulation if you hide your goals or don’t put all the information on the table.
I also notice that the higher you climb in the organisation’s “food chain”, the more important it becomes to be able to communicate well, be socially skilled, and be able to “read” the room. Unfortunately these are also the most difficult skills to develop, there is no course for it. But if you open up to feedback and have conversations about it with your customers, colleagues and friends, you will get there faster.
If you add up everything described in this article, you will see that as a designer you definitely spend more than half of your time on soft skills than actually pushing pixels and making screens. So next time you have to explain to your grandmother at a family party what exactly you do at work, you can definitely say that you are just ‘talking to people all day’, which won’t be far from the truth :)
This article was originally published (in Dutch) on oneshoe.nl/ on the 29th of January, 2020
