9 Essential Skills To Boost Your UX Design Career

UX and UI design skills can be learned and improved through practice, but it’s important to know what skills. Your skills are essential if you want to have a long UX design career.

We are living in a world that interacts with technology every day. Technology changes all the time. This means that there is a high demand for UX/UI designers.

But to stay in the industry and be up-to-date, you need to have relevant skills and knowledge.

You need to understand what skills are vital for your UX design career, and which aren’t. After all, it’s impossible to learn all UX or UI skills, and you need to have a solid plan on what to learn next.

If you are aiming to boost your UX design career, here is a list of skills that will help you to grow. Check and see what is the next skill you want to start learning today.

Communication

Every design project starts with finding a user problem. You can’t create a product because you want it. You can’t make a product that doesn’t resolve any pain points.

UX/UI designers create products to help people with concrete problems.

You’re responsible for solutions for your users, not vice versa.

Our first task is to identify the issue. Everything starts with a conversation with your target audience. It’s a perfect time for communication skills to boost your research stage.

At the beginning of my UX design career, I was shy to communicate with people. I didn’t want to talk to them and learn about their problems.

I was waiting for the ready results from researchers or clients. My biggest wish was to fully concentrate on the project only. I felt that I wanted to be a solo designer and I don’t want to talk to anyone.

My mistake early in my career was huge.

When you communicate with people, you can ask what they like and dislike about the products they use. You can ask for any details during your 1–1 very powerful interview.

Even if you don’t talk to people, but create surveys, you are responsible for the questions in the survey.

It’s your chance to ask and learn any data during any type of communication with people.

Communication skill isn’t technical, but are something that you can use in the research stage. Let’s call communication a soft skill. If you conduct user interviews or work with surveys, it’s important to improve your communication skills.

Having a high level of communication with your target audience is a base for the whole design work.

Analysis

Once you’re done with your research, you get the data. You get a lot of data in most situations.

When I do any type of research and talk to people, I get many suggestions and ideas. There may be only 5 questions in my survey. However, with 15 participants, they might propose 20, 30, or more improvements for the same question.

The next problem arises. How do you structure the information you’ve received? It is something that I faced during my whole UX design career.

Once you have such huge feedback, your immediate wish would be to improve everything and provide a solution to every pain point you’ve heard.

While it’s good that you’re creative and can brainstorm immediately, it’s the wrong strategy for product creation.

You need to focus on what problems are the most important to users and which are additional ones. This is where analysis skills will be needed. Learn how to work with priorities.

For example, users need to create a booking functionality, but you’re concentrated on small features, like dropdowns.

Understanding what to do in the first queue helps you to deliver proper expectations for users.

When you deliver a value, it’s important to give from the most important areas to the lower ones. This is how your users will be satisfied with your products and would want to use them more.

Illustrations

Unlike traditional art, UX/UI designers are not very creative. During our UX design career, we create products with those components and solutions that were already created.

The only creative part of our job is the visual side of the product, which is the UI.

When we talk about UI, most people think that we apply colors and include some branding only. But you can go beyond these limits by using something unique, for example, illustrations.

If you want to make your UI solutions unique, you can consider illustrations.

There are many ways to use this skill. For example, you can draw individual icons for your clickable elements. Or you have broader artistic skills and can draw characters and scenes. Think about it and feel if it’s something that interests you.

If you check some inspiration on Behance, there are many examples of web and app products that are fully illustrative.

If you’re not ready for such impressive design elements, consider smaller ones. For example, you can design infographics.

When you have a lot of text, it makes sense to transform it into a storytelling layout with illustrative elements.

This is a huge benefit for your UX design career. Being able to create unique solutions can help you increase your paycheck because of your individuality and the skills you have.

Animation

When we talk about products, do we mean the images as our end products? Yes, you can create prototypes, but these are static images with some clickable functionality for the preview.

How do you make your designs more engaged?

There is a way to do so. Learn animation and micro interaction skills.

When you open a website and immediately see some actions with elements or background, isn’t it amazing?

Yes, it is. And this is why you can consider learning those things to make your design solutions even better.

I love design contests, and I am participating in them now. What I love about design contest platforms is the ability to see the very impressive works of other designers.

Design contests can benefit your UX design career.

For example, Awwwards is one of the most popular contest platforms. Every day you can see incredible solutions there.

Designers do their best to impress judges with their parallax effects, scenes, typography, and other methods. But animation with micro-interactions is tool #1 for them.

So, if “live” products are something you consider advancing your career, the animation is a great choice for it.

Voice Interface

I am a big fan of everything innovative that happens today. It’s already enough to advance your UX design career. I’ve already mentioned so many cool things to you, but there is something more.

Have you heard about the voice interface? I think you have.

So what is the voice interface? To explain voice interfaces in simple words, this is a product that makes some actions with your voice command.

It reminds me of Google Assistant or similar products.

When you want some action to begin, you will say a keyword, and the process will start immediately.

Voice interfaces were created to help people with some kind of limitation, but quickly gained popularity in product design.

People love to save time, so it’s faster to say words instead of typing them.

It’s always cool to interact with products in new ways, so people love to try such things.

When you think about innovation and leveling up your skills, voice interface is something you can add to your skill set.

Along with animation and interactive elements, the voice interface can be incredibly impressive for people.

Typography

What type of web and app can exist without good typography? The right answer is none.

Content is a factor that can change product screens or sections I work with.

Depending on the amount of text and paragraphs, I decide what font size I need to use. But apart from the size, the most important question is what typography to use.

Regarding font family selection, there are some rules on when you need to use a particular font.

As a designer, you need to pair two or more fonts and create a perfect combination to showcase your content.

Based on the typography quality, your users will either love or hate your product.

This is why it’s super important to select the proper font and understandably present your content to visitors.

If you work with data, you might be considering learning more about typography, since it’s your major tool for dashboard or CRM systems.

Directly presenting information is one of the major UX design tasks, so typography is the only skill that you need here.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking to advance your UX/UI design career to the next level, you can consider the skills mentioned in this article.

It doesn’t mean that you need to learn all skills at once. Absolutely not. All you need to do is create a plan of what skill you’re going to learn next and follow your strategy.

The ongoing learning is vital for you as a UX/UI designer. This is your only way to stay up-to-date with skills and knowledge.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, it’s time to learn something new today!