Must have UX designer skills to make your career path successful.

Photoshop and Illustrator

Well, this is quite a basic one, but many UI/UX designers don’t have their hands tested on Mighty Illustrator and Great Photoshop. Obviously, you can be a UI/UX designer without knowing these tools, but if you know Adobe Ps and Ai, then UI tools like Sketch and Figma become easy to play with.

If you have the skills, we will advise you to learn them as it will prove helpful as these are the main digital tools. Photoshop is for photo editing, but along with editing, it has many more features. There is always space for improvement because of its endless upgrades. The same goes for illustrators as it is vector-based aimed at logo and illustration design. Well, the sky’s the limit, so learn these tools and become a guru of designs.

Knowing Photoshop is endless, you just can’t simply put five stars in the skill section of your CV as you need to know about the tool perfectly. We would recommend writing skill strong and medium in the CV regarding these tools.

Real Printing Design

When talking about printing design, it just doesn’t mean InDesign or Illustrator. It represents actual printing. Have an idea about all necessary aspects of printing, as it is never a bad idea to know about designing things.

CSS, HTML, and JS

There are two types of designers: one who knows coding and the other one who doesn’t. But honestly, having coding knowledge along with designing is a boon and can definitely improve as a UX designer. But in many interviews, designers with coding skills are preferred.

Drawing

It is an add-on in the skill set. Have a general idea of how light works, how the sizes of 3D objects change based on perspective, and how to do shading.

On YouTube, you can find countless good tutorials. Start practising! It will definitely improve your designing skills.

Writing UX Documentation

Documentation is tricky, and designers hate bureaucracy and things related to it. But this skill set will boost up the next step of your career. How to write documentation? Well, this is another big topic to write about, but here, we will explain in short. Create user flow for each role and draw a big map that shows different types of user interaction with each other. It is just a small microservice of the product. Export all pages of microservice, open Confluence, and start writing. Add minute details, charts, and tables to explain all aspects.

Coaching

When you rise from the positions below, junior positions are filled with interns and juniors, and there you need to coach them with mentor skills. You have to read a lot more than usual, and reading about new skills and trends is the first step. If you are coaching, read it from a different perspective, and you have to read to teach, learn to teach. You might forget many things; coaching will help you recall and polish your skills and updates.

And if you are going to coach someone, then don’t just give them general theories and links to tutorials in a way they won’t be able to implement. Explain everything in detail, explain to them the task, help them learn the tools (every related tool), speak with interns, discuss the designs, and solve problems. Don’t throw everything on them the first day; ease them in. Check improvements and be patient. It takes a lot of time and energy to polish them for the future. Read about the fundamentals followed by UX designers.

Product Owning

A great UX designer needs exceptional skills. You can be a great UI designer without PO skills and can be a brilliant researcher. You can be aware of basic logic if you are aware of the product. Understand the information carefully about what exactly frontend and backend engineers want and create user journey architecture. Understand the stakeholder perspective and also good UX design skills. Through this, you will boost the level up. From a quaint concept, you can build end-to-end UX design. Product designers create the bigger picture itself, and trust us, the money in this is good too.

Writing

Writing will help you a lot. You don’t need to be a native English speaker to write blogs or articles. But it will eventually help you improve a lot, slowly and gradually. Write blogs but not for followers or views but to express yourself, share your knowledge, that’s all. If you write about a particular subject, you do a lot of research simultaneously, and you read and learn. Communicate with people and share your and their knowledge for better understanding.

Wrapping Up

A handheld video game, camping fork, insurance app, or e-commerce site. What do these have in common? Though they are poles apart, they share one thing in common: UX designer expertise. Yes, the job of a user experience (UX) designer is to create impeccable, meaningful, and enjoyable product experiences. Designers conduct product research and investigate a target audience that meets the needs and make each product a natural fit. Here are the core set of UX design skills that every designer should develop:

• Design thinking
• Decision mapping
• Prototyping
• Basic front-end coding
• Empathy
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Flexibility

Adding more skills always proves fruitful and increases the value of your work. Whether you’re freelancing, working for a 3-man startup, or part of a 500-man design team, you will need unique skills, and the company will appreciate additional skills. Learn about the impact of bad UX design on apps and its consequences.