Hello, Future UX Designers

Is UX Design meant for you?

User Experience (UX) Design is one of the fastest-growing fields in recent years alongside with the massive growth in smart device sales. Our daily lives are influenced by UX designers, perhaps, even without us knowing.

From the feel of the device to the interface you are interacting with your fingers, these touchpoints contribute to the user experience. Hence, the demand for UX designers has grown beyond the Design and Creative Industry.

UX is an incredibly exciting field (don’t get me wrong there!), but it is not for everyone. When we first put up our recruitment advertisement, applications were pouring in we thought we would find the right match quickly. We were terribly wrong.

To our surprise, many candidates were misinformed about the actual role of a UX designer. Let’s look at a general overview of a UX designer’s responsibilities and general requirements to be a good match for the role:

Tasks and responsibilities

Plan and conduct user research and competitor analysis
Create user stories, personas, and storyboards
Determine information architecture and create sitemaps
Create prototypes and wireframes
Conduct usability testing

Skills and requirements

Communication, collaboration and teamwork
A user-centric mindset
Understanding of interaction design principles
Knowledge of industry tools
Attention to detail
Source: Career Foundry

Good job to those who understands the above responsibilities and requirements, but a true UX journey does not stop at wireframes.

If you truly care for your users, you need to see it to the end of the production. A UX designer who takes pride in bringing the best experience to end users should not pass the development work to the ‘next team’ and claim that you’ve done a great job. One needs to continue to advocate and be involved in making necessary adjustments to make it work for your development team and the end users.

UX designers who excel are also great listeners. Listening includes being able to read and be aware of the verbal and no-verbal messages. Good listening includes being able to understand potential internal and external challenges, and solve them. Listening also requires us to change our perspectives to materialise our ideas without perceived limitations. That brings us to the following key trait of a great UX designer — aptitude for learning.

If you are not ready to go beyond the design discipline to bring your ideas alive, it’s best not to begin at all. Many great ideas on Dribbble remain as unborn ideas simply because they only designed to impress without deep understanding of the underlying technical challenges in the production process.

A UX designer who does well is one who understands business. Bringing digital experiences beyond looking good and meet business goals is critical to make the investment of time and resources worthwhile. Research, no doubt is an important process, but one should be mindful that no business has all the time in the world to dwell in the research phase, especially when new products are launching every day. A great UX designer understands the pressure to deliver and work with the limitations to produce outstanding experience.

Final Thoughts

It may sound like we are asking for too much of a UX designer. Perhaps we are. That is why we think UX is not for everyone. At XIMNET, we believe in getting UX designers involved in a project end-to-end to produce good work together as a team.

What’s your take on this? Share with us.

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contributor

Josephine Toh

Joe is the Agency Manager of XIMNET Malaysia since 2018. She is also the UX Lead for an web building platform, XTOPIA.IO.