What soft skills are needed to develop as UX (and/or) UI?

Illustration by Diego Zuñiga

Becoming an UX (and/or) UI in these days has come to be quite attractive, both in the employment opportunities that industry is generating as in the economic side. 

This role has been in development for decades in both design and technological environments in North America and Europe.

In Latin-American countries such as Costa Rica, being UX (and/or) UI 5-10 years ago meant being a mythological creature, like the so-called “Unicorns”. It was a tremendous Pokémon-style evolution. 

Some of us who started at that time had been doing a constant evolution: from the first called "Webmasters" to "Web Designer", up to “Front end” and finally “UX”. Bonus points if you can be UX and UI at the same time, which it is a huge lie, but it is a subject that we will discuss in depth on another time. 

I not forgetting about the designers, who realized how valuable it became to evolve to a UX role and with joy, I recognize that curiosity in evolving to so noble position. 

Apart from the educational training of this career, there comes a very important topic: the soft skills. This represents about 50% of what it is to be UX (and/or) UI. Solutions cannot be created if developers don’t listen to the customer or the final user as well, or if they don’t understand their pain points, create assertive communication, and have an open mind to be able to receive information without bias. 

I can indicate, by my own experience and search in different sources, some of the soft skills you must have to become an efficient and successful UX/UI designer. 

• Collaboration: Give suggestions and feedback in a clear and specific way. Receive feedback with an open mind. 

• Communication: It is vital in the different processes and stages of the UX / UI. Effective communication at different stages of the process, helps us to maintain a healthy and suitable environment to pass on information from processes, analysis, results, and situations of urgency that can be submitted at any time. 

• Active listening: Focus on what the other person indicates without bias. This skill is effective when interviewing with clients, talking to colleagues, or giving customer insights about the business. 

• Empathy: It is the ability composed of other skills, such as active listening, observation and analysis of information taken from the results of tools or artifacts such as surveys, interviews, tests with clients, etc. It is to put yourself in the shoes of the users. 

• Transparency: The ego is a negative point when working in this environment. The absence of the ego allows us to receive the clearest information and without bias and helps us create improvements concisely with given information. 

• Presentation and visualization of projects: This skill helps us to communicate analysis as solutions in a clearer and more visual way to the customers as users. 

• Self-taught: UX is always learning. Design trends change in months. The continuous training, the search for groups in social networks as communities with both UX / UI topics and other topics related to this world. Artificial intelligence, data visualization, branding, content strategy, business structure, technological innovation, among other topics, are ideal to complement UX / UI. 

• Adaptation: Each client or project is a world. There is no client or project like the other, everyone has their "personality". This leads to learning about them to create initiatives based on their reality. This skill goes hand in hand with empathy.  

This is my humble opinion, and I would love to hear comments on these points.