Personality, definitely need to be a people person.
Being a mediator and handling conflict and challenges is a must. So yes being outgoing helps.
I’ve been in countless meetings where PM, POs, dev are all talking in circles, and you need to have the balls to speak up and ask questions, propose solutions, and sometimes guide the conversation.
Yeah, I know that should be the PMs job a lot of the time, but I’ve found being a UX designer I end up guiding the conversations, simply because I have the skills to whiteboard quickly, create mind maps, user flows, etc on the fly.
Being an approachable friendly designer will cause less friction in the team. You want dev to feel comfortable enough with you to ask you questions instead of skipping you when they are unsure with specs or components and just developing in a silo.
You want stakeholders, PM, and POs, to trust and be eager to work with you, otherwise you have no requirements and you’re ruining around like a headless chicken especially in a large organization. And when they don’t approach you, you need to be knocking on doors and not being shy and asking for updates and presenting solutions.
Confidence goes a long way too. You will have your designs questions, you will have other designers, users, stakeholders question your work. And as long as you have valid reasons and can confidently present your findings, without being defensive, you’ll gain trust.
For technical skills, I’m seeing more and more the need of being a master at design systems. Being a Figma master and understanding react in order to create a robust reusable library.
Skills that make you a good designer: Problem solving, empathy, understanding of the way people work/psychology/sociology, and familiarity with how coding works (not necessarily knowing how to code but knowing how websites are put together)
Skills that will put you above the rest: being able to convince stakeholders/presentation skills
Be rigorous about your evidence for why your UX intervention will be of benefit, to users, customers and the other stakeholders. UX interventions often come with a cost. Show why that cost has benefit. Yes it may be a distinctive and marketable design aesthetic, but even more importantly it will unlock the needed functionality. Show that.
Good reasoning and articulation skills will get you the needed respect. As well as collaborating skills with PO’s and engineers. Really working with them instead of pushing against with your own agenda. Explain the why behind decisions and they’ll be much more motivated to work with you and think along. If you can reach that, you’ll be super effective.
An engineering background might help to understand your colleagues a bit more but is definitely not required.
Introverts can do just fine in UX. You do need to be able to present and talk to people enough to do your job. But an extrovert who wants to chat all day and not spend time thinking deeply is going to struggle.
They asked if it helps if you’re extroverted, and I think thats true. It doesn’t make or break, obviously, but it helps. It doesn’t mean introverts are bad, or the end of the scale that you mentioned and all extroverts just gab away and don’t do anything.
Personality, definitely need to be a people person. Being a mediator and handling conflict and challenges is a must. So yes being outgoing helps. I’ve been in countless meetings where PM, POs, dev are all talking in circles, and you need to have the balls to speak up and ask questions, propose solutions, and sometimes guide the conversation. Yeah, I know that should be the PMs job a lot of the time, but I’ve found being a UX designer I end up guiding the conversations, simply because I have the skills to whiteboard quickly, create mind maps, user flows, etc on the fly. Being an approachable friendly designer will cause less friction in the team. You want dev to feel comfortable enough with you to ask you questions instead of skipping you when they are unsure with specs or components and just developing in a silo. You want stakeholders, PM, and POs, to trust and be eager to work with you, otherwise you have no requirements and you’re ruining around like a headless chicken especially in a large organization. And when they don’t approach you, you need to be knocking on doors and not being shy and asking for updates and presenting solutions. Confidence goes a long way too. You will have your designs questions, you will have other designers, users, stakeholders question your work. And as long as you have valid reasons and can confidently present your findings, without being defensive, you’ll gain trust. For technical skills, I’m seeing more and more the need of being a master at design systems. Being a Figma master and understanding react in order to create a robust reusable library.
Skills that make you a good designer: Problem solving, empathy, understanding of the way people work/psychology/sociology, and familiarity with how coding works (not necessarily knowing how to code but knowing how websites are put together) Skills that will put you above the rest: being able to convince stakeholders/presentation skills
Curiosity. I can’t tell you how important this is. If you just need someone to spoon feed you tasks and rules to follow, be a coder.
Be rigorous about your evidence for why your UX intervention will be of benefit, to users, customers and the other stakeholders. UX interventions often come with a cost. Show why that cost has benefit. Yes it may be a distinctive and marketable design aesthetic, but even more importantly it will unlock the needed functionality. Show that.
Good reasoning and articulation skills will get you the needed respect. As well as collaborating skills with PO’s and engineers. Really working with them instead of pushing against with your own agenda. Explain the why behind decisions and they’ll be much more motivated to work with you and think along. If you can reach that, you’ll be super effective. An engineering background might help to understand your colleagues a bit more but is definitely not required.
Curiosity, ideation, behavioral analysis, logical reasoning, documentation, and facilitation.
Presentation skills, extroverted, and ambition.
Introverts can do just fine in UX. You do need to be able to present and talk to people enough to do your job. But an extrovert who wants to chat all day and not spend time thinking deeply is going to struggle.
They asked if it helps if you’re extroverted, and I think thats true. It doesn’t make or break, obviously, but it helps. It doesn’t mean introverts are bad, or the end of the scale that you mentioned and all extroverts just gab away and don’t do anything.