What does a UX designer actually do in this content we're going to look at the skills and attributes of a UX designer some of the tasks and responsibilities that they have every day and we're going to look at some real job ads to see what companies are hiring for when they're looking for UX designers. before we get started if you have any questions about any of the skills or attributes mentioned in this content. let us know in the comments below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
the kind of person that makes a great UX designer is someone who loves problem solving and has a really inquisitive and curious mind a UX designer should really love understanding why people do what they do and what's behind their motivations and behavior so if you really like to understand people and have a desire to make life easier and better then UX design could be right for youit's a primarily people-focused role you'll find yourself working with lots of other teams with business people with developers and with visual designers conducting research running workshops analyzing data running tests and experiments and doing a lot of communication with presentations and creating diagrams so that other people can understand the kind of work that you do and you'll also act as the connection between the users or the customers of your product and the business you'll be doing things like preparing before research actually happens writing up interview guidelines and scripts and creating documents that outline how research should be conducted as well as that you'll actually be conducting the research so interviewing people in person or remotely and taking lots of detailed notes after research there's lots of information that's been gathered so you'll be analyzing that information to understand its meaning doing things like looking at spreadsheets and organizing data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data .
creating reports and presentations to present that complex information to other people running workshops is an important skill for a UX designer because you'll need to get groups and teams of people from different areas of the business to do things like generate ideas and understand and align on where the focus should be you'll also do things like create wireframes which are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept a wireframe for a digital product is similar to a blueprint for a house it clearly illustrates how it functions and the core elements of its design so hopefully that gives you an idea of what a UX designer really does every day now let's look at some of the specific skills needed to be a UX designer .
what skills does a UX designer need to have they need to be a really good listener be able to be empathetic have an open mind and be able to understand other people's needs and motivations it really helps to have a love for solving puzzles and problems and it's great if you're detail-oriented and really understand how all the pieces of a puzzle fit together you'll need to use a variety of different tools to do research create ideas and present those ideas to others but all those tools can be learned now let's take a closer look at some of those skills and attributes by looking at some real job ads from different companies we'll look at three different examples from a large corporate to a small startup .
let's start by looking at a job ad for a big corporate and we've got one here from Tesla so Tesla is looking for a user experience designer responsible for researching designing innovating prototyping new user experiences okay great that fits with everything we know if we look a bit further down here they've highlighted things like having exceptional design skills creative problem solving a great sense of aesthetic aesthetics so it looks like this role is more visual than other UX design roles which we often see there is a big difference when you really dig into UX designer job postings that some are looking for someone who's really visual and other job postings will be looking for someone much more on the user research and of the the wrong so if we look closely into this list of responsibilities.
we'll see that they've highlighted research and defining strategy for different consumer segments they will imagine and conceive so this is really probably involving lots of sketching concept sketching prototyping work to really come up with new ideas and concepts develop creative and innovative designs so this is where we can start to see they are looking for someone a UX designer who has a more visual side as well so maybe going into some ui design and define and implement creative solutions so that word define really highlights that they want someone who will very good at communicating clearly exactly what the concepts are and why they've been chosen so taking the insights from the research and being able to clearly communicate and define what the new directions are if we continue to look down here we also really see invest in building relationships and trust with stakeholders peers and working groups this is where running workshops and being able to really clearly communicate and present to other groups really comes into play .
a UX designer does not work alone and come up with ideas alone they work with other people to to innovate and come up with ideas and then need to also communicate the reasons behind those new ideas to other parts of the business other stakeholders and even to customers as well now that we've looked at a big company let's look at a smaller startup here we have a job posting from a company called Gorillas which is a grocery food delivery service so let's scroll down and have a look at what the responsibilities are in this role they've listed here gather and evaluate user requirements which means user research in collaboration with product managers and engineers which means that you'll be working directly with other people and guiding them through your UX process you'll need to be very good at communicating with people who aren't UX designers then they've also listed conceptualized original ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness this means creating sketches creating digital concepts creating prototypes that really showcase the ideas that have come out of the research that you did they've also have listed here usability testing sessions which is another type of research and testing working directly with customers to gather feedback working with ui designers so again communicating collaborating with other parts of the business and other team members and they've specifically listed communicate your design ideas and prototypes to developers.
so this role for this startup sounds like they've really focused on a collaborative team that works really well together so as a UX designer in this role you'll need to bring your teammates with you and share that UX design work with the rest of the team so if i was applying for this job i would know that my communication and collaboration skills were high on the list of values that they're looking for if we look down a bit further they've actually listed the traits that they'd like the person that they hire to have they said a love of learning and a love of helping others to grow so this again indicates that as a UX designer and especially in this role you'll be working a lot with lots of other people and need to thrive and love that environment the other things they've listed under traits are a sense of independence and ability to establish structures and processes so this speaks to the amount of detailed work that you'll need to do and the ability to communicate those details to others here is also really important a passion for tech with very close collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders so again this collaboration and communication skills are really key uh in this kind of role because other parts of the business need to be on board with the decisions that come out of your UX work.
