A must-have for designers- “Soft skills”

We as designers are always striving for those pixel-perfect designs. But, is it enough in the real world? Is having the talent for designing great products and solutions enough? In my opinion, it is not.

Soft skills are what makes a designer a complete package!

In the past few months, I have felt the need for a lot of soft skills as a designer which I need to develop, and have started working on that bit-by-bit. Today, in this blog I’ll be highlighting the set of soft skills that a designer needs on a day-to-day basis and why are they very important.

1-Articulating your thoughts: 💭

Articulation means “being able to express ideas clearly and effectively.”

It is one of the most important soft skills as a designer. Why? because you as a designer might be amazing in your profession but your client does not always understand your thinking, approach, and decisions made during the design process. That’s where it is really important to well-articulate and express your approach to the client without using too many industry-specific terms that they might find difficult to understand.

2- Asking the right questions: 🙋🏼‍♀️

When a client is giving you brief, they might tell you that they need a modern, interactive, visually appealing, functional design. But it’s really important to ask the right kind and amount of questions to understand your client’s actual perspective and needs in order to fulfill their requirements.

What I generally do is, after my first meeting with the client, I try to visualize what they want and then jot down questions that come across my mind during that process. So, before going ahead in the design process, I always make it a point to clarify all my doubts and questions with the client in order to keep communication channels clear.

3- Selling your design: 👩‍💻

How you present your work really matters. getting better at selling our designs is something we all need to develop, and yet is very much less talked about in the industry.

People from different fields agree that today, every individual should be an impeccable salesperson (great at selling himself and selling his work).

It may be challenging to make people realize that focusing on users is the best way (or even the only way) to make a business successful, but the result is worth every effort.

4- Collaboration/Teamwork: 👫👫

And being a designer is all about collaboration and teamwork. We have to communicate with all the stakeholders, get to know the business goals. We have to connect with the users, understand their pain points and needs. Connect with developers, QA, etc., and get our designs pushed to production. And all of this requires being really good at communication, and well-articulation to be a good team player.

5- Documentation: ✍️

Design is an iterative process, we all know. Something or the other is always changing, be it because of users' needs or business goals. However, What we all miss out on most of the time is documenting the entire process, so that we can always go back to our notes and figure out the initial discussions, approach, thinking even later on in the design process.

TIP: When you’ll be working on your portfolio, you’ll literally bless yourself if you have already done proper documentation of your work.

6- Reception of Feedback: 💪🏻

In the very initial days of my career, I used to read a lot of articles( still do :P) and there was one common thing that I read everywhere, that take feedback positively. So, I always used to agree to whatever feedback was given to me without second-guessing their critique about my designs.

But lately, I have understood that constructive feedback needs to be taken for sure as a designer. We should never become emotionally connected to our designs. But, at the same time do not always readily agree to the feedback given, because you know of all the constraints that you had while designing and the feedback-giver might not. So always think first and sometimes stand by your work if necessary.

Woah, did you just make it to the end of this article? Awesome! I hope I helped you in some way.

Thanks again for reading this. Also, I am always open for feedback or collaboration, feel free to message me on Linkedin. #learnerforlife

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aashi-mittal-uiuxdesigner/

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