Essential skills required to become a ui/ux designer (Part -1)

The lucrative salary and the ever evolving landscape of the ui/ux design field has attracted lot many youngsters, college students, graduates, job seekers and design enthusiasts to take up ui/ux design as a career. Though many aspirants want to pursue ui/ux design still due to lack of exposure they are unable to gain the right skills that would be required to win a ui/ux design job.

To become a successful ui/ux designer knowing only the software used to create ui/ux designing is not enough. Becoming proficient in adobe illustrator, adobe photoshop and figma might help you get a job as a ui/ux designer but beyond that you have to possess certain skills only then you can survive and grow in that job. Those software are just tools used to create ui/ux design and it takes a lot more of skills than that to become a ui/ux designer.

I have segregated these skillsets as

1. Software skills

2. Technical skills

3. Creative skills

4. Soft skills

In this part we are going to discuss only about software skills and technical skills 

Software skills

1. Figma - Though there are many other software other than Figma like Adobe xd and Sketch but still Figma became the winner of this race as it was widespread used by most of them because it integrated features that made an developers work also easy besides being a designing software. Aspiring UI/UX designers should learn to create and co-edit using Figma using their authoring tools. They must be able to work efficiently using features like components, hug, auto layout and masking. Figma comes with inbuilt ui components for both ios and android which is a huge advantage it has and ui/ux students needs to learn to leverage it. Figma's prototyping is a very simple and straightforward approach which is very easy to use and if you learn to manipulate it in the proper way you can create extraordinary micro interactions that will blow away the viewers mind. Though Figma has so many addons still it has its own share of drawbacks. It doesn't has the repeat grid feature like Adobe xd which was very useful while creating product listing pages or team pages or blog pages where we need to create an array of copies of same layout but with different content in it. Similarly Adobe xd had 3d rotation with which we ui/ux designers were able to do amazing micro-interactions but unfortunately Figma does not has that feature. Still it's the most essential and basic skill that you need to acquire while you start learning ui/ux designing.

2. Adobe Illustrator - Adobe illustrator is a world renowned vector graphics software which has absolutely no other alternate that is even close enough to the features and flexibility it provides. But now the real question is what does becoming an ui/ux designer has anything to do with a vector graphic software. How long are you going to be dependent on iconscout, icons8, flaticon or other icon selling websites for your projects? Most importantly they all have a generic set of icons which almost looks same and when you repeatedly use them then all your projects will look the same and monotonous. When you learn illustrator and you can create your own style of icons and maintain different styles for each project type that will really make your portfolio stand out in the eyes of the recruiter. This just not ends with icons alone, you can use your illustrator skills to create unique onboarding screens and other screens like order accepted, welcome screen, order status screens which will make you stand apart from the rest. So do not underestimate the power of illustrator, instead harness it and use it to its fullest potential.

3. Adobe Photoshop - Adobe Photoshop has become a household name in the past 2 decades such even a kid is using Photoshop these days. General public is using Photoshop just in order to edit, manipulate and enhance photographs and underutilizing it in a very disgracing way. But we as professional ui/ux designers should not do that and must know to use Photoshop to our advantage. Before going about why Photoshop is essential for ui/ux designers let all the beginners know that before Adobe xd, Figma or sketch even existed it was Photoshop using which we were designing user interfaces. Now though we might have got exclusive software for ui/ux designing, still Photoshop hold its ground in the field of ui/ux designing. If you want to include some crazy brush strokes in your ui design then Photoshop is the only way you can do it. The above one was just an example but there are many more things that are possible only through Photoshop. Most importantly after covid pandemic companies are not recruiting graphic designers only to do banners instead they expect the ui/ux designers itself to design the banners and social media posts in order to reduce salary expenditure. Though this may be the harsh reality but still we need to accept and adopt ourselves to the industry changes and upgrade us accordingly. So whether you want to learn it out of interest or not but at least for job purpose Photoshop is a must required skill.

Technical Skills

1. User Research - Though we might tell as UI/UX designing but still we perform UX design first and then from those results we proceed with UI design. Being profecient in the above mentioned software might help you create a good UI but to compliment that good UI a good UX is a must. To create a good UX as UX designers we must be able to do quality user research. When we create an app or a website we are not creating it to be used by a specific group of people, we are creating it to be used by as many users as possible. Every user will have their own expectations about that app or website and we are supposed to deliver that. If we need to understand all these users requirements and design an app considering all their inputs then obviously we must be able to do good quality user research. There is always a saying that the correct questions brings out the correct answers. To do quality user research you need to ask the right questions from which you will the right answers. Asking the right questions and knowing to pick the right answers is what you must learn first to become a qualified UI/UX designer.

2. Empathy mapping - With the above to do good user research you would have got a set of right answers. But the ability to corelate the varied and sometimes vague answers to get the list of features that is expected by the users in the app or the information needed in the websites is what matters more. If you are unable to connect the dots hidden between the above answers then there is no use of the above user reseach you have done. This skill to identify what the end user wants and does not wants is called empathy mapping.

3. Information Architecture - Now we have connected the points and we have got a list of features or information that we need to have in our app or website. But now we need to know which feature or information has to be given the highest priority and which one to be given the least priority only then out website or app will be user friendly and easily navigable. Nobody goes to an food ordering app to look into their order history, they most often use it to order food, so there is no point in listing out their order history in the home page instead we should have search bar, offers and food suggestions based on their previous orders and the order history can be moved under the profile page. So the process of sorting the above collected information to create the right priority list is called information architecture and as ui/ux designers we must know to do it.

4. Wireframing - Translating your userflows into an understandable rough drawing is called wireframing. Why wireframing is an important skillset? Once you create the ui and then if it needs some corrections the the amount of time and effort put into it will become a waste and as well you will have to spend another equal amount of time and effort to rectify it. Most importantly we may not be right in the second time also and might have to revise it multiple times before getting the correct final version. If we are directly going to design user interfaces and keep revising it after every feedback, imagine how much time, money and man hours are going to be consuming. Instead if we draw basic pencil sketches or outlines of the user interface then the revising and correcting process would become far more easier and less time consuming. The reason why the word "understandable" is mentioned here is because as ui/ux designers we create the wireframes and obviously we will know what we have created, but we need to make sure that the client and the end users are also able to understand the wireframes because wireframes do not have images, icons or text, they are just going to be rectangles, circles and some lines. So, with these basic shapes we must be able to convey the contents and the functionality of the app or website to its audience. Creating such communicating wireframes is truly a skillset in demand.

5. Storyboarding - Not only creating wireframes is your responsibility but also placing them in the right order such that anybody who goes through the wireframe must be able to understand the flow of the app or website. This process is only called as storyboarding which is an essential skill required to become a ui/ux designer.

6. Usability testing - Usability testing is the process of finding out how easier users were able to accomplish a task using app or website. The reason we do it is because the more easier the app or website is to use more likely to be used by lot of people. Usability testing needs to pick the right users who represent the target audience, creating realistic tasks that the user will be using, observing how the users react and gathering information about user sentiments after using that product, analyzing user behavior, finding out areas of improvement and implementing those changes to create a competitive app. This may be a boring and tiring as we need to repeat it several times to iterate changes but this becomes necessary into improve user satisfaction and to reduce production cost.

7. Accessibility testing - Accessibility testing in UI/UX design is to make sure that digital products and services are usable by the physically challenged also. It involves evaluating how well a product can be accessed and used by individuals with different types of physical challenges such as visual impairments, auditory impairments, motor impairments or cognitive disabilities.

8. Prototyping - Prototyping is necessary for giving the user's, clients and developers a look and feel of how the app or website would be after developing it. Prototyping is needed for 3 main reasons. From the clients perspective they will know how the app or website is going to come out and what is the process pipeline to accomplish each task that the app can do which help them give feedbacks accordingly. Next from the developers perspective prototyping helps the developers to know the navigation between the web pages or app screens which makes linking between those pages easier without assuming anything. Finally, prototyping is necessary for user testing. Instead of asking for end users feedback after developing of the app or website, a prototype would benefit the product owners in getting the user response even without developing the app or website, saving a lot of money, effort and time.

9. Interaction design - When you take your mouse on top of a link, have you noticed the color of the link changes. This is called as micro-interactions. What we just described above was a basic human-computer interaction. Over a period of time this has evolved into wonderful animations. For example when you swipe a card the next card just like that does not appears from the other side, instead it looks like a set of cards stacked one above the other and as you swipe the current card moves out of the screen and next card pops up from underneath that too with some realistic wiggle or bounce or  float animation. Most importantly just in order to make something more interesting you should not make it difficult for the user to use. For example you should not keep a slider to enter a phone number or report an error after submitting the form. Understand that interaction design is mainly used to keep the user engaged as well as to make sure that the user needs to get the task accomplished with minimum efforts. In the name of doing some crazy stuff please do not make it difficult and frustrating for the user.

So the above mentioned 3 software skills and 9 technical skills are the most essential skills to that an aspirant needs to possess to get a job and make a living out of ui/ux design.