The six human skills that make a great UX designer (2024)

When we describe a well-rounded UX designer, we often focus on their ability to deliver on artifacts and processes. We imagine that they have a strong command of “hard skills” like research, user flows, wireframes, and interaction design, among other things. It’s actually someone's ability to master the less tangible “soft skills” that make them great designers. The thing is, it’s easier to improve your hard skills by learning new methods and practicing your craft. It’s decidedly harder and requires much more self-reflection to develop your soft skills.

Many things can be defined as soft skills, but I’ll focus on some of the most important for UX designers: communication, attitude, trustworthiness, collaboration, adaptability, and curiosity. I’ll discuss why we shouldn’t call them soft skills and provide solid examples of how they can take you from a good UX designer to a great one.

Seth Godin and Simon Sinek, two thought leaders on leadership, attempt to re-title what are often referred to as “soft skills” differently. Godin calls them “real skills,” and Sinek calls them “human skills.” They describe the importance of these skills and how they are undervalued but critical to successful people.

Something that struck me as I thought about these two viewpoints was how much they also applied to successful UX designers and teams. The great UX designers I’d been fortunate to work with all exhibited the “human skills” that Sinek points out as important. On the flip side, I remembered how teams who were good at the “what” of their job, but not the “how,” were either toxic or seemed to have difficulty maintaining relationships and team members.

Sinek describes his time with the Navy Seals and what they taught him about the importance of “Human Skills.” When he asks their head of training how they choose who would ascend to their most elite Seals group, he drew a two-axis diagram. On one axis, he wrote ‘Performance,’ which is exactly what it sounds like, someone’s ability to perform at a given level using their vocational skills. On the other axis was ‘Trust,’ meaning how much the rest of the team would feel confident entrusting that person with their lives.

It would make sense that someone who scored high on both axis of this chart would ascend, but what was interesting was that someone who scored high on Performance but low on Trust was the least likely to be chosen. Whereas, someone who scored very low on Performance, in relative terms, but very high in Trust was a much better candidate for Seals' elite group.

What this teaches us is that while your ability to perform your job in regards to what can be measured makes you a good UX designer, to be a great one, you must also focus on how you get there.

When we advance along in our careers as UX professionals, it becomes more apparent that being skilled at the hard deliverables matters, but your ability to gain influence into areas that matter tends to be due to the other things you have, your human skills. You’re more likely to have input into product roadmaps, unblock barriers in projects, and see your and your team’s ideas manifest if you master these less measurable set of abilities.

• Setting expectations for your stakeholders and team members on what you’re capable of accomplishing. Hence, there are no unpleasant surprises that can lead to friction in a relationship down the road. It may not always be what the stakeholder or your leader wants to hear, but be realistic about when you can accomplish something and give yourself space to do your best work. Overpromising and under-delivering are some of the worst things you can do when trying to gain influence on projects and organizations.
• Be transparent, and make it a habit; proactively keep your team, stakeholders, and managers apprised of your project status and early drafts of your work. It’s much better to overcommunicate than to be a black box of knowledge. This shows maturity and transparency in your process and also allows you to get feedback and input as you go rather than waiting too long and having to undo work.

• Being direct with your feedback, omitting as much ambiguity as possible when giving that feedback. There’s nothing worse than coming away from interacting with someone and still feeling unclear about how they feel about something you presented. This is especially true for managers and is critical in helping your people grow. This doesn't mean to be too blunt or not to consider someone's feelings, but you can still kindly deliver feedback without leaving any questions as to your point of view.

• Be positive. Even when things are unsure, and your team is a little stressed, try not to give in to the temptation to constantly point out the negative side of things and only reinforce what is going wrong. Try to focus on a path forward and how the team can fix things or rally the team to develop a plan. When someone on a team regularly points out faults without providing advice on how to fix things, it can hurt the rest of the team’s morale. * This doesn’t mean you should fake enthusiasm or not speak up if there is an unhealthy or toxic environment. If that’s the case, you should immediately speak to a manager or leader.
• Have empathy when you have to deliver tough news, whether it’s a timeline getting pushed back, critical feedback on a project, or if you have to have a heart-to-heart about someone’s interpersonal skills. Remember, there are people behind the projects you work on, and that their personalities, lives, and feelings are often wrapped up in them. Sometimes it’s hard for someone to take critical feedback objectively. Try different tactics to frame your feedback in a constructive way that sets a path forward for improvement and listen to their point of view.

• Be humble, no matter how senior you are or how long you’ve been on a project, there is always something to learn, and the great UX designers know this. The longer you work on products that people use, the more you realize it’s impossible to anticipate every behavior and therefore impossible to suggest perfect solutions all the time. That’s why we test. Much like our work on projects, we should also always be open to new viewpoints, opinions, and ideas. Never assume you know everything to know about your skills as a UXer or as a designer on a project. Even the master of their trades understood this.

“Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.” ― Bruce Lee

• Be dependable. When you say you’re going to do something, please do it. A big part of your relationship with your stakeholders and your team is that they know they can trust you to hold up your commitments. Some teams and projects can get very big. When that’s the case, it’s often impossible for leaders or stakeholders to keep an eye on every task needed to complete a project. It’s the responsibility of individuals to carry their part of the load. There is no quicker way to lose your leaders' favor or get passed on for important projects than to be thought of as someone who doesn’t deliver when it matters.
• Manage your time. This is one of the most straightforward but difficult things to manage as you progress in your career. Be careful before raising your hand for something you know you won’t have time for only because it’s something you really want to do. While burning the midnight oil or juggling many projects at once may feel like a natural act to you. You’ll eventually learn that your best and most impactful work can be done when you are laser-focused on the most important things. So, rather than raising your hand for more, make sure you prioritize the projects and initiatives that will have the biggest positive impact on your team and your career. It’s the adage of quality over quantity.

• Be honest about your skills. Even when it’s hard, it’s important not to deceive your team or people you work with when it comes to your ability. It may seem innocent enough to tell small lies, but over time, those small lies can have a big impact on your team and have ramifications on people depending on your ability to execute a project. Rather than saying outright, you have experience doing something that you don’t, be open with your stakeholder or leader and tell them it’s a skill you’d like to hone. If they feel there is space for you to do that, they can help coach you or pair you with someone who has experience in that area. That’s much better than your team coming away either finding out you were lying or thinking that you could not deliver quality work.

• Share freely and often. If you have new knowledge or findings, share it with anyone whose work may benefit from it. Some work environments can be very competitive, and sometimes teams work in silos keeping their learnings and progress hidden from the rest of the organization. This can lead to unhappy working relationships and cause subpar work because teams are not leaning on each other for learning or feedback. Try your best to break any of these habits and foster a healthy culture of sharing and teamwork. Your leaders and coworkers will notice and be more likely to do it themselves, which will amplify your positive influence.
• Share your wins. Remember that when you’re sharing your work or successes to include the other people who worked on the project. Try replacing ‘I’ with ‘we’ as much as possible when presenting. Not only does it give everyone who worked on a project a chance to share the spotlight, but it also shows those people that you value their contributions. It shows leadership that you have the ability to lead a team and not just toil away by yourself. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to shine, but the more you share your wins, the more people will want to help you and bring you on new projects.

• Be a teacher, and a leader, part of advancing your UX career is by becoming a leader. That doesn’t necessarily mean being a people manager if that’s not your desired career path. It can mean leading from your position on the team by helping younger designers learn through mentorship and providing feedback. It can mean helping others on your team catch up on a project or sharing your findings and processes to help others become better designers along the way. Obviously, if you’re a people manager, these are core to your job, but you can still be a leader by sharing your knowledge even if you're not.

• Roll with the punches. No matter what happens with a single project, there’s plenty more to come. There will likely be many projects that get paused, killed, or seem to lose their momentum. When that happens, don’t take things personally; any work you did towards something made you a better designer, taught you something, or gave you a chance to hone your skill. Nothing you do is ever truly wasted. If a project isn’t canceled completely but seems to have lost momentum, do your best to reassess and get a clear direction from your team or leader regarding whether the project is still a top priority. If it’s not, then you can claim back the mental space it took; if it’s still a priority, then you know you need to rally the troops and kickstart the project again.
• Embrace ambiguity many times early in a project's life, things are fuzzy, and leadership is looking for key individuals to help bring clarity. Don’t shy away from opportunities that aren’t solidified; try to help bring structure to a problem using customer insights, user tests, or digging into analytics. The more you can clarify the impact to users, the easier it becomes for the team to understand the problem and create a plan of action. The more you do this, the better you get, and the more comfortable you are with projects that aren’t well-defined. The best part is the more leadership sees you do this, the more likely they are to approach you early for bigger projects that need this help.

• Seek feedback, sometimes it’s hard for us to hear critical feedback, but it’s important in our evolution as designers. Regularly ask for stakeholder input or peer reviews as a way of making sure you’re considering all viewpoints. It doesn't mean you need to act on it all, but the more you’re empowered with diverse ideas, the broader your bucket of knowledge is to pull from. This also helps keep you efficient and reduces the churn of undoing ideas or starting from the beginning because you were making decisions based on assumptions that you didn’t clarify early because you didn’t want to get feedback. As with anything else, the more you seek feedback, the better you get at receiving it and know when and how to use it.

• Be a ready student. In Collaboration, I listed being a teacher as something you should look to do. On the flip side, you should also be ready to listen to those who have something to teach. Early in our careers, it’s easy to feel like we know everything. Please stop it. Take every opportunity to listen to people, not only other designers but also people from other disciplines. It would help if you aimed to be a T-shaped designer, broadly knowledgeable with a deep level of knowledge in one area, yours being UX. The best way to accomplish this is by talking to people who are experts in their field. One of the best ways I’ve found to do this is to have 1:1s with these people, even if you’ve been doing it for a while. Researchers, engineers, PMs, marketers. Each of them has years of knowledge in their area, and oftentimes you’ll be surprised how many ideas you come away with about how you can collaborate more.

• Don’t be afraid to ask questions. This should be obvious to us as UX designers; it’s our job to understand a problem before we try to solve it. There’s a reason why every design thinking framework starts with an understanding or discovery phase. If you’re unclear about the goals of a project, ask the team why you are doing it and what they see as a success. It’s much better to clarify upfront before starting to do work. Otherwise, you could be building your project on an unsteady foundation of wrong assumptions.
• Know where you stand. When you and your manager meet to discuss your projects, performance, or career advancement, ask all the questions you feel you need to to ensure you are pointed at the right areas for your success. If you are unsure about how your manager feels you are performing, ask explicitly. Also, ask for suggestions on how you can accomplish your goals from a project and career perspective. It shows professional maturity to seek feedback regularly and make you better at giving it if the time comes for you to manage people. Another way to know where you stand is to seek it from your coworkers. Set up regular 1:1s, even if they only happen once a quarter or every month, to regularly set aside time with people you work with. Often we only get to interact with those people on projects. It’s good to give each other space to discuss broader topics that may help your ability to work together.

Unlike your craft which you can work on by yourself, you need other people to practice most human skills. You also need time for self-reflection to ask yourself if there are areas you can improve. Chances are, you’re already doing some of them, and you’re pretty darn great. If you find there are some, you’re not great at, no problem. Write these 6 things down (communication, attitude, trustworthiness, collaboration, adaptability, and curiosity) in a place that you often glance to, like your desktop or a sticky note. Then you can passively remind yourself of some of the things that will help you be a better designer, a better teammate, and a better human.

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I know I could not capture them all, so please share other skills you think fit the bill, please share. Or if you feel like I’ve not touched on these in the right way. Thanks, everyone, if you made it this far!