UX Planet — Medium | Guy Ligertwood

Question 11: These traits are worth remembering

20 Designers, 20 Weeks, 1 Question Per Week

Learn From twenty experienced designers as we go deep into one question every week.

This week we look at key attributes that make a great UX designer

Previous articles in the series (so far)

Intro Article: Get to know the designers
Question 1: How did you get into design?
Question 2: How your typical work day?
Question 3:What things you wish you knew when you started in design?
Question 4: What are the best ways for you to stay inspired?
Question 5: What do you want to see in my UX design portfolio?
Question 6: 5 important questions you need to be able to answer in the UX interview
Question 7: 5 design books every UX designer should read
Question 8: Imposter syndrome: Your experience with it as a designer and tips to manage it
Question 9: 5 non designer books every UX designer should read
Question 10: What’s the best design advice you’ve ever received?
Question 11: (You’re here) 5 things that make a great UX designer

“Fight like a dog with a bone for the person who’s not in the room. The customer. And give them what they want, at all costs.” (Andrew)

“Great designers are great at learning and riffing, balancing long and short work, supporting their team, partnering with other disciplines, and not taking themselves too seriously.”” (Stephanie)

Simon Pan — Senior Interaction Designer at Google, San Francisco, USA

(*Since we started the series Simon has moved from Medium to Google to work on Google News)

Nationality:

Australian 🇦🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Empathy
• Intentionality
• Proactivity
• Adaptability
• Resilience Self-awareness

Where can people follow you?

simonpan.com or on twitter

Stephanie Engle — Product Designer at Cruise Automation, Menlo Park, USA

(*Since we started the series Stephanie has moved from Facebook to Cruise Automation to work on self driving cars)

Nationality:

American 🇺🇸

5 things that make a great UX Designer

“Great designers are great at learning and riffing, balancing long and short work, supporting their team, partnering with other disciplines, and not taking themselves too seriously.”

Nationality:

American 🇺🇸

Andrew Doherty — CEO, Another.ai, Berlin, Germany

Formerly Product Design Manager at Google, Mountain View

Nationality:

Australian 🇦🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Fight like a dog with a bone for the person who’s not in the room. The customer. And give them what they want, at all costs.
• Learn to code, not so you can become a coder, but so that you are able to demonstrate to engineers that you understand their world. They will respect and trust you more, and do a better job at realising your vision (which helps everyone).
• Be like water. Follow every path to every terminus, and truly understand the nature of the problem. Understanding the “why” of things is your superpower. It’s not a nice to have. It’s your job.
• Incremental improvement is better than no improvement. Win the war one battle at a time. Play the long game.
• Choose roles/companies that demonstrate a respect for UX and customer centred design. Don’t contribute to keeping the sluggish gatekeepers alive. They need to be destroyed.

Where can people follow you?

My website or on Medium

Nirissa Govender — Product Designer at Majid Al Futtaim in Dubai

(*Since we started the series Nirissa has moved from Standard Bank in South Africa to Product Designer at Majid Al Futtaim in Dubai)

Nationality:

South African 🇿🇦

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Emotional intelligence
• An eye for detail
• People skills
• Passion for your craft
• An open mind

Where can people follow you?

My Linkedin

Adham Dannaway — Senior UI/UX designer, Contract/Freelance, Sydney, Australia

Nationality:

Australian 🇦🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Attention to detail: I think this is probably the most important thing as it’s our job to notice and fix the problems that most people don’t even see.
• Creativity: UX Design is all about problem solving and it often helps to be able to look at a problem from different angles (sometimes crazy angles).
• Strong work ethic: Solving user problems can be tough and require a lot of ground work and perseverance.
• Solid process: While every problem is different, I think having a solid process with lots of tools at your disposal can help a lot.
• Passion for problem solving: Some people take pleasure in solving messy problems and enjoy the process.

Where can people follow you?

adhamdannaway.com

Ben Huggins — Sr Interaction Designer, YouTube, San Francisco, USA

Nationality:

American 🇺🇸

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Deep understanding of how people think and behave
• Ability to influence, communicate and defend design decisions
• Strong fundamentals; a sense of craft
• Knowing how to define and attack a problem
• Practice

Where can people follow you?

hugg.in or I’m @bhuggins on Twitter and Instagram

Chirryl-Lee Ryan (aka Cheech) — Head of Experience Design at Isobar, Hong Kong

Nationality:

Australian 🇦🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

To me, UX means the detailed design of digital products. Instead of 5 things that make you a UX badass, I’m giving you 5 things that make you a bad UX designer:

• Speaking in tongues: Design is hard enough to explain without over-complicated design-speak. Try to imagine explaining what you’re doing to your grandmother.
• Knowing it all: The future hasn’t been invented yet. So the sooner you stop thinking you know better than your peers, client and users, the sooner you can open your mind to infinite possibilities.
• Being too nice: Designers are nice people, and nice people say yes because they want to be liked. In business, you need to know how and when to say no.
• Reinventing the wheel: The design process is tried-and-tested, so there’s no need (or time) to reinvent tools every time. Use tested tools to reimagine what you’re designing, not how.
• Being selfish: Most of what you’ll design isn’t for you — it’s for someone else. Designing for your own motives might win awards, but it won’t change the world.

Where can people follow you?

My Linkedin

Audrey Liu — Director of Product Design at Thumbtack, San Francisco, USA

Nationality:

American 🇺🇸

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Empathy: Whether it’s a user they’re designing for or a teammate they’re working with, UX designers need to be able to truly understand perspectives and needs that are different from their own. Empathy will help them design better products and be stronger collaborators.
• Optimism + Creative Vision: UX designers need a combination of optimism and creative vision to help them 1) believe that there are better solutions, and 2) to imagine solutions that are not obvious (e.g. they draw on inspiration from other industries, they flip an entire model upside down, etc).
• Communication: Many good and great ideas have died on the table because of how they were communicated. Being able to communicate clearly or utilize storytelling to convey a compelling narrative will help UX designers convey their ideas and improve collaboration.
• Curiosity: Curiosity allows us to question existing solutions, uncover new opportunities, and maintain a growth mindset.
• Systems-thinking: UX Designers have to be able to solve problems and identify opportunities across an entire system in order to create holistic solutions that provide fluid product experiences.
• **Bonus** Tenacity: Problems evolve, user needs change, context shifts. To deal with changing conditions, UX designers need to have tenacity — a willingness to throw themselves at any problem and sometimes the same problem over and over again.

Where can people follow you?

My Twitter

Nick Babich — Development Team Manager, Ring Central, Russia

Nationality:

Russian 🇷🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Passion: passion should drive you to create, to learn, to feel, to create.
• Open-mindedness and empathy: you shouldn’t be in control of your ego; understand users and be empathic.
• Natural skills of explorer: you should be able to give up working in your comfort zone.
• Teamwork: be able to work in team, understand people you work with.
• Optimism: focus on positive sides of your work.

Where can people follow you?

UX Planet, Twitter , Facebook

Paola Mariselli — Product Designer, Facebook, Menlo Park, California, USA

Nationality: Peruvian 🇵🇪

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Intentionality: with every decision they make.
• Curiosity : as to how things work and why.
• Humility: to keep learning.
• Initiative: with projects and explorations.
• Leadership: as to where the product is heading (vision) and inspiring people.

Where can people follow you?

Twitter or Medium

Kymberlee Ide — Vice President, Experience Design (CX & UX), McCann

Nationality:

Canadian 🇨🇦

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Empathy: I said it in an earlier topic, caring is key. You MUST care.
• The right motivation: If winning awards is your key motivation, you’re doing it wrong. Great design comes from wanting to make a positive difference — even in situations where it isn’t obvious — in someone’s life. Good design provides utility and creates value. Great designers pursue this.
• A collaborative spirit: It can never be about one person’s approach or opinion.
• Lateral thought: You’ll do better parking the obvious and seeking out the obscure. The obvious doesn’t need much thought.
• Be scaleable: Not only in your outputs, but also in your self.

Where can people follow you?

My Linkedin

Alessandro Floridi — UX Manager at Deloitte, Sydney, Australia

Nationality:

Italian 🇮🇹

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Empathy
• Curiosity
• Listening
• Observation
• Understanding of design principles

Where can people follow you?

My Linkedin

Leslie Chicoine — Experience Design and Product Management Consultant, Denver, USA

Nationality:

American 🇺🇸

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Patience
• Empathy
• Imagination
• Systems thinking
• Always engaged in learning new things.

Where can people follow you?

My Instagram and Twitter

Buzz Usborne — Product Designer at Help Scout, Sydney, Australia

Nationality:

British 🇬🇧 and recently Australian 🇦🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Empathy.
• The ability to interpret and use data.
• The ability to make bold decisions.
• To be open, collaborative and inclusive in their research.
• The ability to accept feedback and progress without ego.

Where can people follow you?

My work at buzzusborne.com, my Twitter, my writing on Medium and my resume on Linkedin

Kylie Timpani — Senior Designer at Humaan, Perth, Australia

Nationality:

Australian 🇦🇺

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Curiosity and an open mind.
• An ability to communicate their ideas and vision.
• An excellence in their craft (goes without saying), supported by complementary knowledge in other non-design areas.
• No ego (or only just a tad).
• Empathy. Not only for those they are designing for, but for those they are working with.

Where can people follow you?

My Twitter and also on my Dribbble for haphazardly timed insights into my work.

Graeme Fulton — Writer, coder, designer at Marvel Gibraltar, UK

Nationality:

British 🇬🇧

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• Understand people (don’t be a dickhead)
• Able to sell your ideas and inspire people to build them
• Share your work early as possible
• Understand your design constraints
• Realise that design isn’t more important than other departments (marketing, development, management)

Where can people follow you?

My Twitter

Kaiting Huang — Interaction Designer at Google, in Seattle, USA

Nationality:

Taiwanese 🇹🇼

5 things that make a great UX Designer

• The person has an eye for good designs.
• The person has the ability to execute good designs.
• The person has the ability to articulate rationale behind a design.
• The person has a holistic understanding from users, technical and business perspectives.
• The person LOVES design and problem-solving.

Where can people follow you?

My Medium

“Be scaleable: Not only in your outputs, but also in your self” (Kymberlee)

If you enjoyed this…

Read the other articles in this series

Intro Article: Get to know the designers
Question 1: How did you get into design?
Question 2: How your typical work day?
Question 3:What things you wish you knew when you started in design?
Question 4: What are the best ways for you to stay inspired?
Question 5: What do you want to see in my UX design portfolio?
Question 6: 5 important questions you need to be able to answer in the UX interview?
Question 7: 5 design books every UX designer should read
Question 8: Imposter syndrome: Your experience with it as a designer and tips to manage it
Question 9: 5 non designer books every UX designer should read
Question 10: What’s the best design advice you’ve ever received?
Question 11: (You’re here) 5 things that make a great UX designer

Thanks for the read, before you go

Clap 👏 👏 👏 if you enjoyed this article, so others can find it
Comment 💬 if you have a question you’d like to ask the designers
Follow me Guy Ligertwood to read all the articles in the series

5 things that make a great UX Designer was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.