UX Planet — Medium | Tiffany W. Eaton

If you expected this article to be something along the lines of the infamous whether designers should code or not statement, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

But now that I have your attention, what if I told you every skill you learn as a designer is valuable, but how valuable is it to YOU?

Embrace your individuality and use it to shape your career path

There is no one size fits all for skillsets. Everyone contributes a unique perspective in combination with their skills, so there shouldn’t be an expectation to learn the skills some people perceive as valuable, but deep in our hearts, we don’t feel will benefit us.

The skills I am talking about are skills that can leverage the basic UX skills every designer should possess.

Before you dive deeper into a certain skill, you need to know the basics. This includes hard skills of understanding basic UX processes, methodologies, frameworks, UI and programs such as Sketch and Invision, and knowing how to effectively use them to solve different problems. Soft skills are knowing how to collaborate with people and presenting your work. I consider these the baseline skills required to complete any project.

Once we know the baseline skills, we have a tendency to lean more towards specific skills or parts of the design process. This is when we gravitate towards learning new skills based on our interests.

When we heighten our existing skills by learning something new, it requires us to invest our time on that skill over others.

As much as we want to learn as many design skills as we possibly can (I would love to improve my visual skills), we have limited time and energy. we can’t learn everything and sometimes that can be a waste of time especially if we don’t enjoy learning those skills.

Let go if you feel like your time could be spent on other skills

After taking a few courses, I realized coding wasn’t my thing, but I learned to understand basic terms and structures that would allow me to understand how simple code works and change things if I needed to. This can allow me to effectively communicate with engineers and understand their decisions with code, a skill I want to improve on.

Visual design is a skill I wanted to improve on last year, but it doesn’t align with my goals now. I also find it sometimes causes me to get super detail oriented which can block me from other work, and I already developed visual skills good enough to make “nice-looking” mockups. My present goal is that if I can get the job done and people are ultimately satisfied with the visuals, I can move forward.

I also realized that I had been constantly learning about visual design this whole time, whether it’s by reading and looking at examples, receiving specific feedback about visuals for my work, and talking about it to designers whose strength is visual design.

If you want to learn a new skill with the least amount of effort, surround yourself with people who possess that skill and ask for their feedback about it in your work.

It’s important to expose yourself to new skills and try learning them, but don’t force yourself to master them just because other people say you should. They are talking from their experience, not yours. Coding and prototyping may be important to one person but not the other. It comes down to your career goals and what you are passionate about.

Leverage your strengths or improve your weaknesses by aligning them to your goals

Think about your strengths and decide on the skills you want or need to learn once you developed the baseline skills. Do you want to master your strengths? Improve your weaknesses? What skills can you learn that will leverage your existing strengths ? What skills do you see useful for you in the future? Do you want to break into a new industry? There are lots of things to consider before diving deep into learning a skill that can suck out your energy and isn’t meeting your goals.

An example is what I want to do and what my friend wants to do. My goal is improving my leadership skills to eventually become a design leader, so my focus has been on writing and advocating UX across different platforms through teaching and speaking initiatives. My friend wants to focus on information architecture, so she is learning coding. The skills we learn are aligned with a bigger goal of what we want to do.

For the skills we are considering learning, ask yourself some of these questions:

• Why do I want to learn this skill and how will it help me achieve my bigger goals?
• How will this skill help me with other parts of my work? Will it enhance or hinder my work or other skills?
• How does this skill align with my values and my interests?
• Is this the most important skill to learn now and what I want to work on in my career a few years from now?
• How much time should I invest into this skill? How proficient do I want to be in it?
• How will learning this skill affect the time I have to learn other skills?

Leverage your strengths instead of trying to learn everything. Some skills we are better at than others and it might not be the best to invest time on them if they aren’t helping us or we don’t enjoy learning them.

I tried to learn coding because of how heavily emphasized it was to learn (you’ll be a better designer! people said), but I wasn’t enjoying it. It wasn’t worth my time and what I wanted to do in my career a few years later which is focusing on collaboration and managing a design team of my own.

Conclusion

There are tons of articles about which skills to learn as a designer. Just as the field is constantly changing, the list of skills is changing as well.

What makes working together with other designers awesome is that we all have different skills that we can leverage together. We don’t need to be amazing at everything. Sure there are t-shaped designers who can dabble in everything, but they are good at one or two things and not everyone wants to be a t-shaped designers. Some designers want to be specialized in one or a few things and we should embrace that.

Our skill sets vary and the way we convey our designs will be different. Don’t worry about trying to learn the next new skills designers say you should learn. Trends come and go. Focus on your growth, be intentional about the skills you want to invest your time in, and decide on where you think you want to be in your career.

Be the designer you want to be.

Check out my recent collaboration with Skillshare on teaching the basics of UX research here!

To help you get started on owning your design career, here are some amazing tools from Rookieup, a site I used to get mentorship from senior designers:

Links to some other cool reads:

• What I learned From Interviewing and Receiving Offers from Google Two Times
• I interviewed at Facebook as a new grad. Here is what I learned about design
• Journey Mapping is the Key to Gaining Empathy
• UX is Grounded in Rationale, not Design

Coding Is A Design Skill Every UX Designer “Should” Learn (It’s Not What You Think) was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.