Should you become a UX designer and do you have what it takes?
By: Thomas Essl
Tags: Design, Careers, Career Advice, Skills, UX

To answer these questions, let’s first consider some of the pros and cons of a UX career and how important each point is to you. They may be pro or con depending on your inclination, so I’ve just listed some of my observations and leave you to judge what’s good and what’s not.

You learn a lot! The (mostly) project-based work allows you to be involved in many projects across many different industries and client contexts. At the same time, you’ll deal with people — both users and stakeholders — from all different walks of life. This teaches you a ton about tech, business, behavioural sciences, and much more.

In order to learn better and respond to new constraints, you need to be able to also question your own assumptions instead of trying to come across as an expert.

It’s highly collaborative. Allows you to work with many other disciplines.

It’s highly creative. While there’s a framework of a process you can always refer back to, this is a creative problem-solving discipline with many paths to a solution.

It’s highly analytical. While you’ll need your creativity to imagine solutions and methods, you’ll need to measure the effectiveness of the team’s actions and your ideas and use coherent rationals to get to the next question or hypothesis.

It’s a very popular role. Basically the next best to a software developer role in terms of job security and remuneration.

You’ll quickly see the fruits of your labour. Unlike in many other roles, you will produce ‘tangible’ outputs you can enjoy, be proud of, and show to others, and if your team measures their work correctly, you’ll be able to see what impact your work had with your customers.

Others often misunderstand the job so you’ll spend a lot of time convincing them of the value of your work.

The best results come from face-to-face user testing and collaboration. While it is possible to do this rob completely remotely (and I have done so in the past), I’d personally advocate for at least some part of it to happen in person. This may limit your ability to work remotely.

You won’t be a superstar. This is an enabling role where you gather insights and produce assets that help the whole product team (and your customers!) be successful. And again, few will understand what you actually contributed to that success. If you like to stand in the limelight and get a ton of credit for your work, this may not be for you.

In addition, not every UX job entails working on an app for billions of users (but I would argue that this is some of the most interesting work).

Your work will be criticised a lot. The right kind of critical feedback is a good thing as it will help you improve your work, but if you take feedback too personally and have a thin skin, this may not be for you.

You’re often the only person in your role on any given project or the entire company, so you should be comfortable proactively educating about your kind of work with humility.

A good designer considers their work in its context. This means being able to zoom in on the smallest details, the hover state of a button, say, as well as zooming out to see how this work will deliver impact on the entire value chain of a product or service offering.

This industry is changing constantly so you’ll have to/get to reinvent yourself periodically.

From the above list, you can begin to deduct some of the skills that are required to be successful in this role. Being collaborative, sociable, creative yet analytical, and outcome-oriented certainly help, as does being able to take a punch and reflect on the shortcomings of your work in a fact-based manner.

Above all these, there is one ethereal and hard-to-define skill I found essential that I’ll call Critical Thinking. You see, while there are countless tools, processes, assets, diagrams, collaborators, and more, there is no ‘right’ way or moment to take advantage of them. To navigate this space from brief to impact, you’ll need to be able to think on your feet, consider all the information you have, generate new insights as needed, and decide how to best proceed. Memorising the sequence from user interviews to wireframes to looking at charts in analytics software is not good enough. To do the job right, you’ll need to make thousands of fact-based decisions large (e.g. how to prioritise problems to solve) and small (e.g. what is the right wording for a question in a survey), and you’ll also need to be able to articulate the rationale behind these decisions to your team.

In interviews, I was often asked some variation of “How comfortable are you with high degrees of ambiguity?”. This is what this question refers to. Given nothing except the desired outcome, can you gather the insights needed and chart the path to said outcome in a way that works best in the specific context (as opposed to blindly following a process)? Can you question assumptions? Can you interview sometimes very senior stakeholders to understand the true motivations behind the project and any potential risks? Can you challenge the initial brief you received to ensure you are working on the right problem?

But what about technical skills? Don’t you need to know how to code? No, you don’t.