UX / UI Design: The Skills Most Designers IGNORE

Hi everyone, I'm Brittany from AJ and I'm smart. In this video today we're going to go over some of the essential

skills

that

most

design

ers actually

ignore

, especially early in their careers. I'm going to go around the office and ask some of our own

design

ers what

skills

they think are often overlooked, especially in junior

designers

, it'll get pretty interesting before we get into it, although I'd love to know what they think some of them are. Essential skills that

designers

should have, especially early in their career, I think. This is a really very interesting topic, so definitely let us know in the comments.

Let's chat about it. If you have any questions about anything we mention in the video, please ask in the comments. We respond to every comment. Fine, thanks. Hello. m Imran I am a product designer at AJ and I am smart, so one skill that I think junior designers often neglect is knowing how to present their work and communicate it to the client and that is very important, it is a fundamental skill for a designer to have because it means you can speak the clients' language, you can tell them why design is good for their business and that means that eventually you will be able to sit at the strategy table and talk to your clients at a much higher level than someone who does things.

Now, the way you can best present your design is to not speak in jargon, which means that you don't use design terms that your clients are not familiar with, you just use simple language that they will understand and you clearly show them why you the Design is good for them if your client doesn't understand the value of your design, you can't blame the client and say my client doesn't understand design, it's your job to speak in his language and express things in a way that he will. I understand and a resource that I highly recommend to designers is a book called design, it's a work by Mike Montero and specifically good, it's a very small book so it won't take you much time.

It's great, it's a great size because As big books are hard to read, this is a very well written book, it's short, it's nice to read and if you still don't like reading the book, check out chapter 7, it's called presentation of your work and has a lot of tips for Do you know how to do it well? Are you recording? Hi, I'm Jonathan and the CEO of Jane Smart and I'm also a product designer, a skill that is overlooked by many designers, but even by senior designers, even many mid-level ones. or senior designers I know also have this blind spot: understanding typography, so I think understanding typography and really how it works and the rules behind typography was one of the

most

useful things I learned when starting out.

As a designer and typography is often like if you look at most of the products that you are using, many products are even most of the products as if the whole screen is taken up by different fonts and different forms of typography, ignoring typography means that you are ignoring something like that. that often takes up 80% of what's on the screen or 80% of how the structure of a web page or app is actually laid out and it's very easy to make something look really messy and incoherent when you don't understand typography and I think it's actually a fundamental skill that every UI designer should know, not just as pure aesthetics, not just how to add a pretty shadow or not just how to find good color palettes, but for me I think typography trumps all of those things. . so I think the best book I read on typography was something I think I had to read in college and it was called elem the elements wait I'll check it out you can even show it's called elements of typographic style by Robert brings Hurst and a super boring book, but a really great overview of the typography landscape and a really great overview of all the rules of typography, so it's a really boring book, but you know honestly if you search for typography on the web if you're looking for stuff like that On the Internet you're sure to find tons of articles about it, but Elements of Typographic Style is a great book if you just want to jump into the topic and dig deep right away, so that would be my advice for something designers often overlook. typography My name is Dee I am a product designer and design sprint educator in a tennis match.

Yeah, I think a really important skill that a lot of designers overlook is facilitation and it's not just that you have to be a good facilitator if you want to. be a designer, but the point is that being a designer is not done in isolation: you alone will not have the best ideas and the best understanding of the challenge, but you will bring together people with different knowledge and different opinions in a The space and your ability to Making it easy for them to share their knowledge and then propose, share and develop the ideas of others is a great skill that will lead them to make successful things and create fantastic designs for things that people can make. and what you should do is just find a simple workshop that you want to start with.

You could start with a design sprint which is quite long. The first thing you should do is a shorter exercise like the Lightning Decision Jam, and just do it, just do it eight and something. and see how it goes and even get one of your colleagues to think about it and give you some feedback afterwards and just do another one and then just do another one and move on because it can't, it won't be perfect. at first, but you will improve tenfold if you start teaching and facilitating workshops. Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a director of product design at Agent Smart, so in my opinion a skill that many young and young designers are missing is something as basic as having a professional attitude towards your work and your career working with colleagues.

The reason why this is so is because no one teaches you that, whether you are attending a design school or maybe you are self-taught or maybe you are learning design in an online course, but when you work with other people in a team, it's actually very important that, for example, when someone asks you to do something and you say yes, okay, I come to I can do that. Super motivated, you want to show them that you know you love your job and can take on a lot of responsibility, but in reality the responsibility falls on your shoulders to keep your promise, so this is something you have to do.

Learn from experience, but one way to make the process a little easier and faster and also a way to really impress the people you work with is to be proactive and always make it clear that you know what is expected of you, so a basic one What I see that a lot of junior designers don't do is, for example, take notes, so when I see that someone is not taking notes, I feel like maybe I shouldn't talk to that person because I don't know what they will actually remember. I know for a fact that at first I also thought I would be able to remember everything.

This is actually not true at all. You will have to take notes. You will have to know when to do something and when you have to do it. You know, when you go to design school, it's usually okay to tell your instructor. Sorry, I couldn't do that. Whatever it is, you are still a third year student, so it is expected of you that some things may go wrong. maybe you forget something, that's all good, but the sooner you can offer a really high level of professionalism and reliability, which is also very important, the better it will be for your career because the more people will give you things to do.

You'll really appreciate that they can give you tasks, you'll accomplish that task and that's also a great way to build up more experience if you're a designer who maybe is extremely talented, super creative, but in reality you were always beating the deadline. what you have to do needs to be double-checked, then you'll be less likely to get this cool stuff and it'll actually land on another designer's desk who might be less talented than you, but might be more trustworthy and professional and honestly , that's one of the most important things in an agency environment where you just have to get it done on time and on budget, so that's my advice to you, so my name is Bruna.

I'm a visual and product designer here. Agency month, so one. An essential skill that is especially overlooked by young designers is something that is actually very important here at aging smart at Agence Mart we care a lot about interpersonal skills and one skill that I think is really important is improvisation and that is something that most facilitators here because it's very important when you're with a client and sometimes they ask you a question that you don't even know or it's very difficult to answer, so instead of saying oh, I don't know, it's very important to improvise, just use the Skills, the information that you already have in mind and just connect them in a positive way, so you may not know the answer, but the client will feel like they are getting their answer.

And you know what I mean. I just have to improvise. I would say that's a good thing, so learning that you can actually do some theater classes. Improvisation classes. I am needed in Proffitt's classes, so that will help you improvise not only at work in your work field but also in your daily life. It is very good for you to even communicate with other people, other designers, if you are an independent professional, you know how to build your networking base, so I think it's really good to know how to improvise it, communicate better with people, thank you very much.

Much to watch, I hope you found that video insightful and interesting. If you have any questions please ask them in the comments and also if you have any skills that you think we didn't mention, that you think are too many junior designers or even just general designers missing, please leave them there, we want to talk about it too of course , please like this video if you enjoyed it and definitely subscribe if you haven't already subscribed. We have videos coming out every week on UX product design. innovation in all kinds of things, so it's definitely a channel you'll want to be a part of.

We also have an Instagram that you should follow if you don't. It's a daily vlog of what's going on at our agency and we really have interesting and valuable content coming out all the time so definitely follow us there and you should listen to our podcast which is Product Breakfast Club it comes out every Monday and it features Jonathan Courtney , our CEO and, of course, the author and inventor of the design. sprint Jake Knapp is a great great podcast that you are definitely listening to, otherwise those are all the things you can do right away other than that.

I just want you to have a great day so you can do it, cool, bye, hi, I'm Jonathan and Okay, before we get there, I thought this would work if we edited it together, to be honest, it's going to be a very complicated piece of crap, but definitely that's for YouTube, just hold that offer.