Title: Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery
Context: “Jack (or Jill) of all trades, master of all.” Sorry, that’s the job description.
Synopsis: The great thing about being a user experience designer is that we get to do lots of different things all day. We are rarely bored (and if you are, let me know and we can take care of that). That also means that we need to have lots of different skills to be able to draw upon in order to do our job effectively. But we can’t just “have” these skills, we need to “master” them. And mastery requires practice. It is easy to only concentrate on the things that we happen to be good at while ignoring other skills that we not be as comfortable with. The truth is that we don’t have that luxury. Part of our job is to be able to do whatever it takes to align people to our vision and there are 2 ways to do that: we can either convince them or force them. Since we tend to be greatly outnumbered (and most often outranked) the second option will rarely work. Instead we need to bring the full force of a wide range of skills to bear in a concerted effort to encourage people to see things our way. In essence, we need to be able to have – and know how to expertly use – the right tool for the right job. That’s us; master craftsmen of communication.
Best Bit: “It’s easy to produce a poor quality result…anyone without the critical skills is capable of it and there are a ton of those people floating around.”
via uie.com
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