The 10 skills a UX Designer should have

Interpersonal Skills (Soft Skills)

The famous "Soft Skills" are those that define how a person behaves in different situations. They include aspects of personality, language, habits, etc. Three very important skills in the discipline of UX are:

1. Empathy
Do you know the context of the user? Do you know what processes they face in their day-to-day life? Can you imagine being in their place? Do you understand the cause of their anxiety, fear or frustration when faced with technical difficulties in operating a system or application?

2. Listen
Do you know how to extract information without asking a question? Do you know how to focus the conversation to get an objective answer to your hypothesis? Do you know how to interpret when a person feels uncomfortable with a conversation? Do you know how to reformulate questions in case the person wanders?

3. Observation
Did you notice that when you asked about the ease of use of the application, the user's body language proved the opposite? Did you notice that the user struggled or took a long time to complete the flow even though he said he did the procedure daily? Did you see valuable habits in a person's day-to-day life even though when you asked, he omitted that information?

Business Skills

It is extremely important to know where sales, marketing, development, customer service efforts, among others of an organization point. Taking into account these indicators, a UX Designer knows what tactics to implement to direct the efforts of UX.

4. Indicator Knowledge (KPI's)
Do you know how many sales should be generated per quarter, quarter or year? Do you know what indicators or goals the marketing team has? Do you know how many calls are made to technical support and in what percentage should they be reduced? Do you know what the key business indicators (KPI's) are?

5. Project management
Do you know how to prioritize design and development of functionalities? Do you know how much time you have to carry out a redesign? Do you know the implications of economic and human resources that a delay would imply?

Communication Skills

6. Reports

Do you know how to communicate the pains that the digital product has? Do you know how to create a technical specifications report?

7. Team CommunicationDo you have any idea how to ask marketing to develop special banners that incite action? Do you communicate clearly with the development team?

8. Result PresentationsDo you know how to communicate that you achieved increased sales? Do you know how to communicate that you decreased the abandonment rate? Are you able to create presentations of results to the management team or sponsors?

Technical Skills

9. Research
Do you conduct usability tests? Do you conduct focus groups? Do you conduct one-on-one interviews with users? Do you conduct guerrilla tests?

10. Use of Software
Do you know about tools like Balsamiq, Sketch or Axure to make wireframes? Do you master software like Invision or Marvel to make functional prototypes?