Abstract: Having the relevant “hard” skills may help you complete the tasks of a UX designer, but it will be the development of your “soft” skills that will help you push past your boundaries and elevate your design (as well as your career).

The Nielsen Norman Group put out this excellent career report in 2020, which is highly recommended reading for anyone looking to get into the UX design field and one that I certainly learned a lot from during my read-through. It draws its findings from the more than 700+ responses they received to their online surveys from professionals in the field all around the world, in addition to the results of their 2 focus groups as well as 17 semi-structured interviews.

Among other things, respondents were asked which skills they thought were most important to their careers as UX designers; their answers will probably not come as a huge surprise to anyone:

Pretty much every respondent selected Prototyping as their top answer, followed by tasks such as constructing user journeys, creating personas, or conducting heuristics evaluations…things that would be categorized under the umbrella of “hard” or technical skills for a designer.

Now while there’s no doubt that these skills are fundamentally important to any UX designer’s toolkit, my last project made me come to the realization that your success as a designer hinges on more than just your ability to prototype or conduct awesome interviews. None of the hard skills we end up applying is particularly difficult to learn, after all. And, as with most things in life, we eventually improve those skills over time with enough practice. Becoming competent with tools such as Figma, for examplwas really just a matter of experience. Put in enough time with any job, and you will eventually accumulate the relevant hard skills.

But as any practitioner in the field would tell you, UX design is so much more than just a collection of hard skills. And that’s a good thing! Because while hard skills are usually industry- or field-specific, your soft skills are transferrable no matter where you go or what you do. And, more importantly, they improve the quality of your design in such a way that every part of your process gets better. When you add another hard skill, it can be said that you’ve made a quantitative improvement to your toolkit. But your soft skills are what make them qualitatively better. In much the same way a rising tide lifts all boats, improvements to your soft skills necessarily bleed into the rest of your design so that all of it is elevated.

UX design is so much more than just a collection of hard skills.

So whether you’re just starting out in this field, or you’ve been working in it for awhile, make the most meaningful investment in yourself that you can and make the development of these soft skills a top priority this year. I sincerely believe that these skills were so instrumental to our design process that no amount of even expert-level hard skills would have helped us solve the kinds of problems we faced. So the following 3 skills I mention (which I will spread out over the course of 3 separate articles in the interests of conciseness) are really more than just buzzwords; they are grounded in real life experiences that showed us which skills really made a substantive difference in the end.

Know how to sell

On my most recent project, I worked with a teammate who I found to be a deep and insightful thinker. She was often able to connect the dots on things in quite unexpected and innovative ways.

However, I came to learn (as did she) that when you are working within a team, it’s not always enough to come to such brilliant insights on our own; you also need to know how to “sell” your angle to the rest of the group.

So what happened on a few occasions was that what turned out to be some of the best ideas of our group (hers) almost went ignored because she felt outnumbered by the other group members. One of the drawbacks of making decisions democratically, as this particular experience highlighted, was that high-quality ideas could still end being vetoed in favor of a lower-quality one simply because the group’s majority was unable to really grasp the implications and nuances of the better one.

Now, to be fair, she probably felt that it was more beneficial for the group to come to a consensus as early as possible so that we could move forward in unison, but I knew that she must have had good reason for thinking the way she did. It gnawed at me. I couldn’t quite see her angle myself, but I knew that there was something there. So as the team’s project manager, I gently prodded her for more information.

As it turned out, her main concern was that we were beginning to diverge from what the data was telling us. Our ideations seemed (to her) to be solving problems that didn’t really exist for users. Or they were mostly tangential to the actual user needs. She wanted us to bring it back to some of the more “boring” solutions we had ideated, because they were more grounded in the data we had collected.

Now, one of the more interesting tidbits you might find in the NNG career report mentioned above is how often UX designers will mention the fact that they often need to “sell UX” to their company. As expected, respondents who had to do this more often were more likely to list their organizations as having “low UX maturity,” meaning that those organizations may not fully understand or appreciate what UX design is or does.

A big part of being a UX designer therefore, and one that receives surprisingly little attention given its nature, is knowing how to sell to or persuade others, whether it’s your teammates, your boss, or even your entire organization. Of the soft skills to pay attention to as a UX designer, this is one of the most important ones to have, especially as it pertains to what you may be doing day-in and day-out as a UX designer. You may be called upon to do this far more in this profession than you realize!

So hopefully by now, I’ve convinced you of the necessity of this skill. But how about its proper application?

Being able to sell or persuade is really a matter of good communication, therefore it draws from the very same principles as that of being a good communicator. So here are some concrete steps you can follow in order to develop those persuasion skills:

1. Organize your thought process first.
2. Anchor your argument to pre-existing schema.
3. Finally...Speak up!

Organize your thought process. Since we are unable to read each other’s minds, it is unreasonable to expect others to follow the same mental pathways that got you to your ideas, especially the more complex they are. Your job, then, is to help scaffold the learning of others so that they can follow your line of reasoning. If we take separate paths in the woods and you want us to come to where you are, for example, it is far better to leave behind some sort of trail than to yell out loud and hope we find our way to you.

Anchor your argument to pre-existing schema. Imagine, for a moment, that you are trying to explain a complex concept, like blockchain technology, to a novice. The first thing you’re probably doing is racking your brain to find a good starting point, right? “Ok, do you know what digital ledgers are?” you might ask. “Nope,” says the novice. What do you do now? Easy. You simplify things until something works. “Ok, how about just regular accounting ledgers?” You keep going until the novice says, “Yes, I do.” Your argument will stand a much better chance of being understood if you can anchor it to a starting point that everyone knows.

Speak up. Don’t let what could possibly be a great idea die a quiet death. If the idea is meant to die, let it do so but only after it has been put under the microscope for others to evaluate. Give it a chance to be a contender! And then, when it has the spotlight, apply the main idea of this article: Sell it!