In this post, we look at what soft skills are and why mastering them is what sets a great UX designer apart from an average one.
Most aspiring and practising UX designers can learn the basic skills of UX and Product Design fairly easily. There are numerous articles and tutorials out there, both free and paid, that teach you everything from how to wireframe to how to use specific tools like Figma to do it. What is less easy to learn on your own or gain knowledge about, particularly without having a certain amount of work experience under your belt, are soft skills.
Hard vs. soft skills
The examples above around how to wireframe and use Figma are typical hard skills. Hard skills are the job-related competencies or technical abilities you need to do your job. These tend to be very specific to a job. E.g. for UX and Product Designers, some examples of hard skills are Information Architecture, wireframing, and prototyping.
Soft skills, on the other hand, are the more personal abilities related to how you do your job. These are to a lesser extent specific to a job but can often be transferred to other types of jobs. Some examples are communication and presentation skills, teamwork, leadership, as well as critical thinking and being analytical.
Why soft skills matter
When it comes to working as a practising UX and Product Designer, only part of your job has to do with hard skills. Everything around it, from how you work with others to how you present and communicate your work has to do with soft skills. It is your soft skills that help you work well with others. That helps you understand and adapt how to communicate, how to give and receive feedback, how you approach a new project, brief or problem, and also how you solve and present it. They form the foundation for the relationships you develop with team members, clients and or/ stakeholders. Being able to master the aspects mentioned is what every job application asks about and what every role requires. Especially the further up the ladder you go. However, having great soft skills will set you a part whatever level you’re at. There are average junior designers and then there are great junior designers. The same goes for leaders. A lot of what makes someone great lies in how developed their soft skills are.
As UX and Product Designers, we’re faced with situations every day where we have to work with other people from different disciplines and parts of the business, and for some companies, with clients. A big part of our job is to present our case, and then to argue for our case when someone might not fully understand what we propose, or when they are of a different opinion. And it’s not always easy or smooth sailing. People will disagree with what we propose. They may not get what we mean or where we’re coming from, why we need to do research and test what we’ve come up with, or why we need to do or include UX at all. To navigate these situations and the complexities we’re faced with we need to be masters not just of hard skills but of soft skills in particular as it is our soft skills we use the most in those situations.
In other words, your soft skills are essential for both working as and progressing as a UX and product designer. They are also critical for attracting new clients – particularly if you freelance or are consulting – and for landing that new job.
How to develop your soft skills
Most soft skills will develop over time. When working with others, presenting to stakeholders and/ or clients you learn what works and what doesn’t. More often than not, however, you find that the soft skills you develop on your own will only take you so far. That’s because though e.g. great communication and presentation skills are soft skills, there are elements of hard skills to them too. There are DOs and DON’Ts, methods, and frameworks you can learn and follow that will help you master verbal and visual communication. The same goes for selling in and presenting your work and what you stand for, and how to increase buy-in within an organisation.
All of the just mentioned skills become more critical the more senior you become, which is why it’s so important that you keep developing your soft skills just as you do your hard skills.
Here are a couple of ways to develop your soft skills:
- Learning from others
- Having a mentor or coach
- Reading, listening and watching
- Taking a course or masterclasses
Learning from others
One of the best ways to learn is by getting feedback from others, or seeing and hearing how others approach and solve certain situations and problems they’re working with. This may happen through formal or informal sharing and feedback sessions within the UX and product team, or by having a more senior UX and Product Designer share their work and review your work whilst also talking through the context. In all of these instances, you’ll get feedback and inspiration on how to go about things. Be they related to more strategic pieces, how you organise sections, frames and views in your Figma files so they are clearer for others to look through and work with, how to handle trickier clients, or how to present yourself and your work more effectively.
Having a mentor or coach
Another way is to have a mentor or coach. Having a mentor is closely aligned to the above where you have someone more senior provide feedback on your work. Often it’s someone within the organisation but it can also be someone you find from the outside. Their role is often to guide and share their personal experiences and insights through which they help you develop both your hard and soft skills.
Closely related to that but with a slightly different role are coaches. Coaches are more like facilitators for self-discovery and self-improvement and guide by asking questions, providing feedback or sharing specific techniques. Almost all coaches are external.
If you have specific areas you want to further your development in, or you have a specific goal in mind, then coaches and mentors are great for helping you.
Reading, listening and watching
Other ways to develop your hard and soft skills are by reading articles and books, listening to podcasts, and watching talks and videos online or from conferences. These may be both ‘how-to’ approaches as well as of a more inspirational nature where others share what they have done and what’s worked/ hasn’t work for them. Generally, this type of learning is more lean back, i.e you read, listen or watch passively rather than lean in and getting hands-on with the subject at hand. This makes this type of learning a bit less effective. What reading, listening and watching also lack is the feedback aspect. Both related to you but also to your specific situation.
Taking a course or masterclass
Here, taking a course or a masterclass is a good alternative. Most courses and classes have some practical element to them. They walk you through the ‘what’, the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ and get you to put what you learn into practice. Short of having a personal mentor or coach, courses and classes are a great way to further your skills in a specific area. When combined with an interactive element with the instructor, be that through a live course or class, or a live Q&A session related to the course, you increase the effectiveness of your learning even further.
Closing thoughts
To round up, by developing your soft skills you improve your ability to work with others. It takes time and you won’t become a master straight away. There are, however, ways to further your learning process by actively engaging in doing so through the ways mentioned above. Since soft skills are closely tied to your social and interpersonal abilities, developing them is most effective when working with someone who can guide and offer feedback.
What we at UX Fika focus on is providing you with easy and effective ways to develop both the hard and the soft skills you need. With lots of experience to draw from and practical frameworks and methods as well as in-person sessions, you’ll be sure to be equipped with learnings and how-tos you can apply the same day. And we always offer the option to discuss what you’ve learnt, be that through our monthly UX Fika meet ups, Q&A sessions, or individual coaching calls.
