The 4 “Rs” that set apart great UX designers
Soft skills that make all the difference (and how to showcase them)
The core ingredients needed to be a successful UX designer in 2022 have not changed much over the decades: you need customer empathy (not sympathy), you need to fall in love with the problem (not the solution), and of course, you need some level of proficiency in UX skills (not coding… unless you want to). These are the bare bones, table stakes requirements to get started in UX.
But in a sea of portfolios, case studies, competing candidates, and overall awesome designers, how do you stand out from the crowd?
The answer is not to collect more UX certifications or create more dribbble-worthy UI GIFs, but rather to showcase the more intangible qualities that ultimately make for someone we all want to work with.
Great designers can distinguish themselves by demonstrating these 4, surprisingly rare, but very important attributes:
- Resourcefulness
- Responsiveness
- Reliability
- Ready with reasons (and ready to be wrong)
These attributes can be tricky to showcase, but I’m going to break down some ways you can make the intangible, tangible through either your portfolio, your interview, or your day-to-day job.
1. Resourcefulness
“Resourcefulness” is the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties. Anyone who has ever tried to implement every phase of the design process (and ultimately had to skip or reorder a step or two) knows that resourcefulness and flexibility are key to getting a project done. In the real world, you will rarely have enough of every resource — time, money, people, stakeholder buy-in, etc. I always love to see what designers do to creatively work within constraints.
How to showcase:
Presumably, at least one of your portfolio case studies involves limited resources. The most common instance of this I see is lack of access to user testing. Instead of saying “I didn’t have users to test with”, spell out what assumptions you made in order to move forward, and how you would validate those assumptions in a perfect world. You can also utilize secondary research (Google is your friend) or imperfect, N of 1 research (use a real friend, or friend of a friend). Anything that demonstrates you’ve thought of an alternative to the prescribed path forward.
2. Responsiveness
This one is easy — respond to your emails (or Slacks)*. A developer is asking for an SVG? Export and send. Your PM is asking when designs will be done? Give them a date. It sounds easy, and it is. But whether or not someone utilizes this hidden-in-plain-sight superpower makes all the difference. I once heard a story of a very wise person who had access to high levels of leadership at a very young age. She was asked, “How did you get to be on such good terms with [insert important name here]?” Her response? “I respond to every email within 24 hours.” While much of the inbox zero philosophy revolves around productivity, another understated benefit is that quick responses also quickly build trust on a team.
How to showcase:
Just respond! If you’re interviewing, don’t let a message from the recruiter or hiring manager sit in your inbox for more than a day. If you had to recruit research participants for one of your portfolio pieces, show your communication methods for reaching out and following up (a powerful skill in its own right). Another bonus skill I love to see is when designers treat their email/slack responses with the same care they give to their designs — organized headings, artful use of emojis — all with the purpose of serving up a great communication experience to the end-user.
* But if you’re on vacation, tell people, then turn those notifications off
3. Reliability
“Reliability” is tightly related to “responsiveness”, but with a twist: instead of just saying something in a timely manner, doing something in a timely manner. The people I trust most in my life have a high say-do ratio, meaning they follow through on what they say they’ll do. As a designer, your PM relies on you to help them shape the vision of a product. Development relies on you for the specifications they need to build the product. Designers have the unique ability to immediately back up their words with action by (you guessed it) designing.
How to showcase:
If you’re interviewing, a great way to show that you have follow-through is by setting out goals at the beginning of your project. At the end of your case study, follow up on those goals. Take the interviewers back to the beginning and remind them of how you were able to meet (or even not meet) the objective of your design. In this case, demonstrating that you can follow through on completing a task you set out to do — no matter the actual outcome — goes a long way. If you’re working at a company, try to never attend a meeting without a prototype. Instead of saying, “We should improve the onboarding experience”, just start improving the onboarding experience. Prototypes don’t have to be fancy or perfect, they just have to show that if this project is started, you can be relied on to finish the work.
4. Ready with reasons (and ready to be wrong)
As a designer, you will be asked “Why?” more times than you can count in response to design decisions you make. Being ready with responses to these “why” questions will show your team members or interviewers that you’ve thoroughly thought through every aspect of the user experience. However, being prepared with answers is only half of the equation. The other half involves being able to engage in healthy debate, and conceding to the best rationale in the end — no matter who it came from. Letting the best idea win involves setting aside your ego in order to put the user experience first. However, having reasons to begin with is a prerequisite for healthy debate. So, armor up, but also be willing to drop your weapons.
How to showcase:
Prepare in advance (either mentally, or by writing things down) for what questions might come up in response to your design. It’s ok to miss something in the experience, or not to cover every possible use case. But never just leave your response to an interviewer’s “why” question as “I don’t know”. If you created the design, no one else is going to know the answer but you. So if you don’t know, and offer no potential solutions, that puts a big dent in your team’s confidence. If you truly don’t have a reason (it happens), not all is lost. Humbly take that as a note to improve upon next time.
It goes without saying that no designer (or human) is perfect at all 4 of these things. We all have our good and bad days. But in my experience, great designers demonstrate these traits more often than not. There are many different ways to set yourself apart from the crowd in this industry, but those who focus on developing soft skills will be better off in the long run.
