A UX designer is a user experience designer. UX design centers on the interaction between humans and everyday services and products such as mobile apps, websites, and even the public transport experience. It is a vast field that combines aspects of market research, psychology, business, technology, and design. The user experience is how one feels when using a service or product. For a successful business, the user experience must be seamless, hence the demand for UX designers. There is a good and bad user experience. A UX designer’s job is to make a service or product enjoyable, accessible, and usable for users.
Discussed below are some of the things to look for when hiring your next UX designer.
Diverse Set of Skills
UX designers are required to have a range of skills because of their job description. Other than the design and technical skills such as prototyping, interpreting data, and wireframing, which are essential, they also require other necessary skills. Some of these skills include problem solving, empathy, adaptability, teamwork, and communication. They must have these skills to work effectively with stakeholders, clients, fellow designers, developers, and the end-user.
Business Knowledge
A UX designer who is knowledgeable in the business is quite essential. They need to understand the needs of the target market and the company’s goals, so they know how they will align these two when creating design solutions. For instance, say a user is shopping on a website for a coat, and they find four hundred coats on the site, but realize that they cannot customize their search.
So, the user goes through all the coats until they find one they like, add it to the cart, and proceed to check out, but realize they have to sign up to be able to check out. At this point, the user is probably a little bit annoyed, but they decide to sign up, only to realize signing up is not just inputting their email and password, but they are required to fill out so much information. Such a process makes them give up and exit the website, which is a bad user experience. So a UX designer needs to develop a design that makes the shopping experience easy and pleasant.
Advocate for the End Customer
A UX designer needs to always advocate for the end customer. The whole purpose of their job is to make a service or product give the end-user a good user experience. So whether the UX designer has to make changes to an existing service or product, come up with a new feature, or design a new product, they always need to have the users’ experience in mind. Therefore, they have to make it easy to use and efficient while ensuring it aligns with the business’s goals.
Qualifications
When hiring a UX designer, you need to ensure that they are qualified for the position. UX design is quite broad, and most UX designers tend to focus on either product or service design. So while some may be good at designing the general experience of staying in a hotel, others will opt for developing mobile apps, websites, and software. Make sure the UX designer can seamlessly interact with the app development company you hire. This will help in conveying the experience you want for users using the app.
The tasks of a UX designer will vary from company to company. The project at hand will also play a part in the skills a UX needs to have. When hiring a UX designer, ensure you get one that is a good fit for your company. Also, make sure that your goals are well defined.
