Being good at Sketch doesn’t make you a UX designer
I often find myself researching (googling) what it means to be a good UX designer. I do this because, well, I am a UX designer who wants to be a good at what he does.
Nevertheless, what makes for a good UX designer is integration. By this I mean that a good UX designer does not frame themselves within a work-life separation, rather within a work-life duality. That is, the designer embeds their professional life into their everyday life, and vice-versa.
Design in general is not just a career choice, it’s a lifestyle choice as well, and UX design is no exception. All too often, many designers obsess over design principles and trends and forget to see beyond the aesthetics. Technical prowess is still necessary, but mastering Sketch—or for that matter Photoshop, HTML and CSS—a good UX designer does not make, or even a web designer for that matter. Being a master of the tools makes you just that-a master of the tools.
UX design is, like all other types of design, a form of communication. This is where the everydayness of the trade is emphasized. A good UX designer understands that their pretty layouts and UI’s were created for an audience. That audience is the user, and like any any other form of communication, the key to success is winning the audience, and one must know their audience in order to do so. A good UX designer observes their audiences on an everyday level, from observing customers at a café to watching a coworker channel their rage onto their keyboard, to even talking to the audience directly.
A good UX designer not only communicates in order to seek the right answers, but to seek the right questions to ask as well. For instance, most users are frustrated with the user-interface of Website A. A good web (UX) designer however, can extract a multitude of questions from this information-what do users seem to dislike the most about this UI? What can I do to improve this UI?
Sketch-ing is something you do in front of a computer. Communicating is something you do everyday, and if UX design is communication, it should be something we do everyday as well.
