What does a UX designer actually do in this video we're going to look at the skills and attributes of a UX designer some of the tasks and responsibilities that they have every day and we're going to look at some real job ads to see what companies are hiring for when they're looking for UX designers My name's Dee and i've worked as a UX designer for over 12 years i've worked in huge companies and small startups in different countries all around the world so i'd really love to share my insights with you about what it really feels like to be a UX designer before we get started if you have any questions about any of the skills or attributes mentioned in this video let us know in the comments below and we'll get back to you as soon as possible the kind of person that makes a great UX designer is someone who loves problem solving and has a really inquisitive and curious mind a UX designer should really love understanding why people do what they do and what's behind their motivations and behavior so if you really like to understand people and have a desire to make life easier and better then UX design could be right for you it's a primarily people-focused role you'll find yourself working with lots of other teams with business people with developers and with visual designers conducting research running workshops analyzing data running tests and experiments and doing a lot of communication with presentations and creating diagrams so that other people can understand the kind of work that you do and you'll also act as the connection between the users or the customers of your product and the business you'll be doing things like preparing before research actually happens writing up interview guidelines and scripts and creating documents that outline how research should be conducted as well as that you'll actually be conducting the research so interviewing people in person or remotely and taking lots of detailed notes after research there's lots of information that's been gathered so you'll be analyzing that information to understand its meaning doing things like looking at spreadsheets and organizing data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data creating reports and presentations to present that complex information to other people running workshops is an important skill for a UX designer because you'll need to get groups and teams of people from different areas of the business to do things like generate ideas and understand and align on where the focus should be you'll also do things like create wireframes which are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept a wireframe for a digital product is similar to a blueprint for a house it clearly illustrates how it functions and the core elements of its design so hopefully that gives you an idea of what a UX designer really does every day now let's look at some of the specific skills needed to be a UX designer what skills does a UX designer need to have they need to be a really good listener be able to be empathetic have an open mind and be able to understand other people's needs and motivations it really helps to have a love for solving puzzles and problems and it's great if you're detail-oriented and really understand how all the pieces of a puzzle fit together you'll need to use a variety of different tools to do research create ideas and present those ideas to others but all those tools can be learned now let's take a closer look at some of those skills and attributes by looking at some real job ads from different companies we'll look at three different examples from a large corporate to a small startup before we jump into the job ads if you're enjoying this video subscribe to the channel and hit the bell to get notifications about more weekly videos just like this let's start by looking at a job ad for a big corporate and we've got one here from Tesla so Tesla is looking for a user experience designer responsible for researching designing innovating prototyping new user experiences okay great that fits with everything we know if we look a bit further down here they've highlighted things like having exceptional design skills creative problem solving a great sense of aesthetic aesthetics so it looks like this role is more visual than other UX design roles which we often see there is a big difference when you really dig into UX designer job postings that some are looking for someone who's really visual and other job postings will be looking for someone much more on the user research and of the the wrong so if we look closely into this list of responsibilities we'll see that they've highlighted research and defining strategy for different consumer segments they will imagine and conceive so this is really probably involving lots of sketching concept sketching prototyping work to really come up with new ideas and concepts develop creative and innovative designs so this is where we can start to see they are looking for someone a UX designer who has a more visual side as well so maybe going into some ui design and define and implement creative solutions so that word define really highlights that they want someone who will be very good at communicating clearly exactly what the concepts are and why they've been chosen so taking the insights from the research and being able to clearly communicate and define what the new directions are if we continue to look down here we also really see invest in building relationships and trust with stakeholders peers and working groups this is where running workshops and being able to really clearly communicate and present to other groups really comes into play a UX designer does not work alone and come up with ideas alone they work with other people to to innovate and come up with ideas and then need to also communicate the reasons behind those new ideas to other parts of the business other stakeholders and even to customers as well now that we've looked at a big company let's look at a smaller startup here we have a job posting from a company called Gorillas which is a grocery food delivery service so let's scroll down and have a look at what the responsibilities are in this role they've listed here gather and evaluate user requirements which means user research in collaboration with product managers and engineers which means that you'll be working directly with other people and guiding them through your UX process you'll need to be very good at communicating with people who aren't UX designers then they've also listed conceptualized original ideas that bring simplicity and user friendliness this means creating sketches creating digital concepts creating prototypes that really showcase the ideas that have come out of the research that you did they've also have listed here usability testing sessions which is another type of research and testing working directly with customers to gather feedback working with ui designers so again communicating collaborating with other parts of the business and other team members and they've specifically listed communicate your design ideas and prototypes to developers so this role for this startup sounds like they've really focused on a collaborative team that works really well together so as a UX designer in this role you'll need to bring your teammates with you and share that UX design work with the rest of the team so if i was applying for this job i would know that my communication and collaboration skills were high on the list of values that they're looking for if we look down a bit further they've actually listed the traits that they'd like the person that they hire to have they said a love of learning and a love of helping others to grow so this again indicates that as a UX designer and especially in this role you'll be working a lot with lots of other people and need to thrive and love that environment the other things they've listed under traits are a sense of independence and ability to establish structures and processes so this speaks to the amount of detailed work that you'll need to do and the ability to communicate those details to others here is also really important a passion for tech with very close collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders so again this collaboration and communication skills are really key uh in this kind of role because other parts of the business need to be on board with the decisions that come out of your UX work so that was a job description from a small startup now let's look at a mid-sized company so we're looking at a job posting from Carhartt which is a clothing workwear manufacturer and this is interesting because almost any company in the world even if they're not primarily digitally focused still have need for UX designers so you know not to limit where you're looking for these kind of roles if we look closely at this role the responsibilities that they've listed so UX and design and here they have listed for websites apps online shops newsletters and social media so even though the primary product of that company is not digital not software based they still have all of these things websites apps online shops and use social media and they're the things that they need UX designers for we can see here that they've listed a lot of the same kinds of things as the other job descriptions and the second item in the list is working within internal and external teams so again this communication and collaboration aspect which is really high on that list of necessary UX skills is really important for them as well then on to the more technical aspects of what you will be doing you would be improving the features and develop new products in close contact with relevant stakeholders so features on those websites apps on the online stores how can people interact better with their website with their store so you'll really be creating those features and they've said here as well co-create page and template designs for mobile and desktop so you can see here you probably will be doing a lot of wireframing a lot of concept designs a lot of creating the structure of how their website looks the structure of how their pages work when people will click on their website and go to another page what will that page look like how many pages are there what's the structure of all of the pages in their website so i know if i would be applying for this job i would be doing a lot of detailed more technical UX work creating site maps and hierarchies of all the pages in their website and how they fit together and flow together and how a user would step through them so i can see from this job uh posting that this is a more detailed technical UX designer role and looking at the profile of the person that they're trying to hire we can see again they've stated they want someone who is communicative and an adaptive team player so knowing you'll be working with lots of other people and lots of other teams which is very normal for a UX designer and someone who has a hands-on mentality which indicates that there's lots of detailed work and they'll need someone to dive right in and take on that work they're looking for someone who's got experience in digital and UX and they're stating this because there are other types of UX designers that don't do digital work and they also need someone who understands the technical aspects of designing for web so they won't be expecting you to know how to do web design how to write the code to design a web page but they want someone who knows how to speak the language of developers because this person will be working with developers it sounds like every day and collaborate all the time between the development team understanding what the UX designer is doing and the UX designer understanding how the developers work and what they need okay so that was a job description from Carhartt which is a mid-sized clothing company so hopefully you can see that some of the things we've mentioned earlier in this video the skills and attributes and qualities that you need to have as a UX designer will come up again and again in any UX designer job descriptions you look at online so hopefully this video has given you a clear idea of what UX designer actually does every day and some of the important skills and attributes that you'll need to have if you want to apply for a job as a UX designer so if this sounds interesting to you and you're thinking about becoming a UX designer career foundry has a great free short course that you can access in the link below it's six daily lessons that take 15 minutes to complete and it'll give you a much better idea if UX design is right for you if you have any questions about any of the skills or responsibilities of a UX designer that i've mentioned in this video please ask a question in the comments below and we'll get back to you as soon as we can if you've enjoyed this video please give it a like and subscribe to the career foundry channel and hit that bell so that you can get more notifications about videos just like this thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and we'll see you again soon it's starting are you ready guys are you ready for today 10 minutes yeah i want to say ask me questions it always seems to end keep going keep going oh right okay