Top 10 Skills and Knowledge Set Every User Experience (UX) Professional Needs

The user experience (UX) of your products is only as good as the knowledge and skills of your UX staff.

​As organizations realize how important the user experience is to the success of their products, UX teams are expanding. People come to role of UX from more and more diverse backgrounds. Some UX staff used to be web designers. Others used to be visual designers. Others used to be usability testers. The plus side of this is that you may find yourself with a team that has a wide variety of skills. That sounds like an advantage, and it is. But it has a down side too. As the diversity of your team increases, it’s possible that particular individuals may have gaps in their skill-set. And the team loses a sense that there is a core set of skills and knowledge that everyone possesses.

So I’ve put together my “Top 10 List” of skills and knowledge that I think UX professionals should know and be able to do.

I’m aware that publishing a list of the “Top 10 Skills and Knowledge Set Every User Experience (UX) Professional Needs,” could be controversial. Your top 10 list, therefore, may not be exactly the same as this one, but let’s see how many you agree with:

Note:

• The list is not in any particular order.
• I have not included “soft” skills, such as communicating clearly, making powerful team presentations, or effectively managing projects. These are critical to success, but not as specific to UX, so I’ll cover them in another blog post.

So here’s my list:

1. Psychology – including cognitive, social, perceptual, and the new work on unconscious mental processing
2. User Testing – basic user testing planning and conducting
3. User Research – more than user testing, including interviews, task flow analysis, personas, scenarios, wants and needs
4. Principles of Usability – how to make a product easy to learn and use
5. Principles of Engagement  — how to make a product engaging and persuasive
6. Lean UX Design – lean start-up methods for doing UX
7. Conceptual Modeling – making transparent all the macro decisions you make before you even start sketches pages and screens, such as information architecture, navigation design, object/action decisions
8. Iterative Design – how to design collaboratively with others, including storyboards, sketches, wireframes, and prototypes
9. Interaction Design  – how to make the best decisions about micro-level interaction design
10. Current Trends – knowing what the current trends are – Parallex scrolling?  Flat design?

If you’d like more details on each of the 10 items, then check out our report:

What do you think? Do you agree? What would you add or take away from the list?