Business: Soft Skills

This article was inspired by a discussion at last week’s Silicon Valley IxDA meeting, where Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong spoke on the topic “Sleepwalking + Designing for a Healthy Future,” which got me thinking about what qualities one must have to be an effective UX professional. So much of success derives from mindset rather than skillsets, and mindset takes a lifetime to develop—or, for those of us who believe in reincarnation, multiple lifetimes. Your mindset derives from your life experiences and the way you respond to them, as well as what you learn from those who influence you greatly—such as your parents, mentors, and spiritual teachers. Read More

At some point in our childhood, we constructed things—whether it was a house out of logs or a hat out of origami paper. We have all figured out a way to build stuff, solving problems through play and by trying things out. Sometimes they work. In other cases, they don’t. Often, even when they don’t, we still take away something of value from the experience—be it a lesson on what to do or what not to do.

Researchers working in the instructional-learning field refer to the concept of understanding through play as tinkering. While this might sound somewhat childish—and it sort of is—tinkering has its time and place in fields such as engineering, design, and science, whose focus is the development and refinement of new ideas. Read More

Perhaps you’re thinking about a career specializing in user research. Perhaps you’re looking to hire a user researcher. Or perhaps you manage or work with user researchers. If so, you might be thinking about what qualities lead a person to succeed in user research. While others have written about this topic—notably Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain in a 2010 column on UXmatters—I want to add my own perspective based on what I’ve observed specializing in user research over the past 17 years.

The following list of characteristics may seem daunting, but you don’t have to be a perfect ten in all of them. There are certainly areas in which I have strengths and weaknesses. We all have room for improvement. But the more of these qualities you possess, the more well suited you are for a career in user research. In this column, when I refer to a user researcher, I mean both user-research specialists and generalists who do both user research and design. Read More