Things a UX/UI Designer Should Know

If you are looking to break into the growing field of UX/UI design, you probably have some questions. What skills do I need? What should I study? What are some good places to start looking for jobs?

This article will answer these questions and more! Here are just a few things that can help you get started:

1) Understand how UX/UI design fits into the rest of your career path. Are you interested in becoming a UI designer or a UX designer first, or maybe both at the same time? How do they differ from one another on a fundamental level? You might find yourself gravitating towards one or the other based on your interests.

2) Know how to draw the lines between UX/UI design and other disciplines. How does UX differ from UI? How can UI designers be different from interface designers? Are there skill sets that are unique to each discipline that you should know about?

3) Understand the basic principles of good design. You may not need to be an expert in art history to understand aesthetics, but it will help you if you learn what makes something good to look at. For example, you don’t want your designs to look like they were done by a five-year-old child, but you also don’t want them to look like they were made by someone who has never seen anything other than PowerPoint or Word.

4) Know the fundamentals of user experience research and analytics. A good user experience designer needs to know more than how to make things look pretty. They need to know how to make things useful and attractive as well. This involves a lot of focus on analytics and usability testing (two things that most designers don’t really care for). Still, these are important skills that can help you stand out from the crowd.

5) Explore the psychology behind the design. What makes certain design elements appealing? Why do we like certain colors, or shapes, or images? It’s hard to answer such questions without some knowledge of psychology behind our preferences and biases.

6) Understand the different tools that are available for you to use. It’s really only recently that design software has become easier for non-designers to use. You might not be interested in becoming a designer, but knowing the basics of Photoshop or Illustrator can help you explain your designs more effectively and can also help you explain to clients why certain elements of your designs work the way they do. After all, any designer should know why they’re making things look a certain way.

7) Understand what makes good business sense and what doesn’t.