5 skills you need to become a Senior Designer
Everyone wants to level up as a designer, so here’s some actionable advice from someone that did it. A mixture of soft skills, UI skills, and empathy — is exactly what we need to be great designers.
Present different options for designs… by understanding what is hard to build technically
How to improve this skill:
Start with the simplest option first. This is harder because naturally, we are going to gravitate toward incredible and blue-sky solutions. Our imaginations are powerful and that’s a great asset. But in this case, if we force ourselves to keep it simple, we will achieve something very important:
The appreciation and adoration of PMs and Engineers.
You can understand what is hard to build technically by asking and pushing Engineers on what is possible and how its possible. Looking at products that already do something you want to do is a good start. I always love hearing the responses to why we can’t even though Product X has done it.
Why this is an important skill:
Directly due to the above sentence! A PM’s goal is to ship out value to customers, Engineers goal is to build things simply and cleanly. By initially covering the easiest solution, you check both of these boxes. After that it’s about your ability to sell and…
Become a powerful storyteller… by captivating your team with how you got the idea
How to improve this skill:
Bring in emotion. I don’t mean get me crying, I mean make me feel emotion. Ideas come through the creative process, and it’s ultimately your job to articulate that process to others, so they can get on board with the idea as strongly as you are. Here are a few ways you can bring in emotion:
- Imagery — e.g. show a child playing to remind stakeholders how exciting it is to play with something
- Facts — e.g. 90% of apps are never used after downloading onto a device, therefore we should do mobile-web first
- A question — e.g. ask the audience what their experience is like while filing expense reports
Why this is an important skill:
The job is a designer is multi-faceted, and usually, the most common job is execution. Doing your job and creating designs. If you want to go beyond just executing as a designer, and you clearly do because you’re reading this article, then you need to be able to sell. Sell your designs. Just executing is not enough to sell your designs, while painting the picture, telling the story behind it, and captivating your team. They’ll come to respect you and your vision.
Quantify the impact of design… by getting the $ value of an experience
How to improve this skill:
This might be the most nuanced of all the skills that a designer can develop. Quantifying impact is hard. It’s so hard that it’s proven difficult for Design leaders 👇🏼
There are some ways to tackle it:
- Time taken for a user to complete a task — if you think something could be faster, time it. Test it with real users and get a time saving, multiply it by the number of users, the total cost of their transaction, or some other metric and you should have a chunky number that will stand out to someone in the business.
- Customer support cost — if it's an issue that a user is having, then find out how many support tickets it generates. (Tickets from Issue / Total tickets) * Salary of Support Staff * # of Support Staff = Potentially a lot of $
- Time taken for designers/engineers to create — if there is an internal complexity in the way the product is being built, then talk about why that's a problem and how much more time it takes you to do it that way. If you can find an accurate time for this, it's a powerful way to get heard. No one’s ignoring something that adds 50 hours of work per month per engineer. Well, not anyone that’s competent.
Why this is an important skill:
If you want to get into a leadership role as a Designer, these are the ways you’re going to need to justify new initiatives or update the ExCo on existing ones. At the highest level, you don’t get paid for just executing. You’ll get paid for management, optimization, and increasing revenue. These things don’t come about by doing work on Figma.
Share back your design with a strong rationale… by asking yourself why you chose it
How to improve this skill:
The most practical way to do this is to write down your rationale next to the design you created. There’s a vast number of note plugins you can use on Figma that you can leverage. Noting down is powerful for a few reasons:
- You capture why you thought it was a good idea
- You don’t have to remember why you thought it was a good idea — remember recognition vs. recall
Why this is an important skill:
Not much needs to be said here. If you can’t back up why you’re creating something, then you’re going to be torn to shreds in any stakeholder meeting. Low-key I encourage making this mistake early, as it's like a right-of-passage that will harden you for future stakeholders.
Build your UI aesthetic…. by copying and combining 3 great ones
How to improve this skill:
I like to look at Dribbble often for common keywords like ‘app’ or ‘dashboard’. Look at a few examples and find a designer that you like, not just the design. Then analyze their style, do this with a couple of other designers and then merge into one. Voila, you have your style.
Why this is an important skill:
Ultimately we are judged on visual output, so make it hard for others to hold that against you and present something stunning. The aesthetic-usability effect is real, and you can use it to your advantage.
And finally…
Put in the work… by putting in the workkkk!
Working smart, not hard is talked about and glorified a lot. It’s kinda like ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’.
It’s not true until you get to a certain point.
You get to that point by putting in the hours and working, you can’t start with the hacks and the optimizations, first, you just do and once you’ve done it many times, then all these other hacks and work smart vibes come in.
I’ve been doing Product Designer for over 5 years, and there have been periods where I would be working on Design for 12 hours a day, while those periods were hard and unsustainable, they taught me the things I’ve shared in this article.
Sakky B
Co-founder, ZeroToDesign
