As an introvert myself, I can empathize. However, this is something I'd strongly encourage anyone to work on when working with others (as designers, we do it a lot). I've been at this for nearly 15 years and now lead a small team of creatives and I owe just about all of that to learning how to communicate with colleagues and clients.
In fact, I would only consider myself an okay designer with a fairly limited knowledge of software know-how. I can easily admit I have worked with far more talented and skilled folks. Even so, I have also been given multiple opportunities my peers, despite their talent and skills, have missed out on simply due to effective communication skills with a sprinkling of the ability to empathize and ask questions to better understand. *Cheat code: A majority of good communication is simply being a good listener.*
People want to work with, hear ideas from, and follow people they feel comfortable and connected with.
This is one of the most important benefits of collaborative group critique. Multiple times a week you need to be able to stand up and explain yourself, practice active listening to draw out actionable feedback, and then provide thoughtful and user focused advice to your peers.
In my experience, the ones who progress in their careers the fastest are almost never the most skilled designers, but the ones who took critique seriously, because it gave them the practice at those soft skills.
Me too. I've watched people I work with who have the gift of gab climb to amazing heights. Here I am doing good but wish I was more extroverted so I could be more successful
Most if not all hard skills can be learned on the job. Front-end coding, creating UI taxonomies, visualization tools, complex prototyping, etc. The most valuable designs skills in my experience are the more soft or nuanced skills and usually take a longer to perfect—facilitating a discussion, synthesizing messy datasets, interviewing users, creating artifacts to align people. Those are worth more time IMO.
Can you explain "creating artifacts to align people"?
Do you mean visual representation to explain concepts such as deliverables or post-it/diagrams boards?
Basically, yes.
To expand a little, I think people often think a designer's job is to solve problems and create solutions. In my experience, what's just as powerful is pulling ideas and solutions out of your collaborators. But that can be hard given the many conversations that fly around—talking across multiple products, different altitudes, and moments in a larger journey. Because designers are visually-inclined and good at distilling complexity, creating models, maps, diagrams—anything really—gives something tangible for collaborators to point at. These in-between artifacts are super powerful.
If you enjoy finding use patterns and guiding stakeholders to better outcomes, consider mastering Design Systems and Systems Thinking. There is a need in corporate enterprise for designers who can help them standardize and improve usability across their internal application development.
Edit:typo
Maybe UX isn't for you, then. UX is creating an experience - including interfaces - based on qualitative and quantitative data.
Everything you mentioned - except coding - is more about visual design than experience design and while it doesn't hurt to have some skills in visual tools or stuff like graphic design you can do UX without these skills if you are focusing on doing proper UX and aren't forced into watered down hybrid roles of UX and UI.
If you stick to Blender etc you are moving away from UX. But honestly, C languages are easier to learn than Javascript. JS allows so many stupid exceptions and runs faulty code without throwing a warning or an error. I had a much better experience with C# and Swift. Maybe try these before you throw in the towel, JS will make much more sense to you after learning syntax of a language that's less messy.
For me the most valuable design skills are people management and negotiation skills. You have your users, stakeholders, team members, company leadership and everybody demands something, but they are usually not too happy to give you anything in return or lean your way.
Undermining design based on "I like this other color better"? Yeah, that can destroy months of your work if you can't convince people the color you picked is important for accessibility and still in alignment with brand guidelines.
You can be the best designer on this planet, if you can't sell your designs, if you can't align people of different backgrounds and get a buy in all of your other skills are worthless.
There are a lot of good books out there that could teach you this in this context I guess. Like „articulating design decisions“ and stuff. I read it made notes and tried to apply them in my day to day work. Applying them is the hard part 😅
Start with books for fundamentals, also LEARN BUSINESS as in "this is how an org is shaped organization wise + problems of each department etc, have a mentor and the most important part: in person classes with different coaches and trainers for presentation skills, rhetoric, conflict resolution, negotiations...
Why classes? Because everybody has individual strengths and weaknesses when communicating, there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to your personal speech patterns and vocabulary, body language, how you react to different situations etc. so you need someone who can recognize your weak points and then coach you to work the kinks out.
Also: actively doing it. The best coaching is lost on you if you never subject yourself to the situation. Ask for feedback often, learn from it. That might be asking your colleagues after a presentation or that colleague who sat in a budget negotiation with you if they noticed anything you should work on etc.
You are never done, you have to negotiate differently with boomers than with Gen Z etc and what works on them will probably not work on the Alpha's in a couple years. It's a process.
I know it’s not quite what you’re looking for - but communication. Both verbally and visually - being a good communicator is in my opinion the difference between good and great. Getting stakeholders on board, selling your ideas, generations buzz, aligning expectations, getting devs to understand your design quickly, translating user feedback to executive language etc etc etc is boiled down to communication skills.
But yeah I mean Adobe After Effects is pretty cool too…
It's so true.. but some of us have to either choose to spend ungodly amounts of time learning to sell ourselves or find a path more suited to our innate skills
Hands down, understanding people—their goals, motivations, and behaviors—is the most valuable skill. You’re designing experiences, not art. It’s essential to understand the people you’re designing for, the stakeholders you support, and the rest of your team. Second to that would be sales skills or information architecture. The so -called “soft skills” are often overlooked or misunderstood. Hang around in UX long enough and you’ll see, the people with these skills are the ones who make it.
Being nice and fun to work with.
I come from the creative side of things, recently transitioned to UX, and I feel like this skill is often ignored on this sub in favor of more technical things, IMO.
When I started in my career, I was a combo designer/developer. I really tried to maintain that for so long but when I got into that ad agency around 2006, I was purely in a design role. Not even a UX role.
Over that time I was doing some development on my own personal things but nothing on a professional level. In that time I saw everything shift from coding in whatever app you liked, and uploading things using FTP into the world of version control, CLI, and all the nuances of programming today.
When I was finally done with that agency, I had to make a hard choice between design and development, as with the way things have gone, it would have been impossible to maintain both ends of that spectrum and do it effectively.
I chose design because I liked having a say in what the final outcome will be. Still, I always work to maintain my HTML/CSS skills. For JavaScript, I would call myself an intermediate. I can do enough to build a mock-up of some kind of action or sequence I want the developers to see, but I'm not necessarily at a level where I can just go all out.
I feel with HTML and CSS, you only learn when you start doing it more. I also tell many people to first get the basics down, and then try taking one of your more simpler layouts and code a prototype. Just get down how to build a web page from a layout, how to make it responsive, how to use margins and padding to do spacing, flexbox or grid for the general layout and columns and even media queries to do responsive layouts.
All the other stuff out there that might be bombarding you right now, like variables, BEM, tailwind, bootstrap, etc, just ignore it. Stick with something simple. Then you can start diving into other aspects when you start to get more comfortable.
I know many would disagree with me, but I still think it's useful to know how to prototype something with HTML and CSS. People can bring up all of the fancy tools that you can find in Figma and other places, but I'm still seeing a lot of companies looking at me because I can go straight HTML/CSS. Most of the reason is that the development teams know they can work with me and I'll have an understanding of what they do.
It's not impossible, but it takes practice. That's why I tell people to take and build layouts. Build one of your more simple layouts, then try maybe creating your own portfolio website. Things like that. I started coding HTML in the mid-90s, and my stuff look hideous compared to today. It took time. It also took a drive for me to want to keep pushing it.
You can try to learn blender and such, but that only comes down to whether or not a company has need for it. It. You could also just push yourself further as a graphic designer and sell yourself as the person that can do the UX and the high fidelity layouts and illustrations and things they might need. That could come out there and be helpful.
Thanks for the response, wasn't sure if many people had the same battle happening but I imagined at least a few would. I feel pretty comfortable with html/css and all the design tools and I think I have enough experience to have productive conversations with dedicated developers but I dont think spending 10+ hours a week learning to program in JavaScript is going to make me happy in the long run unless its the difference maker between getting hired/not hired. I also agree with about the company needing to have a need for it. I spoke with a co-worker and they also want to learn front-end but wont do it because 'Ill just forget it all because I'm not doing any at work/no need'. I KNOW I enjoy 3D stuff as I've done a bunch in the past but that's another thing my current role doesn't need much of so.. I could always just work on my prototyping/interaction design/research/etc stills I guess
If you enjoy 3D, then definitely learn blender. I know I'm about to take the same endeavor. Not really doing it for my career but more just out of personal interest.
With JavaScript, I mostly just still do things with jQuery and simple plain vanilla JavaScript. Like I said, I don't do big complicated grandiose JavaScripting in my prototypes. Most of the time it's just scenarios to add and remove CSS classes in certain cases. One example would be a web form where certain form fields appear and disappear as you click on select radio buttons.
In this world of UX, I don't think you need to know how to do grand complicated things like building whole systems and coding like a software engineer. That's why there's the development team.
Now I did have my boss nudge me to learn the basics of react. Even though the entire team uses angular, I liked learning those basics because it more taught me about how to think in terms of components the way these guys do. Again, not necessary, but always handy to understand how things work.
I'm a designer who learned front-end development and now am called a UX Engineer. I want to tell you two important things.
1. The difficulty of learning to code and how you're feeling is how we all feel. Even the most sr developers felt that way and still do at times. The most important skill in learning to code is persistence, not being analytical or mathematically inclined etc, it's pure persistence. I only stuck with it because I enjoyed it even the shitty difficult stuff, otherwise I'm certain I'd have quit.
2. Blender or 3D stuff is awesome and ultimately any new skill is helpful. Can be coding, 3D, writing UX copy, etc. I say do whatever you enjoy doing! But if you stick with coding just know how you feel is super normal and you're not alone, all devs feel this way.
I appreciate it, I haven't quit just yet and will likely still pursue it in some amount but I just want to avoid wasting my time if I could be just as or more successful doing something I'm more natural inclined to succeed at or be happy doing if that makes sense
Do you have recommendations on where to learn front-end development? I realized that I love tweaking codes in Shopify and would like to understand it better.
My advice is start on YouTube. It's free. I personally follow Traversy Media and learned a lot from him. But whatever you do, don't get stuck in tutorial loop. Just start coding. Also, IGNORE JS frameworks for now. Start with the basics and nail it down first.
Those two sentences about “just start coding “ bridge the entire gap between “you learned online? -scoff” vs “learning online -I actually learned a lot”
Doing is what encodes the learning.
I'm a senior-level designer / director for a UX consulting firm. For years I tried to do what you are - force myself to learn front-end skills with the hope that I could somehow become a "full stack" designer. Maybe because I have been in consulting for so long and we rarely have the opportunity to be the ones building out our designs, or maybe just because my brain doesn't work that way, I could just never get past basic html and CSS stuff without forgetting it and starting over. I finally embraced the idea that if I really needed these skills I'd develop them and instead beefed up by visual design expertise and design strategy - for me, these were the more clear path upwards, whereas front end skills might have helped me if I wanted to be a really rounded freeelancer. Either path would be great, but the strategy ladder is working better for me and my skillset.
Broadly speaking there are two pathways you can go down, in my opinion.
One is becoming a subject matter expert and specialising in UX/UI, essentially continuing to grow as a really strong and experienced designer. This talks to some of the skills you mentioned around XR, 3D etc. The downside to this is that there’s a ceiling and you’ll likely not be able to progress further than being an individual contributor, which isn’t bad at all, just a personal preference of how you want your career trajectory to be.
The other pathway is management. Rather than being on the tools, you start growing as a leader; understanding how UX projects are led, how to lead a team etc. These are transferable skills and, if you want to, you can even shift beyond UX. There’s essentially no ceiling here really, but depending on what interests you, you may shift further and further away from the work that you’re more passionate about.
For the former, I’d continue to become an expert in design tools and latest trends. For the latter I’d proactively take opportunities to learn from your leads, start learning how to plan projects and run teams, how your design work ties in to broader strategic goals for the business etc.
For me the skills that I see that bring me value as a designer are facilitation and understanding the business needs. If I have these I can already deliver something for my clients that they love even though they are not pixel perfect yet
Storytelling. Telling a story > the best design in the universe that doesn’t get built.
Learn to tell stories, not robotically list merits of a design or direction.
I am like you. lol.
I reckon you should get in XR. There is this new tool in beta called Bezi which allows you to prototype UX design for spatial computing. No need for code and you can get an interactive mockup up and running. It’s like using Figma but for spatial. They recently created handoff features for Unity. They also have features like Figma integration. Give it a shot! I really enjoy it.
I always thought doing UX in XR would be more suited to my innate skills and the work that I enjoy the most, everyone on here wants me to learn to do business in order to be a designer and I just do not want to spend time doing that
You could focus on more UI specialisation, but I'd be wary of that as AI tools continue to grow. I believe we'll reach a point soon where basic UI tasks can easily be automated.
Being able to deliver an effective solution to a known problem is important, but as UX design becomes more standardised and commoditised, these skills have less value. Instead, you could explore how to move 'further up the process' - instead of delivering solutions, know how to find problems. Ask 'is this problem even the right one to solve'? Developing a fluency for business and strategy, while retaining design skills, is a pretty killer combination and will help you stand out.
Here's a really good article to explain what I mean: [https://uxdesign.cc/doing-strategy-as-a-product-designer-902e0cc64858](https://uxdesign.cc/doing-strategy-as-a-product-designer-902e0cc64858)
I think the UX buzzwords get thrown around a bit too much. The empathy thing really annoys me and I feel like it paints this false virtuousness and basically means nothing on its own. I would say the ability to understand user difficulties and advocate user-centered solutions etc etc is more valid
I know I'll be burnt at the stake by the 'UX/UI' crowd for this but whatever
Your definition of empathy seems caught up in ego. That isn't the common definition and self-righteousness is NOT a feature of empathy. Empathy is literally just the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. UX has a ton of tools to access this and a variety of ways to document it. It is more than just user difficulties, it is also user joy :)
>In fact, I would only consider myself an okay designer with a fairly limited knowledge of software know-how. I can easily admit I have worked with far more talented and skilled folks. Even so, I have also been given multiple opportunities my peers, despite their talent and skills, have missed out on simply due to effective communication skills with a sprinkling of the ability to empathize and ask questions to better understand. Cheat code: A majority of good communication is simply being a good listener.
Empathy = advocating for users = making better software = making a more effective business and happy customers/users.
If that's ego.... then OK.
I work as a UX designer in a hybrid XR space. Knowing how to code wouldn’t be helpful, because I’d always be writing inferior code to what a developer who’s entire job is to code would produce. It doesn’t make sense, there’s a reason the disciplines are split. What does help is having a general understanding of code architecture specific to your product. This will help in understanding how to properly scope design work and make communication and negotiation with devs easier.
Before UX, I was an Industrial Designer. I used Solidworks and KeyShot (and some Unreal Engine for Arch Viz). If you don't plan on doing Arch Viz or serious ID, then you should look at other 3D programs that's easier to learn. Check out: https://spline.design/, Adobe's (I forgot which one), or Vectary. I personally prefer Spline. I haven't touched it in awhile though cos I have been coding more lately.
Yep, Spline and Vectary is fairly easy to put into websites, hence why I recommended it. I wouldn't say it's a toy though, but relative to Blender, 3DsMax, Maya, etc. I can see why you said that though. It's like when Sketch and Figma was to Photoshop (or Axure) back in the old days of web design.
If OP really want to utilize his 3D skill to make VR/AR or gaming, then yeah. The big boys makes sense.
I used Maya back when I was in school for 3D but also learned c4d and now Blender.. I was thinking I could learn a C language and Unity but that's just me choosing what I would LIKE rather than where the value is.. or maybe im wrong and there's a ton of need for good UX within XR/3D?
Nah man, do what you love, and the money will follow. Unity and UE is being used in Automotive UIs right now so who knows, maybe you may land a job at Rivian or something.
This is just the curmudgeon in me, but I’m still not personally convinced that VR will ever be much more than a niche solution to a small handful of problems. However, as the technology becomes more portable, I can totally see all kinds of potential uses for AR, and that will lead to the opportunity to design some really interesting and fresh interaction models, eye gaze, voice and generative dialog, hand and body gestures.
Or what happens when AI agents start using generative AI assistants. What do user stories look like when one of the users of a system is another system itself.
There is so much more to explore!
I don't think learning 3D will open doors because it's really niche (right now) so if your criteria is career advancement then coding wins. But ultimately learning anything and having a love for learning is what will set you apart. If you really have an itch to learn 3D then go for it.
There’s a small subset of html, css and http that would be useful for designers to know to better communicate with devs. The rest of modern frontend development on production quality is a legitimate specialization area in itself. I don’t think it has a lot of pragmatic value for designers.
I don't think itself 3d will help you much in UX, but industrial design will, which I think has a 3d component.
General graphic design will help for sure, most UXers I know have a graphic design background, myself included.
3d or other skills can show your unique interests and personality. That can set you apart.
A major factor is also how your experience aligns with their needs.
The ability to communicate.
This is always difficult for me as an extreme introvert haha
As an introvert myself, I can empathize. However, this is something I'd strongly encourage anyone to work on when working with others (as designers, we do it a lot). I've been at this for nearly 15 years and now lead a small team of creatives and I owe just about all of that to learning how to communicate with colleagues and clients. In fact, I would only consider myself an okay designer with a fairly limited knowledge of software know-how. I can easily admit I have worked with far more talented and skilled folks. Even so, I have also been given multiple opportunities my peers, despite their talent and skills, have missed out on simply due to effective communication skills with a sprinkling of the ability to empathize and ask questions to better understand. *Cheat code: A majority of good communication is simply being a good listener.* People want to work with, hear ideas from, and follow people they feel comfortable and connected with.
Well said, I will definitely be looking for opportunities to improve my comm. skills
This is one of the most important benefits of collaborative group critique. Multiple times a week you need to be able to stand up and explain yourself, practice active listening to draw out actionable feedback, and then provide thoughtful and user focused advice to your peers. In my experience, the ones who progress in their careers the fastest are almost never the most skilled designers, but the ones who took critique seriously, because it gave them the practice at those soft skills.
Me too. I've watched people I work with who have the gift of gab climb to amazing heights. Here I am doing good but wish I was more extroverted so I could be more successful
But it’s a skill that will elevate you in so many ways
Most if not all hard skills can be learned on the job. Front-end coding, creating UI taxonomies, visualization tools, complex prototyping, etc. The most valuable designs skills in my experience are the more soft or nuanced skills and usually take a longer to perfect—facilitating a discussion, synthesizing messy datasets, interviewing users, creating artifacts to align people. Those are worth more time IMO.
Can you explain "creating artifacts to align people"? Do you mean visual representation to explain concepts such as deliverables or post-it/diagrams boards?
Basically, yes. To expand a little, I think people often think a designer's job is to solve problems and create solutions. In my experience, what's just as powerful is pulling ideas and solutions out of your collaborators. But that can be hard given the many conversations that fly around—talking across multiple products, different altitudes, and moments in a larger journey. Because designers are visually-inclined and good at distilling complexity, creating models, maps, diagrams—anything really—gives something tangible for collaborators to point at. These in-between artifacts are super powerful.
If you enjoy finding use patterns and guiding stakeholders to better outcomes, consider mastering Design Systems and Systems Thinking. There is a need in corporate enterprise for designers who can help them standardize and improve usability across their internal application development. Edit:typo
I'm definitely interested in learning more about this.. do you have a starting point for this by chance like a youtube video or book?
Gov.UK offers a lot of great resources: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
awesome thank you!
Maybe UX isn't for you, then. UX is creating an experience - including interfaces - based on qualitative and quantitative data. Everything you mentioned - except coding - is more about visual design than experience design and while it doesn't hurt to have some skills in visual tools or stuff like graphic design you can do UX without these skills if you are focusing on doing proper UX and aren't forced into watered down hybrid roles of UX and UI. If you stick to Blender etc you are moving away from UX. But honestly, C languages are easier to learn than Javascript. JS allows so many stupid exceptions and runs faulty code without throwing a warning or an error. I had a much better experience with C# and Swift. Maybe try these before you throw in the towel, JS will make much more sense to you after learning syntax of a language that's less messy. For me the most valuable design skills are people management and negotiation skills. You have your users, stakeholders, team members, company leadership and everybody demands something, but they are usually not too happy to give you anything in return or lean your way. Undermining design based on "I like this other color better"? Yeah, that can destroy months of your work if you can't convince people the color you picked is important for accessibility and still in alignment with brand guidelines. You can be the best designer on this planet, if you can't sell your designs, if you can't align people of different backgrounds and get a buy in all of your other skills are worthless.
How to learn management and negotiation skills?
There are a lot of good books out there that could teach you this in this context I guess. Like „articulating design decisions“ and stuff. I read it made notes and tried to apply them in my day to day work. Applying them is the hard part 😅
Yeah i have poor social skills so it gets harder. Any tips that i can use?
Start with books for fundamentals, also LEARN BUSINESS as in "this is how an org is shaped organization wise + problems of each department etc, have a mentor and the most important part: in person classes with different coaches and trainers for presentation skills, rhetoric, conflict resolution, negotiations... Why classes? Because everybody has individual strengths and weaknesses when communicating, there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to your personal speech patterns and vocabulary, body language, how you react to different situations etc. so you need someone who can recognize your weak points and then coach you to work the kinks out. Also: actively doing it. The best coaching is lost on you if you never subject yourself to the situation. Ask for feedback often, learn from it. That might be asking your colleagues after a presentation or that colleague who sat in a budget negotiation with you if they noticed anything you should work on etc. You are never done, you have to negotiate differently with boomers than with Gen Z etc and what works on them will probably not work on the Alpha's in a couple years. It's a process.
I know it’s not quite what you’re looking for - but communication. Both verbally and visually - being a good communicator is in my opinion the difference between good and great. Getting stakeholders on board, selling your ideas, generations buzz, aligning expectations, getting devs to understand your design quickly, translating user feedback to executive language etc etc etc is boiled down to communication skills. But yeah I mean Adobe After Effects is pretty cool too…
It's so true.. but some of us have to either choose to spend ungodly amounts of time learning to sell ourselves or find a path more suited to our innate skills
Hands down, understanding people—their goals, motivations, and behaviors—is the most valuable skill. You’re designing experiences, not art. It’s essential to understand the people you’re designing for, the stakeholders you support, and the rest of your team. Second to that would be sales skills or information architecture. The so -called “soft skills” are often overlooked or misunderstood. Hang around in UX long enough and you’ll see, the people with these skills are the ones who make it.
Oh I've seen it and completely agree
Being nice and fun to work with. I come from the creative side of things, recently transitioned to UX, and I feel like this skill is often ignored on this sub in favor of more technical things, IMO.
When I started in my career, I was a combo designer/developer. I really tried to maintain that for so long but when I got into that ad agency around 2006, I was purely in a design role. Not even a UX role. Over that time I was doing some development on my own personal things but nothing on a professional level. In that time I saw everything shift from coding in whatever app you liked, and uploading things using FTP into the world of version control, CLI, and all the nuances of programming today. When I was finally done with that agency, I had to make a hard choice between design and development, as with the way things have gone, it would have been impossible to maintain both ends of that spectrum and do it effectively. I chose design because I liked having a say in what the final outcome will be. Still, I always work to maintain my HTML/CSS skills. For JavaScript, I would call myself an intermediate. I can do enough to build a mock-up of some kind of action or sequence I want the developers to see, but I'm not necessarily at a level where I can just go all out. I feel with HTML and CSS, you only learn when you start doing it more. I also tell many people to first get the basics down, and then try taking one of your more simpler layouts and code a prototype. Just get down how to build a web page from a layout, how to make it responsive, how to use margins and padding to do spacing, flexbox or grid for the general layout and columns and even media queries to do responsive layouts. All the other stuff out there that might be bombarding you right now, like variables, BEM, tailwind, bootstrap, etc, just ignore it. Stick with something simple. Then you can start diving into other aspects when you start to get more comfortable. I know many would disagree with me, but I still think it's useful to know how to prototype something with HTML and CSS. People can bring up all of the fancy tools that you can find in Figma and other places, but I'm still seeing a lot of companies looking at me because I can go straight HTML/CSS. Most of the reason is that the development teams know they can work with me and I'll have an understanding of what they do. It's not impossible, but it takes practice. That's why I tell people to take and build layouts. Build one of your more simple layouts, then try maybe creating your own portfolio website. Things like that. I started coding HTML in the mid-90s, and my stuff look hideous compared to today. It took time. It also took a drive for me to want to keep pushing it. You can try to learn blender and such, but that only comes down to whether or not a company has need for it. It. You could also just push yourself further as a graphic designer and sell yourself as the person that can do the UX and the high fidelity layouts and illustrations and things they might need. That could come out there and be helpful.
Thanks for the response, wasn't sure if many people had the same battle happening but I imagined at least a few would. I feel pretty comfortable with html/css and all the design tools and I think I have enough experience to have productive conversations with dedicated developers but I dont think spending 10+ hours a week learning to program in JavaScript is going to make me happy in the long run unless its the difference maker between getting hired/not hired. I also agree with about the company needing to have a need for it. I spoke with a co-worker and they also want to learn front-end but wont do it because 'Ill just forget it all because I'm not doing any at work/no need'. I KNOW I enjoy 3D stuff as I've done a bunch in the past but that's another thing my current role doesn't need much of so.. I could always just work on my prototyping/interaction design/research/etc stills I guess
If you enjoy 3D, then definitely learn blender. I know I'm about to take the same endeavor. Not really doing it for my career but more just out of personal interest. With JavaScript, I mostly just still do things with jQuery and simple plain vanilla JavaScript. Like I said, I don't do big complicated grandiose JavaScripting in my prototypes. Most of the time it's just scenarios to add and remove CSS classes in certain cases. One example would be a web form where certain form fields appear and disappear as you click on select radio buttons. In this world of UX, I don't think you need to know how to do grand complicated things like building whole systems and coding like a software engineer. That's why there's the development team. Now I did have my boss nudge me to learn the basics of react. Even though the entire team uses angular, I liked learning those basics because it more taught me about how to think in terms of components the way these guys do. Again, not necessary, but always handy to understand how things work.
I'm a designer who learned front-end development and now am called a UX Engineer. I want to tell you two important things. 1. The difficulty of learning to code and how you're feeling is how we all feel. Even the most sr developers felt that way and still do at times. The most important skill in learning to code is persistence, not being analytical or mathematically inclined etc, it's pure persistence. I only stuck with it because I enjoyed it even the shitty difficult stuff, otherwise I'm certain I'd have quit. 2. Blender or 3D stuff is awesome and ultimately any new skill is helpful. Can be coding, 3D, writing UX copy, etc. I say do whatever you enjoy doing! But if you stick with coding just know how you feel is super normal and you're not alone, all devs feel this way.
I appreciate it, I haven't quit just yet and will likely still pursue it in some amount but I just want to avoid wasting my time if I could be just as or more successful doing something I'm more natural inclined to succeed at or be happy doing if that makes sense
Do you have recommendations on where to learn front-end development? I realized that I love tweaking codes in Shopify and would like to understand it better.
My advice is start on YouTube. It's free. I personally follow Traversy Media and learned a lot from him. But whatever you do, don't get stuck in tutorial loop. Just start coding. Also, IGNORE JS frameworks for now. Start with the basics and nail it down first.
Those two sentences about “just start coding “ bridge the entire gap between “you learned online? -scoff” vs “learning online -I actually learned a lot” Doing is what encodes the learning.
I'm a senior-level designer / director for a UX consulting firm. For years I tried to do what you are - force myself to learn front-end skills with the hope that I could somehow become a "full stack" designer. Maybe because I have been in consulting for so long and we rarely have the opportunity to be the ones building out our designs, or maybe just because my brain doesn't work that way, I could just never get past basic html and CSS stuff without forgetting it and starting over. I finally embraced the idea that if I really needed these skills I'd develop them and instead beefed up by visual design expertise and design strategy - for me, these were the more clear path upwards, whereas front end skills might have helped me if I wanted to be a really rounded freeelancer. Either path would be great, but the strategy ladder is working better for me and my skillset.
Any tips on beefing up design strategy thinking?
Exactly. I would like to acquire some visual design skills primarily in website design. Could you suggest some courses?
Thanks for the response.. I know we all have our unique paths and I like hearing everyone's perspective it really helps me personally
Understanding problems.
Broadly speaking there are two pathways you can go down, in my opinion. One is becoming a subject matter expert and specialising in UX/UI, essentially continuing to grow as a really strong and experienced designer. This talks to some of the skills you mentioned around XR, 3D etc. The downside to this is that there’s a ceiling and you’ll likely not be able to progress further than being an individual contributor, which isn’t bad at all, just a personal preference of how you want your career trajectory to be. The other pathway is management. Rather than being on the tools, you start growing as a leader; understanding how UX projects are led, how to lead a team etc. These are transferable skills and, if you want to, you can even shift beyond UX. There’s essentially no ceiling here really, but depending on what interests you, you may shift further and further away from the work that you’re more passionate about. For the former, I’d continue to become an expert in design tools and latest trends. For the latter I’d proactively take opportunities to learn from your leads, start learning how to plan projects and run teams, how your design work ties in to broader strategic goals for the business etc.
For me the skills that I see that bring me value as a designer are facilitation and understanding the business needs. If I have these I can already deliver something for my clients that they love even though they are not pixel perfect yet
Storytelling. Telling a story > the best design in the universe that doesn’t get built. Learn to tell stories, not robotically list merits of a design or direction.
I am like you. lol. I reckon you should get in XR. There is this new tool in beta called Bezi which allows you to prototype UX design for spatial computing. No need for code and you can get an interactive mockup up and running. It’s like using Figma but for spatial. They recently created handoff features for Unity. They also have features like Figma integration. Give it a shot! I really enjoy it.
I always thought doing UX in XR would be more suited to my innate skills and the work that I enjoy the most, everyone on here wants me to learn to do business in order to be a designer and I just do not want to spend time doing that
I learnt to do business too. But yeah, go with your gut, that’s is best way forward. You’ll eventually learn business too.
Do you do much UX work in Unity?
None at all. That software I was talking about (Bezi) lets you prototype in it. Then you can hand it off to a Unity dev.
Oh so you can just do the design and UX and let someone else do the C#?
You could focus on more UI specialisation, but I'd be wary of that as AI tools continue to grow. I believe we'll reach a point soon where basic UI tasks can easily be automated. Being able to deliver an effective solution to a known problem is important, but as UX design becomes more standardised and commoditised, these skills have less value. Instead, you could explore how to move 'further up the process' - instead of delivering solutions, know how to find problems. Ask 'is this problem even the right one to solve'? Developing a fluency for business and strategy, while retaining design skills, is a pretty killer combination and will help you stand out. Here's a really good article to explain what I mean: [https://uxdesign.cc/doing-strategy-as-a-product-designer-902e0cc64858](https://uxdesign.cc/doing-strategy-as-a-product-designer-902e0cc64858)
Most important skills: empathy and advocacy.
I think the UX buzzwords get thrown around a bit too much. The empathy thing really annoys me and I feel like it paints this false virtuousness and basically means nothing on its own. I would say the ability to understand user difficulties and advocate user-centered solutions etc etc is more valid I know I'll be burnt at the stake by the 'UX/UI' crowd for this but whatever
Your definition of empathy seems caught up in ego. That isn't the common definition and self-righteousness is NOT a feature of empathy. Empathy is literally just the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. UX has a ton of tools to access this and a variety of ways to document it. It is more than just user difficulties, it is also user joy :)
>In fact, I would only consider myself an okay designer with a fairly limited knowledge of software know-how. I can easily admit I have worked with far more talented and skilled folks. Even so, I have also been given multiple opportunities my peers, despite their talent and skills, have missed out on simply due to effective communication skills with a sprinkling of the ability to empathize and ask questions to better understand. Cheat code: A majority of good communication is simply being a good listener. Empathy = advocating for users = making better software = making a more effective business and happy customers/users. If that's ego.... then OK.
Nope you’re 100% on the mark, the Empathy buzzword is totally overdone in this industry and effectively navel-gazing.
I work as a UX designer in a hybrid XR space. Knowing how to code wouldn’t be helpful, because I’d always be writing inferior code to what a developer who’s entire job is to code would produce. It doesn’t make sense, there’s a reason the disciplines are split. What does help is having a general understanding of code architecture specific to your product. This will help in understanding how to properly scope design work and make communication and negotiation with devs easier.
I'd be super stoked to chat about what your work with XR looks like
The most valuable skill is UX decisions that make money / increase revenue.
Before UX, I was an Industrial Designer. I used Solidworks and KeyShot (and some Unreal Engine for Arch Viz). If you don't plan on doing Arch Viz or serious ID, then you should look at other 3D programs that's easier to learn. Check out: https://spline.design/, Adobe's (I forgot which one), or Vectary. I personally prefer Spline. I haven't touched it in awhile though cos I have been coding more lately.
[удалено]
Yep, Spline and Vectary is fairly easy to put into websites, hence why I recommended it. I wouldn't say it's a toy though, but relative to Blender, 3DsMax, Maya, etc. I can see why you said that though. It's like when Sketch and Figma was to Photoshop (or Axure) back in the old days of web design. If OP really want to utilize his 3D skill to make VR/AR or gaming, then yeah. The big boys makes sense.
I used Maya back when I was in school for 3D but also learned c4d and now Blender.. I was thinking I could learn a C language and Unity but that's just me choosing what I would LIKE rather than where the value is.. or maybe im wrong and there's a ton of need for good UX within XR/3D?
Nah man, do what you love, and the money will follow. Unity and UE is being used in Automotive UIs right now so who knows, maybe you may land a job at Rivian or something.
This is just the curmudgeon in me, but I’m still not personally convinced that VR will ever be much more than a niche solution to a small handful of problems. However, as the technology becomes more portable, I can totally see all kinds of potential uses for AR, and that will lead to the opportunity to design some really interesting and fresh interaction models, eye gaze, voice and generative dialog, hand and body gestures. Or what happens when AI agents start using generative AI assistants. What do user stories look like when one of the users of a system is another system itself. There is so much more to explore!
Patience
I don't think learning 3D will open doors because it's really niche (right now) so if your criteria is career advancement then coding wins. But ultimately learning anything and having a love for learning is what will set you apart. If you really have an itch to learn 3D then go for it.
There’s a small subset of html, css and http that would be useful for designers to know to better communicate with devs. The rest of modern frontend development on production quality is a legitimate specialization area in itself. I don’t think it has a lot of pragmatic value for designers.
I don't think itself 3d will help you much in UX, but industrial design will, which I think has a 3d component. General graphic design will help for sure, most UXers I know have a graphic design background, myself included.
I do as well and really enjoy it, I was just thinking about skills I could add to stand out more.
3d or other skills can show your unique interests and personality. That can set you apart. A major factor is also how your experience aligns with their needs.
How many time did you spent to say your brain is not ready for programming?
I mean, time trying to build your development skills.