When I decided to specialize in User Experience in the mid-2000s, tech still felt like the wild west. It was full of people who knew how to teach themselves what they needed to learn to finish their projects. I was a website developer at the time. Many of the developers I worked with were former mechanics, machinists, and tinkerers who discovered they could earn a good living building websites and applications.

Website developers cared about web standards and validating their code against HTML and XHTML validators. Semantic naming of tags was necessary because all we had were divs, no fancy Header, or Article tags. Approaches like graceful degradation faded as progressive enhancement became more popular and on and on.

The common theme was self-organization and change. Things always changed because people were building best practices and standards along the way. Back then, User Experience wasn't a common phrase; the term was just usability, and User-centered Design (UCD) was the essential process to follow.

I quickly discovered there weren't a lot of opportunities to learn about usability. Universities offered majors like Engineering Psychology, Ergonomics, and Human-Computer Interaction. I was already working, and truth be told, I was more of an autodidact. The only UX-related training was through certification like Human Factors International's (HFI) Certified Usability Analyst (CUA). I went the certification route and got my CUA certification in 2009, over eight years into my career.

Since then, I haven't stopped adding to my UX tool kit. Design Thinking, Lean UX, Customer Development, Strategic Planning, Jobs to Be Done, etc. You could argue things changes faster today. This process of keeping up with constant change leads us to skill one.

Bookshelf full of books about psychology, design, development and product.

Skill 1: Learning

As my career progressed, a common theme emerged, refining existing skills and learning new skills. Reading was a critical activity for me, as someone who taught themselves much of what I knew. A book that influenced me on this subject was The Opposable Mind by Roger L. Martin (I recommend just about all of his books, especially The Design of Business).

The Opposable Mind's central theme was integrative thinking. However, Martin also introduced a system he called The Personal Knowledge System. This system consisted of 3 boxes arranged in a waterfall.

The first step is Stance, which Martin described as how you see the world around you, but it's also how you see yourself in that world."
The second step is Tools, "Your stance guides what tools you choose to accumulate."
The third and final step is Experiences, "The experiences you accumulate are the product of your stance and tools, which guide you toward some experiences and away from others."

The Personal Knowledge System - Roger L. Martin

When taken as a whole, this system creates a virtuous cycle where your stance helps you choose your tools. Tools influence your experience. Your experiences help refine your tools, which in turn informs your new and improved stance. Then the cycle starts over.

Here's an example of this in action. In the late 2000s, stakeholder interviews were a common form of input into the design process. My stance was that I was never fully convinced it was an ideal method for understanding user needs. At that time, co-creation was an up and coming tool for designers. Co-creation was a form of participatory design where you didn't just interview stakeholders; you invited them into the design process. I found co-creation refreshing, rewarding, and effective. My experiences opened me up to refining my tools. Shortly after that, I read a new book, Change by Design by Tim Brown of IDEO. That book introduced Design Thinking to me, and Design Thinking features empathy for users and participatory design. My stance was updated.

A man is looking at vending machines and trying to make a decision about what top buy.

Skill 2: Decision Making

One of the skills no one will tell you to develop is decision making. I learned about it when attending a training at the Weatherhead School of Management called "Strategic Decision Making & Execution." That coursework made me realize how many business-related blindspots I had as a designer. You aren't making a decision if you decide without understanding the impact and available options; you're impulsive. My biggest takeaway was to make decisions intentionally, regardless of their impact.

If the subject of decision making is new to you, I recommend concentrating on the following four areas.

Learn to Assess Decision Consequences

A strong case for developing a strategy is when you are up against a decision, the right set of options is obvious. You should be able to see which options don't align with your strategy and discard them.

If the decision will not heavily impact future options, then make the decision and move on. Don't wait until you have all of the available information. You will move slower, and you can always see how well your decision performs. That is not to say small decisions don't accumulate or aren't important. Be sure to set your strategy and align your decisions accordingly.

The decisions that considerably limit your options in the future require more investigation. Those choices may become a commitment that shapes strategy instead of allowing your strategy to guide your decision-making.

(For help with this, see the decision matrix below)

Learn From Past Decisions

Decision Journaling is pretty simple. The hard part is realizing when you are making a decision, and then creating the habit to write it down.

Steps for Decision Journaling

Document a decision to be made
What your decision is
Why you made that decision
What you expect the outcome to be

Regularly revisit the journal to assess your decisions, and consider what you would do differently next time.

Ideation

Your first idea is rarely the best one. Ideation is an activity that creates more ideas or options. There are many ways to ideate, but the overall goal is to diverge from what you currently know and generate more options. After developing additional options, you then converge on a few options to make your final decision. You may recognize this divergence and convergence cycle as the basis for the double diamond design process.

Decision Modeling

The 2x2 matrix is an excellent framework for visualizing your options. A 2x2 matrix consists of four boxes stacked two over two with a verticle and horizontal axis to compare your options.

Eisenhower Matrix

This matrix helps you compare options by determining whether the options fall into urgent or important categories.

The four possible categories are:

Urgent and Important - Do it now
Not Urgent and Important - Schedule it
Urgent and Unimportant - Delegate it
Not Urgent and Unimportant - Ignore it

The Decision Matrix

This matrix will help you triage decisions by categorizing them by how consequential and reversible the decision will be.

The four possible categories are:

Irreversible and consequential - Investigation and deliberation
Irreversible and inconsequential - Uncover options
Reversible and consequential - Consider possible outcomes
Reversible and inconsequential - Use your best judgment

This is a photo of the grand canyon where a river eroded the rock without permission.

Skill 3: Influencing Without Authority

Designers dreaming about a seat at the "big kids" table seems to be a rite of passage. In my experience, these feelings result from designers being aware of others making decisions without their input while also having a keen sense of the downstream effects. The root cause of this varies but is almost always dependent on the company's culture.

User Experience designers are cursed with the power to see issues across silos, but blessed with little ability to affect organizational change. For UX to be as influential as it hopes to be, their leadership must be in the room where consequential decisions are made and respected enough for others to consider their input.

There are grassroots efforts to change company culture, such as UX maturity methods, which aspire to improve the awareness of UX and its capabilities. I hate to be the one to tell you, but UX maturity is a myth promulgated by design agencies to sell their services. Yes, you can undoubtedly make incremental improvements, but culture starts at the top. You can only move the needle by gaining influence.

Try these four areas to improve your ability to influence change.

Build Relationships

Many designers don't like the idea of involving themselves in company politics. I was one of them. Don't lionize somebody in a position of authority. They are just people showing up to work every day, like you. Please get to know them. They have their own set of problems and goals they would like to achieve. As a designer, you can help solve some of their problems.

I'm not saying you should ingratiate yourselves to people in authority. See where your interests converge with theirs. You will be amazed at what you can get away with you once you help executives meet their incentivized goals.

Measure Dissatisfaction

I've been through dozens of organizational change initiatives, and one common theme determines their success, dissatisfaction. Don't try to impact significant change without measuring it. You'll only be disappointed and experience a setback.

You and your coworkers build routines around organizational habits. The worst kind of habit is the one no one intentionally creates. They are tacit knowledge that everyone knows about, but no one seems to know where it started. The infamous "that's how we've always done it" is born from these habits. The only thing that breaks through these objections is tremendous pressure from the top.

Find where there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, and figure out how you can affect change there. After all, you are a designer; use your design process to improve your company.

Try Farming

You may be familiar with the term land grab. In business, that's where department heads get in turf-wars because they see political value in an area that is either orphaned or not well defended. Land grabs are often the result of turf-wars and are a highly political move. They are incredibly demoralizing when you don't have the authority to stop it.

A practical way to combat land grabs is by planting seeds. Scan your company to find projects or initiatives that should exist but don't. Figure out how to pitch this to your management or better yet, start mentioning it during one on ones or staff meetings. When an unrelated issue arises, say how project x could help alleviate issue y. Be persistent without being annoying. This approach is hit or miss, but when you hit, you immediately are seen as an expert and can position yourself to have more influence on its execution.

I've seen this approach described as "terraforming." In other words, modifying the environment to make it more habitable. I love this.

Be Someone to be Counted On

One of the best ways to gain influence is simply to be competent. Be seen as someone who gets the job done. You need to set expectations and deliver on them in a timely fashion. Doing this alone will make you stand out in a world of wishy-washy "it depends" personalties.

UX has the distinction of being a black box to the vast majority of people. That means UX becomes defined by whatever you do at your company. Don't complain about UX not being taken seriously, or the work you get to do. Build the skills to be a competent design expert and influential leader at your company.

Final Thoughts

The skills I've mentioned are subjective and contextual to me. The decisions I have made throughout my career and the places I chose to work heavily influence the skills I sought to build. The last skill I will impart is to be self-critical and take responsibility for your career. See where you are lacking and fortify yourself. Find mentors who will push you past your comfort levels until you get to the other side. Teach what you have learned to others; there will always be people who can learn from you if you let them.

There are hundreds of articles about the skills a designer should acquire. I wanted to write an article about becoming a more effective designer, rather than just a proficient one. Did I accomplish my goal? Please let me know in the comments!

Thanks for reading!

Sep 9 Designers Need These Three Uncommon Skills to Stand Out