Skills for Experience Designers

09 May 2022

What is Experience Design?

The key value that design brings is its integrative synthesis, through bringing together the pieces of an organization’s value proposition into a coherent narrative. Many aspects of companies today are siloed, and thus the customer experience becomes siloed also . Experience designers help organizations put their customer’s experience first, and organize around that, not the opposite way around. Once the customer experience is put in the middle , we are putting the pieces of the business within the right relationship to every other.
The experience design lens enables businesses to interrupt through the economic model, to make a backend (the processes needed to deliver a product or service) that’s in line with what the customer wants. Experience design helps businesses to concentrate their effort on the areas that matter most to their customers.
From an efficiency perspective, experience design holds tons of potential, because it helps organizations understand the precise aspects of their product or service that make the foremost value for the customer. This ability to be in sync with the top users, helps them feel confirmed in their choices at every turn of the experience — that’s a really exciting thing for the user.

What are the highest 5 skills experience designers need to succeed today and within the future?

1. Empathy

Empathy entails understanding that people are different from you. The Dutch designer, Marshall Wanders breakthrough in his interior design career was when he realized that people had to use the objects he designed. He realized that when he was finished making the thing he was not relevant. Empathy is realizing that you are not other people, and taking others seriously. Also, empathy must be applied to both the within and out of doors of the organization.

2. Design Generalist

The experienced designer may be a generalist, within the planning context. Its enough if you barely understand the utilization of the Creative Suite (Photoshop, Indesign…). Experience designers don’t got to have a degree as a graphic or industrial designer. But they need to be ready to see the entire system, and understand how things connect and interconnect.

3. Understand People

The experience designer has got to know a touch bit about people, their basic drivers, what engages them, and the way we create our context together. I have recently become very curious about social constructivism (Social constructivism maintains that human development is socially situated and knowledge is made through interaction and co creation with others) and believe experience designers got to understand individuals as co-shapers and co-creators during a wider context.

4. Business Savvy

Even if you are working for a charity, as an experienced designer you have to be business savvy. This is not about making a profit, but about constructing an efficient system. The word we have for that today is business. This is about having the ability to separate wheat from chaff, and specialize in what’s important.

5. Ability to be a ‘Producer’

The experienced designer is the organization’s ‘producer’. They need to understand how to put a system to work effectively. In the gaming industry, you’ve got the people that are making the code that are actually building the sport , but the role of experience designer will always be the producer — the one who can take all the pieces of the sport and confirm they’re working coherently together.