#5. Collaboration and Communication
Soft skills are also important in the workplace. After analyzing various job descriptions, I found that the two most critical soft skills that employers look for are collaboration and communication, namely the ability to both lead and be a team player and a strong ability to communicate in both verbal and writer formats when analyzing and presenting. While technical skills are definitely favored by recruiters, the success of a project actually relies entirely on the ability of a designer to integrate smoothly into a team and be able to both contribute and accept feedback that will prove invaluable to the project objectives.
As someone with prior experience working in software engineering and usability, I am able to channel this experience into stronger collaboration. That is, when working with other teams throughout the design process, I am able to save time by only conveying the most relevant information and communicating it in a way that is most comprehensive to their individual perspectives. This ability to put me in their shoes is a major asset to my communication ability because I am able to share and present ideas that advance the understanding of the entire team and consequently moves the project along more efficiently.
Collaboration and Communication Essential in Iterative Approaches
As the scale of projects increases and projects become more complicated, companies are transitioning to agile or lean UX which requires iterative approaches to achieve project goals. In the past, the process was very linear so while communication was important, collaboration was not as much of a priority as it is now that team members need to be on the same page during each stage in order for the project to proceed. Numerous teams have to work together in order to achieve project objectives due to how closely products and services are linked within a platform. Furthermore, innovation can only be fostered in environments with high collaboration.
Internal and External Collaboration
In my experience working at a large company with numerous teams, each with their own clearly defined role, I have had to develop strong collaboration skills in order to effectively work with both internal and external teams. Internal teams include the UX team, project team, and other in-house teams that are not directly involved with the project. I adapt my communication depending on which team I am collaborating with. For example, within the UX team, we generally exchange mutually beneficial feedback but when collaborating with teams such as GUI my key objective is to effectively share and explain my design without overstepping my bounds. That is, I don’t confirm colors, shapes, or graphic styles because I know that is a GUI responsibility. I have found that understanding stakeholders’ context is of the utmost importance in communication. I think what sets me apart from others is that I can visualize a problem as having discrete parts. From there, it becomes clearer to me how to pinpoint the exact problem and how to move forward.
I have also obtained a lot of experience working with external teams. Because external teams do not have the same context as internal teams, I need to put in more effort to present clear and concise explanations in order to ensure that we are on the same page. I maintain constant communication with external teams in order to both keep them updated and to proactively detect any issues that can be resolved on my end. Throughout the collaboration, I only share information that the company has approved in order to avoid violating NDA confidentiality terms.
Regardless of whether working with internal or external teams, strengthening relationships is critical for effective collaboration. To build strong relationships with stakeholders, it’s important to think from their perspective, to understand their terminology, missions, and milestones. To build strong relationships with my colleagues, I try to make the process more efficient and subsequently make their lives easier by sharing resources I have based on proven research data. Additionally, when I present my UX designs I try to provide clear explanations along with simplified and accessible materials. For example, sometimes software engineers and product managers don’t have specific design tools, so I send them screenshots with annotations so that they don’t need to download any tools to view the design. When necessary, I can also rely on my past experience with software engineering and technical terminology to better facilitate communication and the process overall.
Accepting Critical Feedback is Essential
Though I take measures to ensure that I provide my best work, critical feedback is an unavoidable component of working as a UX designer, and over the years I have learned how to welcome constructive criticism and use it to better improve the quality of my work.
One example of a time when I was faced with critical feedback on my work was during my project designing the safety features on smartwatches in 2016 at Samsung. By identifying safety and security as crucial behavior-based user needs, I designed this feature for protecting users in emergencies. Considering the urgency behind an emergency as well as the 80-character text limitation on smartwatch screens, I tried to be concise in phrasing messages. Language changes were another limitation when it came to crafting these messages, but I tried to maintain clarity and concision even when those changes were necessary.
