The best user experience designs begin with a great user experience design lead. In other words, the UX design leader needs to be as much of an expert on creating great design as they are on communicating effectively and strategically across the organization. With this in mind, here are several Tips for Creating a UX Design Lead That Gets Results within your organization, or to get one if you don’t already have one in place.
Tips for Creating a UX Design Lead
Define what a successful Ux design lead looks like
Successful Ux design leads go above and beyond just leading design. Successful Ux design leads should be advocates, teammates, and thought leaders. A successful Ux design lead focuses on three things: a user-centered approach to product development, internal brand building, and personal leadership growth. If you want your team to be more effective—and you want yourself to advance in your career—this might be just what you need. Here are some tips for creating a successful Ux design lead that gets results.
What does a User Designer do? First, let’s talk about what it means to be a user designer. There are two basic categories of designers: those who work with developers (UI/UX) and those who work with business stakeholders (UCD). While there is definitely some overlap between these two types of designers, they tend to have different responsibilities within an organization depending on their focus area.
Identify the qualities that make a successful Ux design lead
Given that you’re reading a post about how to become an effective Ux design lead, I’m going to assume you have some innate qualities that will make your job easier. However, there are other characteristics that are easy to develop and can help boost your career as well. Communication skills: A successful Ux design lead needs strong communication skills.
You should be able to listen and communicate clearly with developers, clients, QA personnel, and business partners. Team management: As a leader of designers, it’s essential that you can work well with others. In fact, more than anything else when hiring for our company we look at interpersonal skills when evaluating new team members. Your ability to motivate, inspire and guide your team is one of your most important responsibilities.
Creativity: It goes without saying that if you want to be an effective Ux design lead, you need to be creative. Whether you’re coming up with new ideas or solving problems, creativity is key. Critical thinking: To get results from any project requires critical thinking skills. This means using logic and reasoning in order to solve problems or come up with creative solutions to challenges presented by users or stakeholders. Leadership skills: An effective Ux design lead is also a leader who inspires their team by providing direction while also being approachable and open-minded when making decisions together as a group.
Understand how to create a successful Ux design lead
A user-designer, or Ux design lead, is an experienced designer who leads a team of designers. A successful user-designer understands not only how to design and conceptualize products, but also why users interact with their products in certain ways. Moreover, they understand how to train other designers on creating products that meet users’ needs effectively. These are invaluable skills that you can use to create a successful Ux design lead within your organization.
Here’s how A user-designer must be able to think like a user: One of the first things you need to do when thinking about hiring a user-designer is to determine whether they have experience designing products from scratch. If they don’t, then it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to adequately teach others how to do so. Instead, look for someone who has worked as both a product manager and designer—they’ll have experience thinking through both sides of product development. For example, if your company makes software for salespeople, then your Ux design lead should know what questions users will ask before even meeting them face-to-face.
Implement a successful Ux design lead strategy
User designers (UxD) are more and more commonly appearing incorporate design teams; however, there is often confusion about what exactly UxD’s do, how they should be hired and managed, and how to get them to produce results. To establish a successful UxD lead strategy, use these three guidelines:
1. Hire an expert user experience designer. An UxD should focus on interaction and visual design as well as have strong experience testing prototypes with users and stakeholders.
2. Manage your UxD like any other top-level executive within your organization: Set targets (for example, redesigning a key feature), give measurable objectives (reduce X by Y) and hold them accountable when they fail to reach those goals.
Create a plan for developing and executing a successful Ux design lead role
Developing and executing a successful user experience design lead role is no easy task. It can require you to be deeply involved in every aspect of your organization’s product or service, from sales and marketing to engineering. To succeed, plan your Ux design lead responsibilities and develop ways to get everyone on board with them.
You don’t have to take all of these tips at once; rather, pick one or two to start. With time, they’ll become easier—and more natural—to execute. The following tips will help you get started: • Find an advocate within your organization who can help you convey what it means for users and will listen to your concerns about how users are interacting with their product or service.
Suggest ways to improve the effectiveness of a Ux lead team
User design leads should have a background in psychology, copywriting, or persuasive communication. Everyone on your team is likely to have some kind of skill or knowledge that could help you get results from clients—but if you’re really looking to cut down on your workload and quickly bring in new business, consider making your Ux lead as effective as possible.
User research experts who also understand how to properly conduct persuasive conversations with clients are extremely rare but can save you so much time when it comes to bringing in new clients—not to mention getting existing ones to spend more money with you. This person could literally be worth their weight in gold. Or at least enough money for you to hire someone else who’s not quite as valuable. Get our point? We hope so!
