6 future-proof skills for designers
6 future-proof skills for designers
Or: what other skills to focus on apart from copy-pasting ChatGPT?
If you’re finding yourself in the same online circles as I’m in, your feed on any social media platform is currently overflooded with AI content. It brings to surface the pressure people in our industry feel to adapt new technology.
I definitely feel a pressure (aside from genuine curiosity) to stay up to date with new tech and trends. But it also made me wonder:
What are timeless skills for designers, beyond new tech and trends?
Here are some skills I believe will continue to be an important part of a designer’s toolkit.
1. Visualising insights and ideas
Whether it’s a persona, a customer journey map, a high-fidelity prototype or a strategy slide deck, a big part of our work as product designers is creating artefacts that visualise insights and ideas. It’s one of our most important communication tools, because it helps us bring insights we’ve gotten about our users to our stakeholders.
Here are some artefacts that I use a lot to visualise insights and ideas with stakeholders:
Customer journey maps and service blueprints
Google Slides
Wireframes and prototypes
Online whiteboards with research insights
AI tools now can help us create imagery or texts, but finding the right format to tell a compelling story is still on us.
2. Facilitating collaboration
As my impact on project grows, so does the need to build strong relationships with other teams and stakeholders. I found this to be one of the hardest things to master and it’s still a learning process for me. It’s easy to just sit behind your computer and forget to show your work.
This is what helps me to build relationships:
Project rituals with a kick-off workshop and weekly check-ins.
Mapping stakeholders and their roles early on in the project.
Get to know and understand people’s personal goals and preferred working styles.
4. Ability to switch context quickly
One of the things that has proven to be so valuable in my work is the ability to switch contexts quickly. One day I find myself working on a customer vision strategy, the other day I’m building components in Figma.
It’s important to understand how to best communicate with different people. Stakeholders just need a high level overview whereas engineers might need a deep dive - understand which level of detail is appropriate helps you to save time and get useful feedback.
The ability to switch context quickly also helps you to adapt to change. As you already can tell by now, change is permanent in our industry. We need to be flexible and open to embrace new tech, new ways of working and new views on our industry.
5. Critical thinking and making educated guesses
That’s what we do in the end. We’re making educated guesses. Emphasis on educated. Based on insights from user research, analytics and our toolset as designers.
Yet there are enough instances where designers are just guessing, like unsolicited redesigns of popular music apps or 99% of the shots you’ll find on dribbble.
With the coming of AI, there’s a risk we completely fall into a guessing game because we blindly take over the output that AI (design)tools spit out. Connected to this is our ability to apply critical thinking, especially when using AI tools give us the illusion of objectivity.
6. Writing
How exciting is it that we now have tools that gives us what we want, just by asking for it? However, that’s also the biggest challenge.
How can we make sure to write correct prompts? How can we formulate our ideas clearly?
I for one will be focusing on polishing my writing skills, focusing on how to write correct prompts. Beyond that, I’ve seen the impact on my work from working with UX writers and content designers. Working with real content and a content strategy makes my (low-fidelity) designs so much better that I have a hard time imaging that I used to work with ‘lorem ipsum.’
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