Roles and Responsibilities of UX Designer

Importance of UX Design

Imagine Ninja went shopping for new clothes. He visits a clothing website, excited to make further additions to his wardrobe. He does a search for t-shirts and gets hundreds of them as a result. The number of options available adds to his excitement. But the problem is, there is no filter that removes those t-shirts that he doesn’t want. That means that before he finds the one that he wants, he has to go through a lot of unsuitable options.

After spending a lot of time selecting the t-shirt that he wants, Ninja finally moves to make a purchase. As a new user, he has to create an account before purchasing something from that site. When Ninja went to create a new account, he saw many mandatory fields that needed to be filled. 

He thinks that shopping for clothes on this website is a hassle. So, he abandons his cart and starts to search on other websites.

That was an example of a bad user experience. Bad UX can cause a company to lose a lot of valuable customers, even when the product or service that they are selling is top-notch. That is why good UX design is really important.

Let us now move on to see the role of a UX designer.

Who is a UX Designer

Making a service or product useful, fun, and accessible is the role of the UX designer. Many businesses create user experiences. However, the term is most commonly linked to digital design for apps and websites. 

A UX designer is concerned with every area of a product's development. That ranges from branding and marketing to usability, function, and design. Their work includes finding new prospects for the product and company and tracking the end-to-end journey of a user's interaction with a product. 

Let us now move on to see the roles and responsibilities of UX designer.

Responsibilities of a UX Designer

Following are the roles and responsibilities of UX designer. 

• Understand the brand and the user: UX designers look into the problem they're trying to resolve for the user and how this relates to their brand's objectives.
   
• Conduct user research: Designers identify the behaviors, issues, needs, and goals of the user. Some user research methods include A/B testing, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and surveys.
   
• Persona Development: They create user personas based on the trends and patterns they found in their research. Each persona represents a potential user's traits, motives, needs, possible responses, and anything else that developers need to keep in mind. It helps organizations get a better understanding of the target audience.
   
• Creating Information Architecture: Information architecture describes how information is laid out and arranged to serve a specific purpose. The ultimate goal of this blueprint is to improve how users encounter, browse, and interact with the service or website.
   
• Wireframing: Creating wireframes is one of the first steps UX designers take before designing the final product. Simple UI design aspects are part of wireframes, which act as a roadmap for future work and product design.
   
• Prototyping and Designing: UX designers build prototypes that closely resemble the expected finished product in terms of look, feel, and functionality. These prototypes are used for testing.
   
• Conduct user testing: One of the most popular product testing methods is user testing, which involves letting consumers interact with a prototype of the final design to test its usability, accessibility, and intuitiveness.
   
• Present your work: UX designers give their clients or business the design solution.
   

Now that we know the roles and responsibilities of UX designer, let’s see what skills you need to become a successful user experience designer.

Skills of a UX Designer

We have divided the required skills into two parts. These are:

• Technical Skills
   
• Workplace Skills
   

Let’s look at them one by one.

Technical Skills

A UX designer needs to have the following technical skills:

• Wireframing: Prioritizing page items according to user demands on a web page layout without any visual style
   
• Prototyping: Creating a sample version or simulation of the final product to collect feedback
   
• Mockups: Creating a realistic visual representation of a website's or application's final look
   
• User flow: Making a diagram of each action a user takes to use a product or service
   
• Visual Design: Typography, color theory, layout, iconography, and general design theory are all critical parts of visual design.
   
• Design Software: UX designers create the visual aspects of a product using design software like Figma, Sketch, Photoshop, and Illustrator.
   
• User research: You can improve a product by conducting user research for the feature or product you're making.
   
• Usability Testing: Testing confirms the credibility of your design choices.
   
• Agile: You have to be familiar with Agile. It is a collection of project management techniques that are based on an iterative method of product creation. 
   
• Information Architecture: You need to understand the effective structuring and organizing of content.
   
• Application Development: It will be beneficial if you have a basic understanding of application development.
   

Now let us look at the soft skills that you need.

Workplace Skills

The following are the vital workplace skills that a UX designer should have:

• Collaboration
   
• Communication Skills
   
• Creativity
   
• Presentation Skills
   
• Prioritization
   
• Time management
   
• Empathy
   

We have discussed the skills, roles and responsibilities of UX designer. Now, let’s find out the average salary that a UX designer gets.

Salary of a UX Designer

The table below shows the average wages of UX designers in India.

*Please keep in mind that the salaries listed here are only estimates. They may vary according to the company.

After learning about the roles and responsibilities of UX designer, are you interested in learning how to become one? If yes, let’s find out.

How to Become a UX Designer?

You can follow these steps to build a career in UX design.

•  Step 1: Learn UX design fundamentals.
   
•  Step 2: Learn how to use design tools.
   
•  Step 3: Develop your projects to refine your UX design skills.
   
•  Step 4: Create a portfolio to display your UX design work.
   
•  Step 5: Apply for relevant UX design jobs.
   

When you choose a career, you always consider the future scope of that job. So let us find out the future scope of the job of a UX designer. 

Future Picture of UX Designers

As we stated, UX design is tied to successful business strategies. Only goods and services that offer a good user experience will be successful on the market. Following is the future picture of this industry.

• One of the fastest-growing industries in technology is user experience design. The number of job opportunities in this field is increasing day by day. 
   
• UX becomes more crucial as everyday activities (like shopping) move from offline to online.
   
• Retailers are increasingly offering experiences and services on top of their core product offerings, and UX is at the heart of this. 
   
• Even in the world of eCommerce, firms are becoming more concerned with predicting what users want and when they'll want it. They employ personalized UX designs to satisfy customers' needs and increase sales.
   

Now that you’re aware of the roles and responsibilities of UX designer, why don’t you look at the top companies to which you should consider applying for the job?

Top Companies for the Role of UX Designer 

Here’s a list of companies that offer excellent working environments and attractive salaries to UX designers.

• Microsoft
   
• Linkedin
   
• Paypal
   
• Meta
   
• Google
   
• Cisco
   
• Adobe
   
• Amazon
   

Let us now answer some frequently asked questions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a UX designer do?

Making a service or product useful, fun, and accessible is the role of the UX designer.

What is UX design?

UX design focuses on how products and services, including websites and apps, interact with users.

Does the job of a UX designer require coding?

You do not need coding to become a UX designer. Your ability to execute the design-thinking process will determine how successful you are as a UX designer.

Can I become a UX designer without a degree?

To be a UX designer, you don't need a specific degree, but you do need the required skills to be hired.

What do I need to learn to become a UX designer?

It would help if you focused on learning user research strategy, user experience fundamentals, design fundamentals, user interface, and responsive design.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned about the roles and responsibilities of UX designer. We also learned about the skills required to get that job. Finally, we looked at the top companies to work for as UX designers.

These articles can help you prepare for a job as a UX designer at your dream company.

• UX designer at Amazon
   
• UX designer at Google
   
• User Experience Engineer at Cisco
   

You can refer to these articles for interview preparation.

• System Design Interview Questions.
   
• Javascript Interview questions and answers.
   
• Git Interview Questions.
   

Refer to our Guided Paths on Coding Ninjas Studio to upskill yourself in Competitive Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms, JavaScript, System Design, and much more! 

To test your competency in coding, check out our mock test series and participate in the hosted contests in Coding Ninjas Studio! 

If you have just begun your learning process and are looking for quality questions from tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, etc., Look at our interview experiences and interview bundle for placement preparations.

Happy Learning!