Did you know 88% of online shoppers stop visiting websites after having one poor user experience? Meanwhile, 23% of customers who had a positive interaction typically share their experience with ten or more people.
UI/UX designers enhance your overall user satisfaction by uncovering new ways to improve customer experiences. They do this by ensuring products, services, websites, and more are efficient, easy to use, accessible, and enjoyable—even for older products/services that have been on the market for years. For physical products, this includes packaging, the purchasing process, and the product's transportation. For digital products, this involves technical troubleshooting and even how to properly explain the product to other people.
To be successful, strong UX designers must have empathy for the user, a clear understanding of user-centered design (UCD) and powerful analytical abilities. They must know technical limitations and business strategies and goals backed by experience with different technologies. UX designers conduct user research, interviews and surveys, and use the information to create sitemaps, customer journey maps, wireframes, and prototypes.
Roles and Responsibilities of a UI/UX Designer
70% of online businesses that fail to be successful have poor usability. User experience (UX) designers create optimal practices for interacting with digital or physical products. They work on everything from standard business websites to espresso machines. They focus on service design, such as producing the overall experience of using public transportation or attending doctor appointments. Their primary focus is analyzing users, understanding behaviors, and architecting a user journey that allows them to accomplish their tasks with minimal effort.
66% of millennial consumers expect real-time responses and experiences. User interaction (UI) designers specifically focus on how users navigate through digital products. User interaction design is recognized as a UX function. This is why UI/UX is often used conversely in job titles and job descriptions.
Required Skills
UI/UX designers are required to possess numerous critical skills and qualifications in their position. Examples of required skills include the following.
- Conducting user research. Candidates must have experience uncovering user behaviors, goals, motivations, and needs. UX teams typically collect data via interviews with users/stakeholders, competitive analysis, online surveys, and focus groups. They analyze data and convert it into qualitative and quantitative information to help guide decision-making.
- Creating user personas. UX designers recognize key user groups and create representative personas of their behaviors and demographics. Personas are used to make in-depth scenarios, a day-in-the-life of a persona, which shows how products fit into the user’s everyday routine.
- Defining the data architecture of a digital product. UX designers organize content within apps or websites to guide the user to accomplish tasks or educate them about the product. An effective information architecture informs users where they are and how to find the data they need—think of a chatbot with quick-answer prompts.
- Designing user flows and wireframes. UX designers form a low-fidelity representation of a design. Wireframes represent the user journey as they would interact within a website or app. This includes testing images and buttons. These are expressed in a simplified version utilizing placeholders.
- Creating prototypes. Generating a final interactive version of the product pre-development, which is either clickable or tangible. This should enable users to test the main interactions of the product. Modern prototyping tools allow designers to record prototypes as videos to guide users through design functions.
- Analyzing products with real users. UX designers collect feedback from users based on a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is the first version of a product with the minimum qualifications required for the go-to-market. Product testing is often structured (designers gather user feedback by asking specific questions) or unstructured (users are left to their devices to figure out how to use the product, and feedback is gathered based on their authentic response rather than explicit questioning).
- Designing user interactions. Designers focus on how users navigate through digital products. User interaction design is recognized as a UX function.
- Ensuring the product aligns with your team's vision. UI designers work to ensure the user journey reflects the UX team’s product vision. For example, making sure users can complete all the steps in an online purchase or respond to upsell or cross-sell prompts at checkout. Some UI designers manage voice user interfaces for voice-activated IoT devices, including smart speakers or virtual assistants. They design conversation pathways that expedite tasks for the user without a visual interface aid.
How to Streamline Your Hiring Process
As a group of entrepreneurs, we found ourselves frequently frustrated by the difficulty of finding UI/UX designers. We came from different backgrounds, so hiring a designer with specific skills was tough enough. But finding the perfect platform to do so was, well, frankly, a waste of time! We would recommend candidates we found to one another, but each of us discovered different needs, so each subsequent person would end up having to re-do the research.
Precisely why our platform provides a list of the different websites we use to find candidates, a ranking system, algorithm, an online quiz and free job description templates to ensure you find the candidate that meets your qualifications.
Our hope? That these features save you time and streamline your hiring process. Try it for yourself by using our UI/UX job description template.
UI/UX Designer Job Description Template
How to Use our Template
Finding a professional UI/UX candidate can pose as a challenge. Especially now as the market grows and remote opportunities rise. Precisely why saving time right now is essential. Streamline operations by simply copy and pasting our UI/UX template above to your job board/website.
About Our Team
[Use this space to place an honest and straightforward testimonial about the identity and focus of your team. Remember to shed light on the company culture and overall day-to-day operations.]
UI/UX Designer Briefing
Our team is searching for a dedicated UI/UX Designer to turn our software into a simple-to-use yet visually stunning product for our clients. Core responsibilities involve gathering user requirements, working on the graphic design and building navigation components. Experience with design software and wireframe tools is a must!
Key Responsibilities
- Produce user-centered designs by understanding business requirements, the voice of the customer, user journeys, customer feedback, and usability findings
- Promptly create user flows, wireframes, prototypes, low and high fidelity mockups
- Interact with product and engineering teams, as well as business stakeholders and executive leadership
- Ensure the customer’s voice is present by incorporating customer feedback, usage metrics, and usability findings into the design
- Producing metrics analysis post-launch to inform design/UX optimization efforts
- Understand how to use prototyping tools such as Sketch, Invision, or equivalent
- Maintain exceptional communication, presentation, collaboration, and interpersonal skills
Critical Requirements
- Proven background as a UI/UX Designer (or similar role)
- Portfolio of work
- Experience with wireframe tools (e.g., Wireframe.cc and InVision)
- Knowledge of current design software practices (e.g., Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop)
- Strong communication skills
- Experience collaborating with stakeholders
- Excellent time-management skills
- BSc in Computer Science, Design, (or relevant field)
Compensation
Compensation for this role is competitive and based on experience. (Note* You may wish to list health insurance, 401K and other applicable benefits here.)
How To Hire a Designer for your UI/UX design needs
When searching for a professional UI/UX designer, remember you are looking for a multi-disciplinary magician. We suggest you consider these key factors when hiring a designer:
- What is their skill level? What type of experience does this candidate have around usability testing, design thinking, and qualitative research? Think about their expertise with product development, design, and collaboration with other teams.
- How is their project management? A UI/UX designer needs to hit deadlines, set milestones, and correspond with various teams to bring the product experience to reality.
- Have you reviewed their portfolio? Think about the projects they have worked on and compare them to your own. A similar aesthetic and approach will be necessary.
- Can you work with a remote candidate? Consider which programs you need the UI/UX designer to use and how it fits your current workflow.
Suppose you want to test a candidate before hiring them. In that case, we suggest you utilize alternative staffing which allows you to hire remote independent contractors, part-time workers, seasonal workers, gig workers, and more.
Alternative staffing has grown rapidly over the past year and is especially popular now as businesses anticipate utilizing digital technologies and remote work. Why? This method provides undeniable benefits to employers and workers. Companies gain flexibility and greater access to staff while employers cut costs, boost productivity, and tap into distributed and on-demand networks—especially now during the pandemic. Check out our suggestions of sites to hire a UI or UX designer using alternative staffing methods.
What do you think? How valuable are UX/UI designers for products, services and the digital market space?