What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
The best UX designers know the world and they can articulate how their designs are either working with or against the facts of the world.
Examples:
- The eye and brain: The designer knows how the eye and brain work, so they can tell you which elements on the screen they want people to notice and how they are going to use contrast etc to achieve that result.
- The domain: The designer can distill the knowledge they've received about the domain and tell you why a certain screen does or doesn't provide the means the user needs to accomplish their goals.
- The materials: The designer knows whether their interface will sit lightly on the conventions the programmers use to implement the product or if it will require lots of special cases that raise the cost of change.
- Human nature: The designer understands peoples' attention spans, their emotional ups and downs, their habits to skim or read carefully, their tolerances for learning curves and so on.
- Aesthetics: The designer knows what is appealing or what is unappealing to the user they're designing for.
There are probably more examples, but this gives a sense of the idea.
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