10 Critical Soft Skills for UX Designers & How to Develop Them

Becoming a UX designer involves a rewarding but challenging career path. Like many careers in the digital industry, it requires individuals to harness hard skills (like user research, information architecture, prototyping, etc.) and soft skills.

Often carelessly, junior designers neglect soft skills focusing instead on learning design software and polishing their portfolios. Despite the importance of hard skills in the UX design process, you will not be able to get too far ahead in your career without soft skills.

The ability to communicate, collaborate, emphasize, listen attentively, and receive and deliver feedback builds the core of a UX designer’s job. If you don't know how to use a tool, you can learn it pretty quickly. But nobody will teach you how to manage your time or articulate your design decisions — it’s up to you to master these small but significant things yourself.

Discover which soft skills are most common in UX job descriptions and how to develop them.

Communication skills

Although designers are more accustomed to using visual tools to communicate, even the most fascinating designs can't speak for themselves. You need to know how to provide feedback to your colleagues, articulate your solutions to stakeholders, or discuss technical requirements with the dev team.

Communicating effectively with clients and colleagues demonstrates intelligence and expertise in what you’re talking about. Additionally, expressing yourself and listening attentively during a job interview can make or break your chances.

How can UX designers develop their communication skills?

• Be an expert on your topic. Come prepared when you need to present your design decisions to your team and persuade them that your designs are the right ones for solving a specific problem. Be able to back up your words with research data and supporting evidence, and rehearse your speech at least once.
• Practice public speaking. Even if you don’t have enough expertise or confidence to participate in large UX design conferences, practice your communication skills in front of your team, your relatives, or even your dog. Try to speak more during your team’s meetings — you don’t necessarily have to pile on new ideas or design suggestions. Just comment on your colleagues' work or give them kudos. The point is to break your inner vow of silence.

Empathy

Empathy encompasses the first phase of the design thinking process and defines the ability to put yourself in your users’ shoes and see the world from their perspective. Designers need empathy to create products that address users’ problems and meet their expectations. Otherwise, you may waste time and resources developing solutions that no one actually needs.

According to Matt Bogado, a Senior Interaction Designer at Google, empathy is closely interlaced with active listening skills. "When you listen, you can empathize with customers/users, which leads to user-focused solutions," Matt says.

How can UX designers develop empathy?

• Practice empathy in real life. Observe how people solve their problems in real life and try to look at situations from their perspective. Try to imagine the feelings and thoughts they are experiencing. For example, when riding a bus, pay attention to how people behave during rush hours. Are buses equipped enough to make everyone feel comfortable? What do individuals do when they can’t reach the grab handles?

• Learn from users. Conversation mining is an excellent research method to learn what people think, like, and dislike about a product through public domains like website forums, app store reviews, posts, and comments on social media platforms. Use this method to feel users’ pain and envision how you, as a designer, could help them with their problems.

• Create empathy maps. Empathy maps can be used at the very early stages of the product development cycle. They help teams understand users' attitudes and behaviors before developing requirements and generating solutions.

• Build user personas. User personas are fictional but realistic profiles of a product’s end users. Getting familiar with users’ pain points, motivations, and frustrations helps the whole team visualize who their users are and develop empathy for them.

• Set aside your biases. Be honest with yourself and define what biases you might have about your target audience that may affect your opinion and decisions.

Curiosity

The job of a UX designer doesn’t end once the laptop is closed. Being a UX designer implies staying curious about everything that is happening around you.

But what is curiosity? An individual's curiosity is an insatiable desire to explore the unfamiliar, uncertain, and complex and see them as learning opportunities. Designers that are constantly driven by challenges and unknown paths grow and progress faster.

How can UX designers develop curiosity?

• Pay attention to the usability of everyday objects. Look around and start paying attention to how things work around you. For example, does your electronic kettle provide enough clues about its state (off or on)? Does its handle comfortably fit into your palm? Is its design aesthetically pleasing?
• Explore new apps and websites. Check out new apps and websites that catch your eye. What would you do differently about their typography, colors, navigation, or UX copy? Such questions can help you practice creative and critical thinking.
• Learn more about design outside of your work. Being curious is developing an interest in disciplines beyond UX design. Attend art galleries and photography exhibitions, pay attention to the printing design of books and magazines, and get curious about the intricacies of movie production. Curiosity expands your views and interests and brings you inspiration for your work.

Collaboration skills

Although many tasks are carried out by a UX designer individually, the job requires a great deal of collaboration. UX designers often have to collaborate with design colleagues, clients, developers, project managers, and other stakeholders. Collaboration with non-designers is even more beneficial since it helps you gain a wider perspective on a problem and create a more intuitive, user-oriented experience.

How can UX designers improve their collaboration skills?

• Seek feedback. Share your wireframes and prototypes with other team members and listen to what they say. Sometimes, people without a design background can see things from the perspective of users better.
• Be proactive. Don’t wait for others to ask you for your ideas. Share your ideas and solutions when you feel like it.
• Take yourself less seriously. Alix Han, a Staff UX Design Lead and Architect at Google, recommends seeking feedback with an open mind. Your teammates aren't your enemies, and teamwork is key to delivering a successful product. Don't take criticism personally. Even if you disagree, face negative feedback with a smile and back up your words with solid evidence.

Critical thinking skills

In the design context, critical thinking implies questioning ideas and assumptions before making a final solution. This thinking approach is crucial for UX designers to create an objective perception of design problems and solutions.

Critical thinking consists of 2 main components:

• Observation. Let’s say your team is considering a few possible design solutions to a problem. Start by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages and measuring them against design practices, user needs, business requirements, and technical limitations.
• Questioning. Asking questions is a vital part of a UX designer’s job. UX designers ask questions when conducting user interviews, focus groups, surveys, usability testing, and other research methods. They also pose questions when evaluating other designers' work or when investigating a design problem. Questioning helps reveal wrong assumptions and biases about the problem.

How can UX designers develop critical thinking?

• Avoid biases. Stay objective when assessing other designers’ work or a design problem.
• Avoid black-and-white thinking. There’s no single solution to a problem, and you can always find more than one way to solve it.
• Practice active listening. Listen carefully to what your users and teammates say — you may discover a lot of interesting information. Don’t anticipate their answers but try to be fully present in any conversation and reflect on their words.[1]

🧠 Pro Tip! Use open-ended questions in conversations to encourage thoughtful, expansive responses and dig deeper into a subject.

Receiving feedback

While many designers fear receiving feedback, critique is an essential part of the negotiation process. It allows for different opinions to mingle and lead to a compromise.

The benefits of critique include:

• Preventing a design from steering away from the timeline, budget, scope, or other project constraints
• Involving non-designers to gain a different perspective on a problem
• Incorporating an iterative approach to the design process
• Distributing responsibility for the final output
• Building team trust and a collaborative spirit

Your design solution may not be obvious to everyone. You may encounter one-sided, ambiguous feedback, but it’s up to you to get value out of it and improve your mutual project.

What can UX designers do to develop the skills of handling feedback?

• Ask specific questions. Sometimes, people give a general opinion of what they like or dislike about designs. Ask specific questions to get stakeholders to talk more and prevent miscommunication.
• Stay away from feedback based on personal preferences. When people start commenting on a design from their personal likes and dislikes (”I don’t like purple”), ask them to think of the target audience’s preferences and imagine how users would feel about these designs.
• Avoid sounding sarcastic. Sometimes stakeholders, especially non-designers, offer contradicting thoughts or, alternatively, sound indecisive or indifferent, hesitant to express their non-design opinion. Your task is to encourage them, without sounding sarcastic or patronizing, to put themselves in users' shoes and express their thoughts.
• Don’t be afraid to start over. Like all humans, designers make mistakes. Hearing negative feedback can be unnerving, but try to think of this feedback as an opportunity to improve your mutual project. Take notes and reflect on them to learn from your mistakes.[2]

Creativity

Creative ideas don’t come to designers easily. Like many things in life, creativity requires practice and discipline, as contradictory as it may sound. To create something original, designers may spend hours observing and researching.

What can UX designers do to develop their creativity?

• Explore beyond the UX realm. Develop an interest in art and science to get inspiration from unusual channels.
• Collaborate with your teammates. The saying “two heads are better than one” exists for a good reason. Obviously, you can’t ask a colleague's opinion on every single task, but an outside perspective can help if you feel stuck.
• Practice creativity techniques. Try different techniques like the Six Thinking Hats or brainwriting to look at a problem from someone else's perspective.
• Create storyboards. This is a method that helps designers visualize user journeys through comic-book-like illustrations. Accompany each illustrated box with captions describing what’s happening in a picture and what users are feeling and thinking.
• Change your surroundings. It can be very refreshing to change your surroundings and work in a cafeteria or in a park for a change. Simply getting out for a walk and shifting your focus from your problems can do wonders for your brain.

Time Management

Most designers have worked late into the night to meet a deadline at least once (or possibly more than once) over the course of their design careers. UX designers are often pushed to finish their work faster to finish a sprint or meet a company’s budget. Knowing how to handle time pressures is a vital skill for designers.

What can UX designers do to improve their time management skills?

• Perfection is the enemy of the good. Sometimes, when you’re limited in time and resources, it’s okay to settle for “good enough” designs and plan to improve them later.
• Plan your day ahead. Define no more than 2-3 large tasks for a day and schedule them on your calendar. It’ll help you prioritize tasks and focus on the most important ones.
• Turn off notifications. Check Slack and email no more than 3 times a day. Disable other social media notifications until you've finished your work — they're great time drainers.
• Prioritize. There may be many people waiting for your help with small design favors that will steal your time. Put off these tasks until later, and don’t take them up until you've completed your current tasks.
• Plan time for rest and hobbies. Taking a short walk without your phone, practicing yoga, or spending time with a pet can help you recharge and improve focus when you return to work.
• Limit your team to 3 design revisions. Excessive rounds of feedback and design revisions can turn into a time waster. Set limits and value your time.[3]

Psychological flexibility

The term “psychological flexibility” defines the ability to stay aware of the present moment and welcome all emotions and thoughts that come to you, including the undesired ones. Psychologically flexible individuals don’t ignore their feelings or act impulsively. They effectively handle stressful situations and overcome failures.[4]

Inflexible designers, on the other hand, more often experience imposter syndrome and self-doubt, which impact their mental health and career growth. In the UX designer's role, you must be able to accept that some of your assumptions about user behavior may be incorrect. UX designers should also be stress-resistant as they often collaborate with different teammates, participate in discussions, and settle conflicts during design workshops.

Psychological flexibility depends on mindfulness, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution, but there are some tips that can help designers develop this skill:

• Practice mindfulness. It’s easier said than done, but there are exercises that help people to master the state of just being in the moment. For example, practice asking yourself how your body feels and naming the emotions you experience at any given moment. Meditation is also a wonderful way to calm down your rushing mind and focus on breathing.
• Practice a growth mindset. Those with a growth mindset believe that they can develop their skills and talents, as opposed to those with a fixed mindset. They enjoy the learning process, embrace challenges, and accept the fact that mistakes are an inevitable part of a journey.[5]

While hard skills like prototyping and research are teachable and expected, soft skills — like communication, empathy, and time management — are what truly set designers apart. They enable UX professionals to bridge the gap between technical expertise and human connection, fostering collaboration, problem-solving, and user-centered solutions. For example, clear communication ensures design ideas resonate with stakeholders, while active listening and empathy help uncover users' real needs and frustrations. Without these skills, even the most polished portfolio or technically sound designs risk missing the mark.

The key to mastering soft skills is consistent, real-world practice. For example, time management, curiosity, and psychological flexibility all contribute to a designer’s ability to thrive under pressure, adapt to uncertainty, and continuously grow. In essence, mastering soft skills doesn’t just elevate design — it cultivates resilience and impact, empowering designers to create solutions that matter.