5 qualities of great product designers

It takes a lot of skill to design usable digital products.

There are many qualities that a designer should have to produce the best possible product.

This blog post will explore five qualities that make a designer excellent: creativity, empathy, analytical skills, technical skill, and understanding human behavior.

Creativity

Creativity is often a designer's most vital asset. The more creative a person is, the better they can design innovative products that people can easily use and enjoy.

A good designer has to use imagination. A designer who takes risks with new ideas will have a unique design that differs from the crowd. He might also experiment with different techniques or materials which no one else has ever tried.

Creativity can also be used for problem-solving and thinking outside the box.

Creative designers are often ambitious, which is a quality looked after by many employers.

Having an innovative idea for a design could be enough to set you apart from the competition.

Empathy

Nowadays, digital Products are the way people interact with the world, so designers must have empathy. If designers can empathize with the person using their product, they're more likely to create something easy for them to use.

It's not a coincidence that "Empathise" is the first stage of the Design Thinking process. In this stage, the designer's job is to get inside the head of the person or company that commissioned the product.

Empathy is crucial because it means you can design a product that considers people's needs, wants, and responds to, leading to an easy-to-use experience. There's no use in creating something if nobody wants to use it!

Analytical skills

Product design is not art. You don't contemplate products; you use them to achieve a goal. It's not about beautification; it's about utility.

Designers need analytical skills to deconstruct what someone will be doing with their digital products to design a valuable and effective product for the end-user.

Analytical skills are crucial for measuring what's working and what does not.

Designers need to measure how a design is working or failing by getting feedback from the product itself.

The field of product analytics may be relatively recent. Still, its popularity has skyrocketed in recent years because it can help designers make better decisions about optimizing their designs for users and customers alike.

Designers should use Mixpanel, Amplitude, Hotjar, or other tools to measure how a design works or fails.

Technical skills

Being able to "walk the walk" is another vital asset to a great designer. You can spend a lot of time researching, but at some point, you should build something. It's not a case that the first step of the Build-Measure-Learn loop is Build.

Designers need to work with different platforms and styles, so they must have the technical skills to design usable digital products across all media.

A designer must also know how to effectively use Figma, Illustrator, or Sketch to create something, whether a wireframe or fully-formed design.

Understanding human behavior

The last quality we want to discuss is understanding human behavior.

Creating a design that looks great but has no natural substance is not worth the effort, so designers need to understand how people use digital products and expect to create successful designs quickly.

Our online behaviors differ significantly from our offline behaviors, so designers should adapt their designs to these different contexts.

For example, the Google Glass, while a groundbreaking product, failed because it was not designed for and tailored to the way people behave in their daily lives.

People just found it awkward to wear, and it didn't offer many benefits over what we already have.

Conclusions

We have listed some of the qualities a great designer should have to create usable digital products.

The best designers know that good design is not about how it looks but rather the experience and function of a product.

What do you think about it? Do these qualities describe great designers for you, or does the list leave anything out?

We would love to hear from you! You can write us at hello@donux.com or on Twitter @donuxcom.