The Softer Side of UX Consulting

Soft Skills Can Make a Huge Difference

For the past year, I have been consulting with a large healthcare insurer. When I started working with this client, it was a relatively hostile environment. Mistakes had been made in the past, and I was brought in to fix something that no one on the business side really thought was broken. In the words of the IT sponsor, I was supposed to make the user experience “sexy.” Anyone who has been on the receiving end of such a request knows what a challenge it is to even begin to capture exactly what that subjective term sexy might mean.

I started this task by finding out what had been done before. It soon came out that other designers had previously worked with the business, but those designers had just produced their designs and defended them without listening to the business. After hearing about the project’s history, I said something akin to the following:

“I don't know your business as well as you do. Not by a long shot. I have been here an hour, and most of you have been living this business for years. It would be arrogant of me to come in and design at you instead of with you. I have seen what you have built so far and, honestly, it can use some work. But it is much easier to tear things down, than it is to build them. So help me, and work with me to design and build something great. I cannot do it without you. My role is to guide you, to help you realize the vision you have, to take it out of your heads and your everyday process and create a solution that’s as great as you want it to be. To do that, I need you to guide me.”

I generally need to have this type of dialogue with people on a daily basis. While that statement did not provide an instantaneous solution to their problems, and I had to reinforce it over and over again, it did allow a beleaguered IT and business group to have some hope that this time things might be different.

Your Soft Skills Make Your Hard Skills Shine

My hard skills got me that client. My design expertise, my technical expertise, and my role within my company contributed to that client’s even entertaining the idea of having another UX professional help them. Those hard skills got me a seat at the table, and they are completely necessary for me to be able to be effective there. However, it is my soft skills that have enabled me to develop into a trusted advisor for my client—someone that people want to work with rather than their feeling like they’re forced to work with me.

This does not mean that everything is all smiles and warm fuzzies. There are still arguments and frustrations that both sides feel. But, again, soft skills can come to the rescue. Being able to relate to people prevents our professional differences from getting in the way of the fact that we are a team of people trying to do a very hard job together.

At the end of the day, you have to produce something—for example, a design, an implementation, a persona, or a wireframe. The hard skills of a UX professional remain a core value, if not the core value. However, your soft skills—how you interact with people to produce those deliverables and meet your goals—make the difference between your work with a client being a one time thing or something for which they consistently seek out your help.