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Why I Stopped Hiring UX Designers with ‘Great Soft Skills’ (dnsk.work)

submitted 2 days ago by dnsk@lemmy.ml to c/web_design@lemmy.ml

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Five years ago, I hired a UX designer with exceptional soft skills. Articulate in meetings. Diplomatic with stakeholders. Created beautiful presentation decks. Responded to Slack within minutes with encouragement and emoji.

Three months later, the project failed because they’d agreed to every terrible idea anyone suggested.

Seventeen stakeholder requests. Fourteen contradictory features. Zero pushback.

The product launched as a compromise nobody wanted, designed by a committee nobody asked for.

Their soft skills were outstanding. Their design judgment was invisible.

That’s when I realized “great soft skills” in a job description usually means “won’t challenge us when we’re wrong.”

Which is exactly what clients don’t need but desperately want.

(Like hiring a doctor who agrees with your self-diagnosis.)

Now I hire differently.

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[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The bigger question is how you hire UX designers that don't just think about the "X" of the most unskilled, tech illiterate "U"s and force everyone down to that level. The number of times I've seen complex but time saving features taken away under the guise of "simplifying" the interface is infuriating.

"Our dumbest users can't figure out how the existing group select/filter button works on a list of items so go ahead and individually click the checkbox for all 100 items because fuck you." This actually happened with a cloud based service I had to use for work once.

Also the classic "Let's make you click on each list item which opens a new page with the action buttons instead of putting the most common ones on the list itself because we care about how clean the interface looks more than the people who have to do repetitive tasks on each list item."

Also "Error messages are scary so we'll be as vague and condescending as possible and if you actually want to troubleshoot the ten million abstractions we hide behind a single button you can go fuck yourself." And its friend "We made a slick single page web app that only has one URL so you can't send the page you're on to your team members."

Honorable mention to "Instead of cluttering the interface with grayed out buttons, we'll pretend the options you don't have permission to access don't exist to make it as hard as possible to figure out what you're doing wrong or what permission you need to ask IT/your manager for."