As someone who has managed and worked with designers for most of my adult life, I get a lot of calls from people looking to check references on someone I\u2019ve worked with or find out from me if there are other designers they should be talking to.<\/p>\n
When I think about the range of critique I\u2019ve provided in these situations, the term I always use to describe the very best designers I\u2019ve ever worked with is five-tool designer<\/em>.<\/p>\n Five-tool player<\/em> is actually a baseball term used to describe someone who can hit for average, hit for power, run the bases, throw, and field. It\u2019s the highest compliment you can pay to a player and is generally reserved for only the most complete athletes, like Ken Griffey Jr. and Willie Mays. In fact, Major League Baseball estimates there are only 8 five-tool players<\/a> in the game today.<\/p>\n Everyone looks for slightly different things in the designers they hire, but for me, there are five tools that stand above the rest.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is probably the most obvious skill laypeople think of when they think of design. Having this skill doesn\u2019t necessarily mean you are a master iconographer or can reproduce the Take On Me video<\/a> in an afternoon of After Effects, but it does mean when it\u2019s time to slang pixels, you aren\u2019t throwing your arms in the air and saying \u201cI\u2019m just the wireframe person\u201d. You should be able to produce beautiful final assets yourself, in most cases, and only need the help of specialists in special situations (for example, if you were looking for a particular illustrative style for some marketing materials or tutorials).<\/p>\n If visual & animation skills are mostly about how a product looks and feels, interaction skills are about how a product works. When I tap the search field, do we put recent searches or trending searches in the dropdown? When a new user comes to the service, what\u2019s the strategy for getting users through the onboarding flow? In the past, this skill has been heavily oriented towards wireframing and sitemapping, but it now includes work that is much closer to the finished product. Prototyping, in particular, is a skill that no interaction designer should be without at this point in time. If you can\u2019t prototype by now, you just aren\u2019t trying. This skill is an absolute must, and it’s not difficult to learn anymore.<\/p>\n If you work on a team of mine, the best compliment I could ever pay you is telling you that you are where problems go to die<\/strong>. We don\u2019t have a good icon for Home. \u201cI\u2019ll take care of it.\u201d<\/em> Our CSS styles are getting out of control. \u201cI\u2019ll take care of it.\u201d<\/em> JimBob is not getting along with KellyAnn. \u201cI\u2019ll take care of it.\u201d<\/em> There are so many things in product development that conspire to lengthen, weaken, or outright kill what could be great projects, and people are either net negatives or net positives in that equation. The key to being great in this area, however, is not just being a \u201cnet positive\u201d but being a consistently reliable positive<\/em>. The people you can throw any problem at \u2014 technical or interpersonal \u2014 are always the most valuable people on the team.<\/p>\n Young designers often begin their careers thinking that if they just learn to design the best stuff, the world will beat a path to their door. It makes sense to think this, given how visual a lot of our work is, combined with our ability to display it easily for all the world to see. Pixels, however, don\u2019t get you jobs. People do. You may get that first nibble from your sickass Dribbble shizzle, but once someone starts asking others what you\u2019re like to work with, that\u2019s going to be the difference between “we’ll keep you on file” and an amazing job that could catapult you into a wildly successful career. This doesn\u2019t mean you should be a suck-up or avoid conflict if and when it is necessary. As one of my favorite ex-teammates loves to say, \u201cyou have to break some eggs to make an omelet\u201d, but one of the most important skills you need to learn in your career is not just how to be a great designer but how to be a great teammate. In fact, think of the interactions you have with engineers, PMs, researchers and other designers just as you would any other interaction design problem. What is the desired outcome? How do your teammates need to feel in order to help you produce this outcome? What do you need to do to make them feel that way? Hint: it usually does not involve being an asshole.<\/p>\n Leadership is probably the most fungible of the five tools, because it can come in so many forms. You might think to yourself, \u201cwait… the best designer I\u2019ve ever met is amazing, but she isn\u2019t really a leader\u201d. What you probably mean by that is maybe she doesn\u2019t have any direct reports, or she is a little quiet in meetings, or she doesn\u2019t put the term \u201cthought leader\u201d in her bio. But you know what she does do? She runs the meetings when the PM is out sick. She pushes the team to explore other solutions when they\u2019ve tunneled in on only one. She pulls the person who got yelled at in the meeting aside and explains why it happened. She mentors the new hire. She is the \u201cheat-sink\u201d when tensions flare. All of these are leadership activities, and not enough people get credit for them publicly because they may not be an official part of the job description or the Silicon Valley archetype of a leader, but believe me, the people on the ground know who leads and who doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n So there you have it. The five tools.<\/p>\nVisual Design & Animation<\/h3>\n
Interaction Design<\/h3>\n
Getting Things Done<\/h3>\n
Teamwork<\/h3>\n
Leadership<\/h3>\n