It won’t surprise you when I say that there’s a boom in digital product creation worldwide today. For example, as of September 2022, there are 1.98 billion websites in the world. Such rapid technological development not only creates new professions but also increases demand for existing ones. Did you know that UI designer is among the top 15 most in-demand professions? In this blog, I want to tell you about the UI designer profession, required skills, and career path.

Who is a UI Designer?

UI design is User Interface design. User Interface Design includes all visual and interactive elements of a product interface, including buttons, typography, color schemes, and more.

A UI designer’s goal is to create such an intuitive experience that doesn’t require excess thinking from users. They care about interaction design and the aesthetic side of digital products, determining which color to give a button or which font to use for button text, so users can easily understand which button to click for their desired action.

Skills

For a UI designer to be in demand in the market, it’s important to possess three types of skills: Soft, Hard, and Transferable skills.

SOFT SKILLS: ● Adaptability ● Collaboration ● Creativity ● Communication ● Empathy

HARD SKILLS: ● Visual branding ● Prototype creation ● Responsive design for different devices ● Wireframing

TRANSFERABLE SKILLS: ● Graphic design ● Customer relations ● Project management ● Research

Career Development

“Today, we are in an active process of design digitalization. In this reality, there’s naturally a growing need for creating products, systems, and services that will simplify human interaction with computers/mobile devices. UI designers lead this process. Therefore, it’s natural that the demand for them is growing daily” – Sopho Gogishvili, UI Design Lecturer

The demand for professional talent naturally reflects on compensation. For example, did you know that UI designer hourly rates on Upwork range from $20 to $40? Their average salary in Georgia is 2500 GEL. In America, according to Indeed’s data, the average annual salary for a UI designer is $77,832.

Beyond financial benefits, “people in this profession naturally tend to specialize in different directions based on their interests and abilities: some are better at dashboards, others at image-focused landing pages, some are interested in web, others in applications, and in some cases, some work on non-graphical interfaces.” – Sopho Gogishvili

As you can see, the career path for a UI designer can be very diverse.

So, if after reading this blog you think you want to step into the design field in this direction, I recommend taking the first step