Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for UX UI Designer

🎯 Role Definition

The UX UI Designer is a product-focused design professional responsible for shaping intuitive, accessible, and visually compelling digital experiences across web and mobile. This role owns end-to-end interaction design and UI execution, partners closely with product managers, engineers, and researchers to translate user needs and business goals into scalable design solutions, and contributes to design systems, usability testing, and data-informed optimization.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior UX Designer with a proven portfolio of web/mobile projects
Visual Designer or UI Designer transitioning to product/interaction work
Product Designer or Front-End Developer with design experience

Advancement To:

Senior UX/UI Designer or Senior Product Designer
Lead Product Designer or Design Lead
Design Manager, Head of Design, or Director of Product Design

Lateral Moves:

UX Researcher or Design Research Lead
Product Manager or Growth/Product Analyst

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Conduct end-to-end user experience and user interface design for web and mobile products, translating product requirements and user research into high-fidelity interactive prototypes and pixel-perfect visual designs.
Lead discovery and collaborative design workshops with product, engineering, and research partners to define user journeys, map information architecture, and prioritize features that maximize user value and business outcomes.
Create and iterate on wireframes, user flows, sitemaps, and interactive prototypes using Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Framer, or Principle to validate design hypotheses and accelerate stakeholder feedback.
Design and maintain a scalable, component-driven design system including tokens, components, patterns, and documentation to ensure visual consistency and accelerate development handoff.
Plan, design, and moderate usability testing sessions (remote or in-person), analyze qualitative and quantitative results, and synthesize insights into actionable design recommendations that improve conversion, engagement, and retention.
Collaborate with product managers and data analysts to define UX success metrics, instrument experiments (A/B tests), and use analytics (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude) to iterate on UI decisions and prioritize product backlog items.
Produce responsive designs and adaptive layouts that support mobile-first and cross-device experiences while ensuring performance and accessibility (WCAG) best practices are embedded in design decisions.
Translate product requirements into clear design specifications, redlines, and developer-ready assets; maintain design-to-engineering handoff via Zeplin, Figma, or Storybook and participate in development sprints to ensure fidelity and quality.
Craft motion and micro-interaction specifications that communicate state changes, transitions, and affordances to improve discoverability and delight across interfaces.
Mentor and review work of junior designers, provide constructive feedback, and help raise the team’s design standards, processes, and craft through design critiques and pairing sessions.
Partner with UX researchers to recruit participants, co-run ethnographic studies, customer interviews, and diary studies, and translate research findings into personas, empathy maps, and prioritized problem statements.
Lead accessibility audits and remediation planning, ensuring designs comply with WCAG guidelines, keyboard navigation, semantic markup, and assistive technology compatibility.
Drive cross-functional alignment by presenting design concepts, roadmaps, and iteration plans to stakeholders, synthesizing feedback, and negotiating trade-offs between user needs, technical constraints, and business objectives.
Own the visual language and brand system for product interfaces, ensuring typographic scale, color systems, iconography, and imagery support brand consistency and user comprehension.
Design for performance and scalability by optimizing UI assets, recommending front-end performance patterns, and collaborating with engineering to reduce load times and interaction latency.
Establish and document UX principles, heuristics, and success criteria that guide product teams and new project onboarding; evangelize user-centered design practices across the organization.
Execute conversion optimization initiatives for key funnels (onboarding, checkout, activation) through hypothesis-driven design experiments and iterative UX improvements.
Integrate accessibility, privacy, and localization considerations into design flows to ensure global product readiness and legal/regulatory compliance.
Collaborate with marketing and content teams to create landing pages, emails, and campaign assets that align with product UX and maintain coherent visual standards.
Conduct competitive analysis and industry trend research to inform innovative interactions, platform-specific patterns, and product differentiation opportunities.
Partner with engineering during QA to validate implemented UI, provide guidance on edge cases, and sign off on production-ready interfaces.
Maintain and evolve a pattern library or component repository, tracking usage, versioning, and technical constraints to minimize design debt and inconsistencies.
Translate complex data or workflows into simplified, human-centered interfaces by leveraging information architecture, progressive disclosure, and clear visual hierarchy.
Drive iterative improvements to onboarding, help flows, and in-product guidance to reduce friction, lower support load, and increase first-time user success metrics.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc stakeholder requests for UI assets, design proposals, or rapid prototypes for executive review or pilot launches.
Contribute to quarterly product strategy sessions by providing design feasibility analysis and time-to-value estimates for proposed features.
Assist in maintaining design operations (DesignOps) including project templates, component naming conventions, and sprint prioritization to improve team throughput.
Help recruit, interview, and onboard new design hires; participate in portfolio reviews and candidate assessments.
Document design decisions, accessibility considerations, and usability test artifacts in a central knowledge base for cross-team reference.
Provide design support for post-launch monitoring, triage production issues, and rapid iteration on user-reported pain points.
Create export-ready visual assets for marketing, press, and partner integrations while ensuring product brand consistency.
Run occasional training sessions on tools and processes (Figma, prototyping best practices, accessibility checks) to upskill non-design partners.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proficiency in Figma (design systems, prototyping, component libraries) and experience maintaining shared team libraries and tokens.
Strong UI design skills in Sketch or Adobe XD, including visual layout, typography, color theory, and iconography.
High-fidelity prototyping experience using Figma, Framer, Principle, or InVision to validate interactions and transitions.
Solid understanding of interaction design patterns, information architecture, and wireframing best practices.
Familiarity with front-end technologies (HTML5, CSS3, basic JavaScript) to provide accurate engineering handoffs and constraints.
Experience creating and maintaining design systems, component libraries, and documentation (Storybook, Zero-height).
Practical knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1), semantic HTML, and designing for assistive technologies.
Usability testing and user research facilitation skills, including study design, recruitment, moderation, and synthesis.
Data literacy: ability to read analytics dashboards (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude), define funnel metrics, and interpret A/B test results.
Prototyping for mobile and responsive web, including breakpoints, adaptive layouts, and touch/gesture considerations.
Experience with version control and collaboration workflows for design assets (Figma version history, branching strategies).
Familiarity with design handoff tools (Zeplin, Abstract, Avocode) and experience producing developer-ready specifications.
Knowledge of motion design principles and use of tools to create micro-interactions and animated prototypes.
Localization and internationalization-aware design experience, including right-to-left (RTL) layouts and variable text lengths.

Soft Skills

Strong verbal and written communication skills to present design rationale clearly to non-design stakeholders and cross-functional teams.
Empathy and user advocacy: ability to translate qualitative insights into actionable design solutions that prioritize user needs.
Collaboration and stakeholder management: balance product, engineering, and business priorities while building consensus.
Problem-solving mindset with a data-informed approach to prioritizing design work and validating outcomes.
Facilitation and workshop leadership to run discovery, ideation, and design-sprint sessions effectively.
Attention to detail and visual craft, ensuring pixel-level quality and consistency across product surfaces.
Time management and prioritization skills to manage multiple projects and deliverables within sprint-based development cycles.
Mentorship and feedback delivery that supports junior designers’ growth and improves team design quality.
Adaptability and resourcefulness in fast-paced product environments with ambiguous requirements.
Negotiation and persuasion skills to advocate for user-centered trade-offs and influence product roadmaps.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Visual Communication, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Computer Science, or related field; OR equivalent professional experience with a strong portfolio.

Preferred Education:

Master’s or post-graduate certificate in HCI, Interaction Design, UX Design, Product Design, or related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Interaction Design
Visual Communication / Graphic Design
Industrial Design
Computer Science with UX focus
Cognitive Psychology or Behavioral Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–6 years of hands-on UX/UI or product design experience for mid-level roles; 5+ years where senior responsibilities are expected.

Preferred: Demonstrated portfolio of end-to-end product design work, experience building design systems, running usability testing, collaborating with engineering to ship production applications, and measurable impact on product KPIs (engagement, conversion, retention).