We’ll break down the definition of craft into sub-fields (e.g. Visual Design) and then break those down even further into individual skills (e.g Typography).

Visual Design — basics of communication Interaction Design — guiding the user through flows Platform knowledge — native, web, emerging platforms Research methods — usability, cognitive and behavioral psychology Design tools — Sketch, Framer, Figma, Abstract, whiteboards…

Take these lists and others that follow as a starting point to get you thinking about skills you have or might want to develop in the future. Use this leveling framework to grade yourself on the individual skills.

1. Visual Design

Visual design plays a vital role in the digital experience. At a visceral level it gives the user clues on what they’re about to see. Is this experience serious or playful? An expert visual designer is able to come up with a pleasing composition of elements on a screen.

Today visual designers have more power as they play an active role in creating design systems that embed visual design and interaction rules in them which span multiple platforms.

Some of the core visual design skills include,

Typography — choosing type for function and emotion, creating typographic scales that work across multiple platforms and contexts, creating your own typefaces. Grid — creating grids that guide the eye but knowing when to intentionally break the grid, working with baseline and vertical grids, considering the macro and micro grid interactions. Layout — creating pleasing layouts that come together through a combination of typography, image, illustration and so on. Color — choosing colors that are functional and emotional, colors that are pleasing and accessibility compliant, understanding cultural contexts of color and trends. Iconography — choosing icons, doing minor vector work, creating an icon family that scales across different platforms and contexts. Illustration — using illustration in proper contexts, understanding the nuances of colors and shapes to make changes to existing illustrations, creating your own from a sketch. Image — using images to evoke a certain aesthetic, image manipulation and editing, creating and shooting your own photos, coming up with image and photo guidelines. Motion — animation between screens, micro-interactions, making the customer experience feel polished and using motion design to inform, guide and delight.

The best way to learn visual design is to practice. Better yet, try practicing and critiquing design with other senior visual designers. Pick up on their good habits and pick their brains on how they think through a visual design problem. You’ll save yourself a ton of time and acquire shortcuts faster.

Outside of that, make time to replicate and copy work of others to understand how they’ve made it. See if you can uncover not just the individual design elements but common patterns and think through the problem they were trying to solve.

2. Interaction Design

Interaction design is about understanding true user intent and developing proper workflows to get the job done. It’s the art and science of communicating to the customer in a way that makes sense for them while pushing back on technology constraints meaningfully.

Sketching — exploring many ideas quickly on whiteboards and paper. Storyboarding to communicate key interactions. Showing rough ideas via UI thumbnails or drafts of complex multi-platforms flows. Storytelling — creating a compelling narrative of your work, “sketching” out your user’s world via succinct scenarios, writing a story that stakeholders can relate to and thus take action to make it a reality. Wireframes — moving quickly from low-fidelity sketches, utilizing whiteboards, paper, or digital low-fidelity diagrams. Flows — distilling complex information into abstract flows, mapping existing flows of apps, knowing how to balance comprehensiveness with complexity, mapping out flows for multiple platforms and services Diagrams — synthesizing complex data and communicating abstract concepts to yourself, to other designers and stakeholders. Patterns — awareness of interaction patterns and best practices that are being used right now and why they’re effective. Understanding the reasoning why certain patterns work better than others depending on the platform and context. Prototyping — communicating your work effectively through a series of different stages of prototypes (within a screen, across screens), focusing on prototyping the critical few interactions while leaving out the unimportant many. Copy — giving your product’s customers “information scent”, guiding them through the experience via effective copy. Providing a good way of finding clues and being consistent across screens and platforms.

Resources

There are tons of great resources out there but if you had to read one (hefty!) book, then you should read About Face 4 by Alan Cooper. This is a great primer to anyone new to industry or for anyone to revisit the foundational concepts.

3. Platform knowledge

Understanding the advantages and constraints of platforms is an important skill of an interaction designer. This includes understanding best practices and trends for each platform. Aside from technical specifics, it helps to understand the platform market, recency and adoption of a platform.

Responsive web — creating a system that works well across multiple sizes and deals with different platform nuances (touch vs point interfaces). Mobile — understanding touch, mobile and tablet affordances, being aware of guidelines for iOS (Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines) and Android apps (Material design). Wearables — unique patterns in the experience (e.g. designing for bracelets, rings, watches), understanding use cases, small tap targets, managing battery life and other hardware considerations. Voice — designing trees, anticipating user intent and actions, providing cues, new interaction patterns. AR/VR — inventing new patterns or stress-testing existing ones, guiding users in unfamiliar settings, understanding different VR platforms — their capabilities and trade-offs.

Between native (touch) and web (point and click) devices, you’ll have your work cut out for you. If you never touch any other platform, you’ll probably be fine and you might be even better off since mature platforms are easier to understand and relate to.

But if you’re in for adventure and want to explore or pioneer new methods of interaction, you’re in luck! New wearable devices are emerging all the time and the world of augmented reality and virtual reality while maturing, still has a long way to go.

4. Research methods

As a product designer you probably don’t need to be a research expert but strong interaction design skills are complemented well with solid research skills. Understanding your customers, their goals and being empathetic to their needs helps you focus efforts on things that truly matter.

At a large company you’ll likely have access to dedicated research resources. But when there is a crunch or when you do need to do something quick, it helps to be familiar with core principles of doing research to get feedback and steer the work in the right direction.

Heuristic review — the easiest way to critique an interface via a list of guidelines for UI Design (e.g. Jakon Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design) Competitive audits— analyzing your competitors to learn about their offerings without falling into the trap of copying them. Analogous domains— extracting relevant patterns from a different domain and applying it in your work. Usability testing — structuring and running unbiased usability studies that will give you proper directional data with confidence. Surveying methods — understanding basic tenets of how to write a survey, how to take a correct sample and how to synthesize data. Contextual inquiry — monitoring users in context, understanding how work is actually being done (as opposed to how they say it is) and being empathetic to their needs and workarounds. Research planning — putting the methods together in a plan that’s cost effective, leading to faster feedback loops with the right amount of rigor.

Resources

Need to brush up on research techniques? Check out Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research. This book lays out the core fundamentals while arming you with practical tips.

Psychology principles

Designers should also have a basic understanding of cognitive and behavioral psychology,

Cognitive psychology — limitations of human memory and how people make sense of information and what they pay attention to

— limitations of human memory and how people make sense of information and what they pay attention to Behavioral psychology—understanding how to influence and guide people with your product.

5. Design tools

Think of design tools as an extension of your skills. Are there tools that can help you generate more quality ideas faster and communicate them effectively? Tools keep changing every day so think of how these tools support your workflow,

Low fidelity exploration — quick sketches on paper using pens, markers, sketching flows and UI on whiteboards. Static UI— creating polished mockups quickly (Sketch, Adobe XD, Figma). Prototyping — creating interactive prototypes and communicating micro and macro interactions for developers and users (InVision, Framer, Principle). Capturing feedback— helping your stakeholders comment and share their feedback on your work (Google Slides, InVision). Diagrams of complex interactions — providing a bird’s eye view for yourself and others of how screens and information flows (Overflow, Omnigraffle). Pixel perfect precision — when you need to do retouching or pixel perfect precision usually for photography (Photoshop).

Of course to some degree if you’re working with others (be it a client or for a company) you’ll probably have some tools mandated for you. You’ll also have to think about hand-offs (to clients, to engineering, etc.) and collaboration. Usually a combination of Sketch, Photoshop (or equivalent), and a quick prototyping tool like InVision are good enough to get started.

The changing nature of tools

Just don’t outsource all of your thinking to tools. The best ideas come from rough, unpolished mockups and prototypes that leave some room for imagination. Can pen and paper or a whiteboard sketch (not Sketch) suffice?

How quickly can you get feedback on your ideas? Airbnb’s machine learning prototype gets rids of the tool layer altogether. Tools will always change and evolve but great thinking is never out of style.