Firstly, I am not the first person to do this. I found some great articles where people and teams have approached this in a similar way. Particularly I found the Figma team’s design skills approach really insightful. The UX studio team also has some good approaches on mapping your team's skills. I still felt that there was not one that was quite as granular as I would like.

You can see I managed to break down UX design into 18 different skills, I will outline each one so you have a better understanding and then I encourage you and your team to color in your UX matrix maps and see where you need to strengthen your skills.

UX Skills

1.UX strategy and planning — This is what any good leader needs to have, it is the ability to understand what tools to use in any given situation. It includes how to scope out your work and structure your project. More than that it also includes how to carry out the correct research and discovery work to identify pain points and know where to focus. Good UX strategy and planning will make or break your business.

Strategy also includes who to hire, how to structure your team and how to influence various key stakeholders around the business on the benefits of UX design. Planning might be something that is being looked at that year, whereas strategy you may well be looking at a plan for the next 5 years.

2. UX writing — Writing is now a critical part of user experience design, understanding how to write copy that is instructional and simple on a product is key. Couple that with brand and marketing tone of voice to speak to your users in their own words they empathize with.

3. Information architecture — IA is about understanding how your information flows and presents its self. Typically this would include site maps and the equivalent in a product. How we structure our information hierarchy and layout is integral to the users' success in achieving their goal or elevating their pains.

4. User flows — These are the bread and butter of the UX designer, you literally can’t function in the UX industry without a good level of user flows. In it’s most basic form you understand the steps a user takes to achieve a goal or outcome. Usually, you can break down the user flows into a high level and detailed, there is room for different interpretations of these as long as the information is clear. You can often combine user flows with wireframes.

5. Communication and presenting — This skill set is essential, our designs mean nothing if we can not effectively explain them and present them in a succinct and effective manner. You should be able to create UX packs and talk to your work as needed to help stakeholders understand the reasons behind the design. The other important part is taking your audience on the journey with you, they need to see how you arrived at the outcome. The work you do in discovery and leading up is essential to articulate.

Another part of presenting is telling an effective story and knowing which parts to leave out. Not every stakeholder needs to see every single screen iteration.

6. Wireframing and prototyping — Wireframes are used to capture your UI designs at the low fidelity stage of the design process. We use them to show how the design will function and what that might look like. Couple that with prototyping and you are bringing the wireframes to life! Your prototype can show key interactions and paths through the experience.

Prototyping is used to validate your ideas and to evaluate how the target user will accomplish their goals. It essentially should bring your wireframes to life, showing important interactions and functionality.

7. Branding — Branding is important to understand as your brand identity will run through everything you do for that company. It is important to understand the brand guidelines and make sure the designs and copy are aligned to the brand. A good value proposition should always be linked to the brand and help drive design choices. A company's mission statement will be the foundation everything is built on and should help shape strategic goals that drive all design decisions.

8. User interface design — This is the bread and butter of a pure UI designer, you will be using digital tools like Sketch or Figma to create high fidelity pixel-perfect designs ready for development. You need to have a good handle on design patterns and the common ones used across Apple and Android devices. There is also a good chance your product or business has its own design system with patterns you must use. Hierarchy understanding and use of a grid will be tools that aid your designs along the way.

9. Interaction design — This could be a little confusing as some people call UX design as a whole interaction design. But what I am using the term to describe is the interaction between elements of your design including animations and transitions. Good interactive content creates an engaging experience and can also help users understand things more clearly. E.G. A shaking red button with a cross to indicate a mistake.

10. Workshop facilitation — When we are trying to ideate or run sessions on the discovery, we often do this via a workshop. Workshops are used to get the team involved and work towards one goal or outcome.

Some typical workshops are:

Creating a user journey of the current state

Future vision and journey map

Prioritization mapping

Goal mapping

Ideation on pain points

Design ideations

Sprint planning

Sprint retro

11. Design thinking — Design thinking is a framework that uses EDIPT, which means Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. It has many ways of executing these steps throughout a UX project. The continuous cycle of test and learn is used throughout UX design work and has proved to be a great approach to solve complex problems. IDEO is thought to be one of the leaders in this space.

12. Agile — Agile is a way of working that involves design sprints, planning, retros, and scrum. It is centered around understanding and delivering the most value to customers and is commonplace in product design teams and I would say an essential framework to know well and practice. You can learn more about it here.

13. Empathy — I might actually rank this as the number one skill that a UX designer needs to have, empathy is all about understanding what it is like to be someone else, what are they feeling, thinking and doing. Empathy is so critical to getting your experience correct. You can check out my other article on empathy mapping here that explains how to effectively empathize with your users.

14. Qualitative research — Qualitative comes from the word quality, so what we basically mean here is face to face or video screen to video screen research. You do this with small numbers of people to understand customer pain points, conduct usability tests, create personas, user testing or interviews.

15. Quantitative research — Quantitative comes from the work quantity as in a large quantity. For this type of research, we are reaching out to large sections of our users or potential users to look at behaviors and goals. Commonly this is used for surveys and unmoderated online testing around functionality or information hierarchy.

16. Analysis — The ability to analyze is critical, this can span across quite a few areas. You should be able to look at your designs and analyze its effectiveness by going through your research data findings. Carrying out research is only useful if you can then analyze the data and make suggested improvements.

You also need to be able to set up a measure for success, if you build a new feature how do you know it has been effective? You must put measures in place to analyze it and understand it's impact, did it achieve its goal?

17. UX audits — If you have a good handle on interaction design best practices and UI design patterns, coupled with behavioral psychology you should be able to audit designs in product and websites or anything else. You would normally follow the 10 key heuristics and gage the designs based on each one, you can learn more about those here.

18. UX leadership — Being a leader in UX design to me means allowing your team to learn, grow and develop into the type of designer they want to be. It also means understanding your goals and objectives clearly and making sure you and your team align on them.

Putting it all together

Of course how you put these techniques together and knowing when to use which to find out what is part of the learning of a UX designer.

Using for your UX team

If you manage a team it is great to get each member to work through and self evaluate by coloring in their skills matrix. I then asked each person how they would like it to look in 1 year's time. We now have a clear goal and know what areas we need to focus on to achieve that.

The other benefit is if you combine your matrix maps you can see the teams combined skills and how all the skills fit together. This can even give you guidance on who to hire next.

Give it a try

Each skill has a value from 1–8, 1 being a complete novice and 8 being an expert. You can see I have articulated which each number represents on the scale below.