designer-skills

Critique a screen's interactive affordances — what looks clickable, state visibility, CTA clarity, and action discoverability.

Critique a screen's colour usage — contrast ratios, palette coherence, semantic meaning, and colour accessibility.

Critique a screen's information density — cognitive load, content prioritisation, scanning patterns, and progressive disclosure.

Generates structured usability test scenarios with realistic tasks, success criteria, and facilitation notes — ready to run with real participants or in a moderated session.

Apply an emotional resonance lens to any UI. Use when a design is technically correct but flat — to identify what's missing and prescribe specific changes at the copy, motion, and interaction layer.

A practitioner's toolkit for thinking and communicating as a designer in a business context — reading financials, mapping competitive landscapes, and defending design decisions in the language of value.

Organize qualitative research data into an affinity diagram with themes, clusters, and insight statements. Use when synthesizing large amounts of qualitative data from interviews, observations, or surveys.

Create a structured user interview script with warm-up, core exploration, and wrap-up sections. Use when preparing for user research interviews to ensure consistent, insightful conversations.

Critique a screen's brand consistency against mood.md, voice.md, and tokens.md.

Critique a screen's composition — balance, whitespace, rhythm, and gestalt principles.

Critique a screen's typography — scale usage, readability, consistency, and token compliance.

Critique a screen's visual hierarchy — entry point, eye flow, weight distribution, and emphasis.

Identify, categorize, and prioritize accumulated design inconsistencies and structural problems across a product.

Communicate design's contribution to business and user outcomes in terms that resonate with stakeholders.

Build and maintain a research repository that makes findings findable, reusable, and cumulative across the organization.

Design surveys that collect reliable, unbiased quantitative data to validate hypotheses and measure user attitudes at scale.

Define how a design system evolves — contribution models, versioning, change management, and deprecation.

Design interfaces that adapt gracefully to multiple languages, writing directions, and cultural contexts.

Define a motion system with duration tokens, easing vocabulary, and reduced-motion handling for consistent animation across a product.

Advocate for design quality, scope, and time with cross-functional partners and leadership using evidence and shared goals.

Design forms that minimize friction, prevent errors, and guide users to successful completion.

Select and design navigation patterns that match product structure, user tasks, and platform conventions.

Design first-run experiences that get users to value quickly without overwhelming them.

Design search experiences that help users find what they need, recover from failure, and refine results.

Define what content a product needs, how it should be structured, and who owns it.

Design the structure, hierarchy, and navigation model for a product's content and features.

Map the end-to-end service delivery system including frontstage actions, backstage processes, and supporting infrastructure.

Apply the Doherty Threshold — keep system response times under 400ms to maintain user flow and perceived performance.

Apply Fitts's Law to size and position interactive targets for fast, accurate interaction.

Apply Hick's Law to reduce decision time by limiting the number of simultaneous choices presented to users.

Apply Miller's Law — chunk information into groups of ~4 to work within working memory limits.

Apply the Aesthetic-Usability Effect — visually consistent, polished interfaces are perceived as more usable.

Apply the Law of Common Region to group elements using containers, backgrounds, and boundaries.

Apply the Law of Proximity to group related elements through spatial relationships.

Set optimal line lengths for readability across typography scales and responsive layouts.

Apply the Von Restorff Effect to make the most important element distinctly different from its surroundings.

Analyze card sorting results to inform information architecture and navigation structure. Use after conducting open or closed card sort studies.

Design a diary study plan with prompts, duration, participant criteria, and analysis framework. Use when you need to understand user behavior over time in natural contexts.

Build a 4-quadrant empathy map (Says, Thinks, Does, Feels) to synthesize user research into actionable insights. Use when you need to quickly capture and share user understanding across the team.

Map user Jobs-to-Be-Done with functional, emotional, and social dimensions plus outcome expectations. Use when reframing product decisions around user motivations rather than features.