Review our skills as a team and where we want to go from here

As a team, we used this process from Nielsen-Norman to baseline skill levels and see where we want to be in the future.

Summary of results:

• We are a well-rounded team, with advanced skills in almost every category. Research lags in areas we lean on our research partner for, so I don't see this as a weakness.
• Several product designers bring strong visual design skills from previous roles. - We're strong in design communication, which doesn't surprise me as GitLab helps us develop this skill through issues, videos, UX showcases and all the other ways we work asynchronously.
• We have room for improvement in Iteration and Interaction Design.
• There is room for growth in leadership in terms of coaching others within our team and across the UX team.
• We are weakest in quantitative research, with Growth product designers obviously being strongest here, and showing the most motivation to improve.

Next Steps - Learning Opportunities

LinkedIn Courses

• UX Research: Lean Experimentation - This is a great overview of Lean UX and discusses business impact, iteration, hypothesis writing, experiment design, lean interviewing and more.
• Surveys and Questionnaires for UX Projects - This one might be a review for some of you but it's a good overview of what a product designer needs to know about surveys.
• UX Deep Dive: Analyzing Data - This one isn't about quantitative research, but it is about how to properly analyze your qualitative data to get to good insights.

Current (updated 8/12/2021)

(outside purple line is a fake person who is an expert in everything)

Future (updated 8/12/2021)

(outside purple line is a fake person who is an expert in everything)

Definitions

Levels

0. Awareness: You are aware of the competency but are unable to perform tasks.
1. Capable but still new to the skill: You understand the concept and you can apply it but your experience is limited (you might be new to GitLab or new to quant research for example)
2. Intermediate proficiency: You have applied this skill to situations occasionally without needing guidance.
3. Advanced proficiency: You regularly apply this skill at an advanced level without needing guidance.
4. Advanced proficiency + leader: You can coach others in the application by explaining related nuances.
5. Expert: You have demonstrated consistent excellence across multiple projects and are a thought leader across the UX department

Skills

• Qualitative research: Usability testing, interviewing. Creating effective unbiased research plans. Synthesizing data into insigts.
• Quantitative research: Understanding when to use surveys and how to use the data, AB testing - when to use and what do do the the data, how to design for an experiment.
• Visual design - UI design, graphic design, illustrations, typography, logos
• Interaction design - Form and flow design, microinteractions, handling latency and error states, UI copy, page layout
• Leadership: Starting new issues, being a content or design contributor (handbook, Pajamas, YouTube, etc), collaborating with others to acheive big goals, evangelizing your teams outcomes or sharing new methods or skills.
• Iteration: Breaking projects down into parts to get results faster - could be smaller studies, smaller design scope. Working with the team to break down a larger design into an MVC. Not refining design work too early, waiting for it to get scheduled for design
• Design communication: Sync or async, the ability to see and quickly understand a design, critique it, share design rationale for the design, get feedback from the right people at the right time.
• IA and Workflow Definition: Organizing large amounts of data or concepts, navigation design, card sort and tree studies, creating workflow diagrams and screen flows"