Mind the gap, part 1: Group and prioritize skill development for your design career

Overview

Design is not an easy career. Those trying to enter the field need enough proficiency in a core skill set to get hired. Then to advance to a senior level, you need to have a large breath and depth of knowledge across several different disciplines.

It is simply not a question of choosing between being a generalist or a specialist. The answer is not that simple because for more complex domains and for higher experience levels, you need to be both. It’s more about having the right mix of skills which can cover any major gaps that are important to a company and that are missing from your team.

In this article, I will provide a framework to organize skills into different areas as well as discuss which ones are more important. There isn’t a clear-cut answer because we all start from a different place. I want to provide a helpful way to think about skill areas to help you plan your development. We’ll get more specific about planning your learning in part 2 but let’s start high-level first.

There are three problem layers (the framework)

All design projects have these 3 problem layers which need to be solved. Each layer supports the one above it.

1. Presentation: What customers see and interact with
2. Structure: The architecture and how well digital products connect as a cohesive system
3. Strategy: Your understanding of and plan for solving targeted problems. (This should be informed by insights)

Strategy and structure are the underlying foundational layers

In this article, when I mention “underlying” layers, I’m referring to the two bottom layers (strategy and structure). These are the layers customers don’t see but will definitely feel. These are foundational layers because if you get them wrong, they support and affect everything above them. More on this later.

Skills map to these layers and they support the skills in the layers above

Now that we’ve established the framework, let’s look at how related skills and disciplines map and connect to it. Similar to the three layers, the related skills mapping a layer also naturally support the ones in the layer above. Let’s look at skill mapping going from the bottom layer up.

This are how the related skills map to the three problem layers

Strategy layer skills

The strategy layer is about the underlying thing you are offering customers. You need to start by getting an accurate picture of the customer problems from research insights vs guesses. This helps you form a strategy to solve their most important problems. Aside from research, related skills here are ideation, workshop planning and facilitation and ultimately storytelling and communication.

Structure layer skills

Information architecture, systems thinking and design systems are skills in the structure layer. I’ve also put interaction design (IxD) here because it is the underlying skill required to create quality work in the presentation layer above. Without proficiency in IxD, visual design is purely aesthetic but non-functional.

Presentation layer skills

This is the top layer where visual design and content design map to. If you are doing it right, you are thinking of how the entire experience connects vs designing for individual screens. Your choices should follow consistent guidelines from a connected system you defined in the structure layer.

Different types of research supports all three layers

Discovery research clarifies the strategy layer by helping you accurately understand your customers. Having this fuller understanding can also inform the structure layer. Often when systems are set up poorly, it’s because they don’t align with actual mental models or don’t scale well to cover them. In the top presentation layer, usability research ensures that your content is understandable and your experience is easy and error-free.

So which layers are more important?

There are a couple of factors that influence which layers and their related skills are more important. They depend on your individual role as well as a company’s skill gaps and design maturity level.

The layers you focus on will naturally shift as your career progresses

Where you focus developing and practicing your skills will shift as you grow.

A common starting design role typically requires skills to output more on the presentation layer. Jr. roles tend to require more tactical work and visual outputs. Sr. designers have more expectations to clarify ambiguity in systems and strategy. In a Sr. role, whether structure or strategy is more important will depend on the specific situation.

The industry is currently over-indexing on the presentation layer

Within the last decade, design has really shifted to overemphasize aesthetics and intuition over foundational skills from the underlying layers. Because we can’t be good at all things, when companies prioritize higher expertise in the presentation layer, they are directly deprioritizing strategy and structure whether they want to admit it or not.

This is a design maturity issue. It’s not to say that design mature companies don’t value a high level of visual design craft. They do. They just aren’t willing to compromise quality in the underlying layers to have that. So they weigh criteria differently for different roles so they can have a diverse team vs expecting visual design inclined product designers to be good at all other things. Hiring everyone with the same strengths creates skill gaps you can’t fill.

Neglect skills in the underlying layers at your own risk

More design mature companies or ones with large, complex products that service risky domains tend to value skills in the underlying layers more. They realize that these foundations are much more costly to fix or undo after poor decisions. Poor strategy and architecture decisions are hard to come back from. The cost also accumulates if you keep repeating them over time.

I’ve worked at many big companies and seen this first-hand. When they fail to accurately understand customers and roll out a strategy which provides no value or erodes trust, it can adversely affect their business for a long time. When they build incorrect rigid architecture, they greatly limit design efficiency and innovation. Rebuilding their entire platform is often the only way forward but the high effort often leads to this never happening.

You can’t be good at all things so you have to decide what type of designer you want to be

UX unicorns are rare. It’s not impossible but becoming an expert in all disciplines requires decades of constant learning. You also have to be constantly practicing a discipline to maintain that level of expertise. Most people often don’t have the time, drive or aptitude to do this for every single discipline.

You have to decide which layer to develop into an expert and which layers will be more complementary. If your main expertise is in the presentation layer, you will limit yourself to Jr. or mid level roles. The underlying layers contain the more challenging and critical problems. Solving those layers are where designers make the biggest impact so you will need to improve in those areas if you want to advance to more Sr. roles.

Next steps

Now that we’ve looked at way to group skills in relation to problem layers and provided considerations on which layers are important, you need to start developing some of these specific skills. You want to plan a good sequence for learning them and determine how much expertise is sufficient. We’ll look at all this in part 2 of this series. Hope to see you there.