As designers, we are a lucky bunch. As a group, we are prolific writers and speakers. There is undoubtedly more to read, watch, or listen to than time in the day. I take pride in and diligently read as much as possible to learn and grow in my chosen craft.

In the beginning, I bookmarked articles that I wanted to refer back to in the future. Eventually, I used tools that sync bookmarks across devices. As time passed and the list grew in length, I often found it hard to find articles. Also, many articles covered more than one topic, and the list had become unmanageable.

Then came along Bear, which was a game-changer. Using the browser extension, I could save entire articles with text, images, and links all intact! I could tag saved articles with several categories. Bear solved many of the problems other tools did not.

After a few years, I had a new problem. The amount and quality of content coming from the email lists and the newly formed Medium was astounding. I no longer had time to read all of them. I identified another problem. Sometimes, there were excellent articles outside of my skill set at the time, but I wanted to read later.

More Focused Learning

When I want to learn more about a specific topic, I might read through my saved articles, search for others on the Web, or read books on that topic.

I identified the need to be more intentional and deliberate in how I skill up my craft knowledge. Instead of focusing my learning primarily based on what appears in Medium or my email inbox, I needed a learning roadmap.

A Rounded UX Skill Set — A Practical Guide

To develop a rounded UX skill set, I did what I typically do — search for relevant articles. I found the excellent article, “How anyone can develop a rounded UX skill set” from H Locke. Locke details a superb framework to skill up as a designer.

Here is an outline of the framework:

1. Create a skills matrix
2. Identify where you want to be
3. Grade yourself
4. Do a gap analysis of your team or peers
5. Prioritize your first set of target skills
6. Identify the best tools to help you learn
7. Study your ass off
8. Track your progress

Bear on Steroids

In my perennial quest for continuous improvement, I recently replaced Bear with Notion — the tool I’d been waiting for years to find! Notion allows me to create a database in a variety of views. I can view my articles as a list with different categories as I did in Bear. With Notion, I can create a kanban view and give my articles a status to keep track of those I want to read.

After reading Locke’s article, I had an epiphany. I could use Notion to create several databases with different views that relate to each other to create a skills roadmap. Here’s how I did it.

1A — Create a skills matrix

First, I created a skills database list view in Notion. Referring to Locke’s article and several others, I’ve documented 206 unique skills to date — a great starting point.

1B — Classify Skills

Digital product design spans many disciplines and sub-disciplines. With Notion’s table list view, I can create structured data using properties. I made two columns named “Discipline” and “Sub-Discipline” using the multi-select property and classified each skill. Now I’ve got a taxonomy of skills.

1C — Product Development Process

Having a taxonomy of skills and methods was great, but when should I be using them? The answer is during the design (thinking) process, of course. I revisited several articles on the topic and came up with the following list:

• 1 — Understand: What problems should our product solve?
• 2 — Explore & Define: Define project scope and addressing user needs
• 3 — Execute: Design solutions
• 4 — Validate: Tests to validate designs
• 5 — Listen: Monitor to identify existing problems and find new ones
• 9 — Not Part of Process

Now I can filter on the process column, allowing me to focus on skilling up on a specific part of the process. I also felt it was essential to have a Listen stage. Ideally, we should be listening to our users during all steps of the product development lifecycle.

2 — Identify where you want to be

Locke doesn’t explicitly specify a scorecard for how to identify where I’d like to be. Drawing inspiration from step 5 and other sources, I created my own rating system:

• 0 — Irrelevant or invaluable
• 1 — Low Impact: learn someday
• 2 — Medium Impact: low-hanging fruit
• 3 — Medium Impact: harder to reach
• 4 — High Impact: low-hanging fruit
• 5 — High Impact: harder to reach

3 — Grade yourself

Locke provides a 1–3 grading system. After doing some additional reading (I can’t find the articles 🙁), I defined my own grading system:

• 0 — Never heard of it
• 1 — Learner: I understand what it is, but I have no practical experience
• 2 — Beginner: I have tried it
• 3 — Junior: Applied to several projects, but I’m still getting the hang of it
• 4 — Practitioner: Confident; I have some experience and learning but still need practice
• 5 — Intermediate: Confident approach and reasonably well-practiced
• 6 — Senior: A good understanding used often
• 7 — Advanced: Very good understanding and confident
• 8 — Expert: Completely confident and well-practiced. Have completed multiple projects and have a complete understanding

4 — Do a gap analysis of your team or peers

When I created this system, I was the only designer in my organization, so I skipped this step. That said, it should be simple enough to develop docs to assess the team’s overall skill level to identify learning opportunities.

5 — Prioritise your first set of target skills

There are several ways to prioritize target skills to learn, as Locke outlines. As he recommends, I prioritize 1–2 “low-hanging fruit” tasks with low impact and one harder, high impact task.

I often take into account projects we’re working on along with my assigned grade to determine priority.

6 — Identify the best tools to help you learn

6A — Knowledge Base

I had already imported my knowledge database from Bear. It already included properties for adding multiple tags and another column for status to indicate if I’ve read the article yet. I have opted to keep the tags column for now.

6B —Here is Where the Magic Happens!

In my skills database created a new column and applied the relation property to it. Next, Notion asks me to relate or link this database to another, and I chose the Knowledge Base. A new column appears in my Knowledge Base (and vice versa) named Skills, where I can link each skill to the article.

6C — Books Database

If you’re like me, you have many books you’ve bought but haven’t read yet. Locke, and many others, also have articles with lists of design books to read. Of course, the next thing to do was to create a Books database. “Skill” uses the same related property type.

Sub-Discipline uses the rollup property, allowing me to choose a column from the same database. What’s great about this is it fills in the disciplines based on the skills I choose. Having sub-discipline in the database allows me to recall the book’s subject matter quickly. Here are the options for the location and status columns:

• Location: Apple Books, Kindle, or home library
• Status: Personal Reading List, Professional Reading List, Read Next, Reading, and Done

7 — Study your ass off

Like many office workers, I spent 45 minutes each way on the train, the “T,” as we call it, in Boston. Since the pandemic, I reclaimed that time as a one-hour block every morning to learn new things. Sometimes work gets in the way, but I try not to let it.

8 — Track your progress

Prioritized Kanban List

Next, I created a new column named “Kanban Status” using the select property that allows me to choose only one of the following statuses:

• 0 — Irrelevant
• 1 — Backlog
• 2 — Learn More
• 3 — Next Up
• 4 — In Progress
• 5 — Confident in Ability (for now)
• 6 — Expert Level Achieved!

After that, I created a kanban view that allows me to see my skills database as a prioritized backlog. Skills that I added and deemed as irrelevant are marked as such. They stay in the database to record that I’ve captured it or want to revisit it later.

Different Views

I’ve also created many filtered list views to quickly see all Knowledge Base articles related to a skill or skills. Notion also allows for symbols in each document. I frequently star or favorite articles.

Putting It All Together

My Routine

In the morning, when reviewing articles from my many mailing lists, I don’t read them thoroughly. I open them in Firefox and scan through them, save articles into a page I’ve titled “Inbox” in Notion using the browser extension.

On Mondays, I clean up the Inbox. First, I move articles into the Knowledge Base and then classify them to the appropriate skill(s). I’m considering removing the step of saving articles into the Inbox and replacing it with just placing them directly into the Knowledge Base.

Cataloging articles affords me the time to dive deep into the content I’ve saved in the past in a focused and longitudinal way.

During the week, I review the kanban board and click on a skill to view its detail view to see all the linked articles and books related to that topic. After reading the content, I update its status.

As I learn more about a skill, I don’t expect to become an expert in it. It’s more likely that I move up one on the grading scale. I mark the skill as “Confident in Ability (for now),” which also notes that I recently upskilled in that area. “Next Up” is similar to “Backlog” but allows me to scan the board.

Weekly Updates with Things

I love the app Things. One of its best features is that it allows me to add a to-do via a global shortcut quickly. Another is repeating tasks. I have repeating tasks every day to remind me to work on my skills. I also have a weekly task to review my skills backlog for updates on my progress.

Thanks for reading my first article! Any questions, feedback, or suggestions are always welcome. Cheers!