Member-only story

Demystifying UX competencies

Visualizing the current and future with the “Skittle Skills” Assessment

Stephen Riley
UX Collective
6 min readSep 14, 2019

We, as a UX community, seem to have a problem.

A problem defining our roles consistently, along with the key skills that define each role and the expectations of mastery that go along with them. Whether you’re in an in-house team, a consultancy, agency, or an independent practitioner, roles can and often do change from group to group.

Plus, it can be difficult to determine growth areas for each member of a team, and thus offer our teams clear development plans. We can get so caught up in the “immediacy of now” for our teams: how strong are you now? What have you been contributing as of late?

Since UX is very much about contributing specific tasks and artifacts to larger teams on very specific timelines, we are often stuck in the present or near future of what our teams need to deliver, when.

This mindset can have a dire impact on the potential of our teams, as well as their morale and faith in our abilities as career developers. I’ve seen too many talented practitioners who go years without a review, let alone anything meant to design their futures.

This gap is doing our teams a massive disservice, and we need to change, or we risk our talented teams…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Stephen Riley

I like understanding why people make decisions, making things people need, playing with the kids and pretending I’ll play hockey again.

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