UX Skills Self -Assessment

Understanding your level of competency in UX Disciplines

One of the most crucial aspects of career development in User Experience is assessing competency in the field itself. This starts with knowing yourself. This assessment is intended to help UX practitioners know themselves a little better.

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” -Aristotle

I have found that knowing where I am in my career development to be a very humbling experience. For me personally, I often think more highly of myself than I ought to. So understanding areas that are less developed than others can help in creating growth goals. If a person knows where they are weak they can begin to strengthen those areas. Furthermore, understanding your level of mastery in various disciplines can help in advocating for particular levels or specific positions. This assessment will help a person know why they are in a particular role as opposed to another or it will arm them with the knowledge to get promotions. Again, it’s about knowing where you are so you can know where you want to go.

Self-Assessment or Manager Assessment?

For this Skills Assessment, I use it both for Self-Assessments and for Manager-led assessments. I believe it is an important practice to have a UX practitioner take an honest look at themselves using this framework I’m about to share. The manager should then do their own assessment of the employee as well. As a follow-up, the employee and manager can compare the assessments and have a conversation around the discrepancies.

Required Reading

In previous articles, I’ve covered The Disciplines of UX and The Mastery Scale. Both of these articles are crucial to understanding this assessment. I will have a brief overview in this article but I suggest checking out those other articles.

The UX Disciplines

User Experience is made up a vast range of core skills — more than any one person could be expected to master. Those core skills contribute to the shape and expression of design. Each skill is grounded in its own discipline and depth. UX Research, UX Writing, Service, Design, Information Architecture (IA), Interaction Design (IxD), Information Design, User Interface Design (UI), and Visual Design are the 8 Core UX Disciplines.

I believe that most, if not all, of UX can be summarized using these 8 core disciplines. In the linked articles, I go into more depth with each one of them. I am not assessing prototyping, mobile design, or things like that because those are things that fall under one of these 8 core disciplines.

*8 UX Disciplines in relation to Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience*

The Mastery Scale

The Mastery Scale is a learning-model-framework that explains the process of progressing through various stages of understanding of a particular skill. A former colleague (Jon Daiello) and I modified our version several times over the years while managing UX teams together.

Mastery Tiers

The Mastery Scale can be broken down into several tiers, each measuring varying degrees of competency:

(00) Unfamiliar
(01) Adequate
(02) Emergent
(03) Proficient
(04) Distinguished
(05) Master

Each tier describes a new level of understanding in a skill or discipline.

Assessment Graph

Now we get to the fun part: The Assessment. This is really quite simple. Go through each of the core disciplines, one at a time. The order doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you go through each one. Assess each Discipline using The Mastery Scale. Once you go through it, you will end up with something like the graph below. I’ve got a Sketch template you can use or create your own in the tool of your choosing.

That’s it. Easy peasy, right?

Follow Up

Once you have this graph there are a few things you can do with it. You should take this Assessment Scale a bit further than just creating the artifact itself.

Team Composition

Set up a time to have team members each do their own self-assessment. Overlap the assessments so that teams can compare themselves and understand the different strengths, perspectives, and how they compliment one another. You’ll find that some team members are very strong in Research, some strong in UI, others strong in IA and everything in between.

Levels Evaluations

I have a 5-level framework that use for positions on my UX team. I adapted it from Org Design for Design Orgs. I recommend using that framework to start out if you don’t have levels already.

Levels 1 through 5 all have varying requirements in terms of mastery of disciplines at certain tiers. This is my cheat-sheet.

At Level 1, for example, I would need to see at least 1 Discipline at the Adequate tier, 2 different Disciplines at the Emergent tier, and 1 at the Proficient tier. In this scenario, I’m only looking to be able to measure 4 different Disciplines.

You can use the Assessment graph to map yourself or an employee to their existing Level. If they are in the wrong Level, it may be time for a promotion.

As an aside, though there are 8 Disciplines, it should be understood that no person can or ever will master all 8 Disciplines. I coach my team in focused on 1–2 Disciplines to really work at mastering for their career, and 2 more to be strong in.

Hope this helps!