Skill Mapping: A Digital Template for Remote Teams

UX practitioners have a variety of skills and strengths. Similarly, UX teams are often built to have diverse capabilities in order to work on many projects at once. These skills can be visualized through a process known as skill mapping. While we discuss this process in the realm of UX, it can be applied to any team working within a given domain.

Skill mapping is a collaborative activity used to visualize strengths and weaknesses of UX professionals and UX teams in order to take inventory of the existing team’s composition.

The output of the activity is a collection of skill maps — one for each individual. Skill maps take the form of radar charts, with axes corresponding to possible UX skills. The value on each axis represents the competency in the corresponding skill.

If all team members evaluate themselves on skills using the same scale, the individual maps can be combined into a single team map by placing each team member’s map on top of each other. When maps are combined, they show the capabilities of the UX team. Depending on the desired level of granularity, a “skill” could be something like “user research,” “quantitative user research,” “statistical analysis of quantitative research data,” or “interpretation of ANOVA analyses of quantitative research data.” To map a big UX team, the broad “user research” axis would be appropriate, but if you are mapping a group charged with statistical data analysis, the ANOVA axis would be more helpful.

When analyzing the combined team map, watch for areas that aren’t covered by team members. Some teams may not need those particular skills to do successful work, but gaining coverage in those missing areas may also be an opportunity to expand your offerings as a team. Also recognize areas where one person is the only coverage for a particular skill. For example, if one team member is a 5 for research and all other team members are a 1 or 2, will it be too much for one person to cover all research? In this case, there may be an opportunity to upskill other team members in this skill or hire someone to help with coverage.

Common Uses

Knowing a designer or researcher’s skill map can be useful in several situations:

• Understanding team makeup: Running this exercise with the entire UX team is beneficial to understand gaps in the team’s overall skillset. In the example above, if a project involved visual design and prototyping, the team would not be well equipped to deal with it and the organization may need to use a different team or hire one or more people to cover these areas.
• Hiring new team members: When a potential new hire is in the interview process, consider having the candidate rate herself in each skill to give you a rough estimate of what this person’s individual shape will be and how she will fit in with the rest of the team. You can also create a skill map for the candidate after you have a clearer picture of her capabilities based on the interview.  
• Tracking individual’s career progression: Individual UX professionals can track growth in skills over time by filling out the template at various points in their career, whether quarterly, every six months, or once a year. Based on the skill map, they can decide which areas to grow at each stage and compare to previous ratings.

How to Use this Template

1. Access the template. Visit the Google Sheets template and make a copy in your own Google Drive (File > Make a copy). Note: you must be logged in to Google Drive to make a copy. Alternatively, there is also a downloadable Excel version at the bottom of this article. (Avoid downloading the Google Sheets file and exporting it to Excel, as the radar charts will not convert properly.)

2. Decide on the skills you’d like to evaluate. Each table is currently set up to evaluate 8 different skills that fall into the realm of UX. These are just a starting point and can be changed to focus on whatever skills are most important for your team, whether these are related to UX or not. You can also include general skills such as written and oral communication. If you change the list of skills under the current state of team member #1, all the lists in the template will update automatically to match.
3. Set up your team members. This template is built for up to 10 team members. Each team member has a skills section with entries for both the current state and future state. Input each team member’s name into the spreadsheet until all your team members are represented.
4. Diverge and evaluate individually on current and future states. On the Individual Mapping tab, all team members will evaluate themselves individually on a scale of 1 to 5 (validation is included in the tables), with 1 being awareness and 5 being expert. Do so for each skill listed for both the current- and future-state tables. For the future-state table, pick an actionable timeframe such as 1 year from now (or a quarter, or six months, depending on how often you’ll be doing this activity).You can define the scale however you prefer, but share it with everyone so all team members will use the same one. Consider the following as a starting point:
   1. Awareness — You are aware of the competency but are unable to perform tasks. (Eliminate the use of 0 in your scale and start at 1.)
   2. Novice (limited proficiency) — You understand and can discuss terminology, concepts, and issues.
   3. Intermediate proficiency — You have applied this skill to situations occasionally without needing guidance.
   4. Advanced proficiency — You can coach others in the application by explaining related nuances.
   5. Expert — You have demonstrated consistent excellence across multiple projects.

Regardless of the scale you end up using, don’t overthink it. The point of skill mapping is to get a general idea of where everyone stands, not for the output of your chart to be a perfect circle of 5s.

5. View the compiled team shape on the Team Mapping sheet. The team shape will be created automatically based on how team members fill out their current- and future-state tables. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the team and compare the two team tables.

The way team members rate their future-state skills will help determine the learning opportunities needed to reach their goals. For example, if a team member rated his current state of qualitative research at 2, but his future state at 4, what tools, classes, or hands-on learning does he need in order to bridge the two-level gap?

6. Download and save the images. Document your individual and team maps by downloading the images from the template and saving them in a team repository. You can easily save the images right from the template by selecting the image and choosing your preferred format.

We originally developed this template for use in group exercises in our full-day course, DesignOps: Scaling UX Design and User Research when we took the UX Conference virtual. In addition to the Google Sheets collaborative template, you can download the template in Excel from the link below.

Reference

Mesut, Jason. (2018, December 4). The UX Spectrum. Medium. https://medium.com/shapingdesign/the-ux-spectrum-cb29f048faf9

Collaborative Template

NN/g Skill Mapping Template (Google Sheets)