Design

Design is the work of giving form to intent. Every interface, object, page, product, or experience reflects choices — about what it looks like, how it behaves, what it emphasizes, what it hides, what it communicates, and to whom. Those choices can be made deliberately, or they can be made by accident. The difference isn't taste; it's whether anyone took responsibility for them.

Good design feels specific, considered, and fit to purpose. Absent design — or lazy design — feels generic, arbitrary, or at odds with the people it's meant to serve. The gap between the two is almost always the presence of a point of view: what the thing is, who it's for, and what response it should produce.

This skill covers methods for doing design deliberately: moving from vague intent to a defensible commitment, then from that commitment to finished work. It favors explicit choices over defaults, expert-led proposals held loosely over open-ended prompting, and divergent exploration followed by tight convergence over single-shot guessing.

Topics

• Visual Language Through Style Tiles: Establish a visual direction via style tiles before building UI — intake, approval-word filtering, translation into visual attributes, divergent candidate directions, render-and-iterate loop. See worked example.
• HEART Metrics: A framework for selecting user-centered metrics across five dimensions — Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success — with guidance on measuring each and choosing which dimensions matter for a given product.
• Goals–Signals–Metrics Process: Translate HEART dimensions into specific, trackable metrics by defining Goals → Signals → Metrics, with a worked HEART × GSM matrix example and guidance on filling the matrix well.
• Structured Design Decision Process: A systematic process for working through a design problem, from assembling candidate designs to evaluating them against goals.