DesignSkills
Design thinking skills for AI-assisted product development. A structured toolkit that guides teams from problem framing through usability evaluation, built for Claude Code.
TL;DR
Built an open-source toolkit of 8 design thinking skills for Claude Code that guides AI-assisted teams from problem framing to usability evaluation — so developers ship user-centered products, not just code.
Overview
Role
Creator & Sole Developer
Platform
Claude Code CLI
License
Apache 2.0
The Problem
AI builds fast, but skips the thinking
AI coding agents can generate entire applications in minutes, but they jump straight to implementation. There's no structured way to ensure the right problem is being solved, the right users are being designed for, or the right assumptions are being validated. Teams end up with technically sound products that miss the mark on user needs.
Key Insights
The Solution
8 skills across 4 phases
Each skill is an interactive, guided process that extracts structured thinking from the user and generates design artifacts in a consistent format.
Workflow
Two paths to shipped product
Architecture
Structured artifact output
Each skill generates numbered markdown files in a design/ directory, creating a persistent record of design decisions that both team members and AI agents can reference throughout development.
What's Next
Expanding the toolkit
Ideation Skills
Problem reframing and creative brainstorming tools
Design Critique
Structured critique frameworks for design review
Usability Scripts
Automated usability testing script generation
Reflections
What I learned
Building DesignSkills taught me that design methodology doesn't have to be a heavyweight process. When encoded as interactive skills, design thinking becomes a natural part of the development workflow rather than a separate phase that teams skip under time pressure. The key was making each skill self-contained yet composable.