DesignSkills
Most developers skip design thinking entirely because they don't have a designer on the team. This toolkit brings it to them.
TL;DR
Solo developers and small teams ship most of the world's software — but skip design thinking because they don't have a designer. This open-source toolkit brings 8 structured design skills into Claude Code, guiding teams from problem framing to usability evaluation.
The Gap
Most software is built by people who don't have designers
Solo developers and small teams ship most of the world's software. They don't have UX researchers. They don't run usability studies. When AI coding agents arrived, the gap got worse — now you can build an entire app in an afternoon, but the "should we build this?" question never gets asked.
Without design thinking
- Built an app in a day with AI
- Solved the wrong problem
- Users bounced immediately
- Rebuilt it 3 times
With design thinking
- Spent 1 hour on structured thinking
- Validated the problem before building
- Built the right thing once
- Users stayed and gave feedback
The Insight
"Design methodology doesn't have to be a heavyweight process. It can be a conversation."
Design thinking frameworks — Jobs-to-be-Done, assumption mapping, heuristic evaluation — are essentially structured conversations. They ask the right questions in the right order, then capture the answers as artifacts. Claude Code already knows how to have structured conversations. It just needs the right prompts. So instead of building a heavy design tool, I encoded each framework as an interactive skill that guides developers through the thinking, then writes the output to markdown files they can actually use.
The Toolkit
8 skills across 4 phases
Each phase builds on the last. You can run the full pipeline or skip to what you need — but the artifacts always connect.
Pre-Planning
— Understand before you buildDocumentation
— Make decisions legiblePrompts
— Bridge thinking to buildingEvaluation
— Ship with confidenceHow It Works
Say you're building a habit tracker
Here's how DesignSkills takes you from idea to shipped product, using the fast iteration path.
Total time added: ~1 hour. But you build the right thing the first time.
Architecture
Artifacts that build on each other
Every skill writes to the same design/ directory. Later skills read earlier artifacts, so your persona informs your PRD, and your PRD informs your build prompts.
Open Source
Built in the open, for everyone
DesignSkills is Apache 2.0 licensed. The whole point is that design thinking shouldn't be locked behind enterprise tooling or agency contracts. If you're a solo dev trying to build something people actually want, this should be free and one command away.
Contributions welcome. Here are the areas where the toolkit can grow:
Ideation Skills
Problem reframing, SCAMPER, crazy eights — creative thinking tools
Design Critique
Structured critique frameworks for async design review
Usability Scripts
Automated usability testing script generation
Reflections
What I learned
The biggest surprise was how well design thinking maps to conversation. Every framework I encoded — assumption mapping, heuristic evaluation, even persona development — boiled down to asking the right questions in the right order. That's what LLMs are good at.
If I started over, I'd ship fewer skills and go deeper./problem-framing and /heuristic-evaluation are the two that deliver the most value — I'd polish those to perfection before expanding.
The bigger lesson: AI should augment human judgment, not replace it. DesignSkills doesn't make design decisions for you. It makes sure the right questions get asked before you write a single line of code. That's the difference between building fast and building right.