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Claude skills

Project: AI tools in design

Channel: design process

Timeline: 2026

Role: Product designer

Tool: Claude

Team: personal project

Problem: In today's fast-paced environment, there is an increasing demand to deliver valuable and user-centric solutions more quickly than ever. This pressure has prompted me to reevaluate my design routine and assess the effectiveness and efficiency of each stage to maximize the positive impact of my solutions.

Solution: Building a set of customized skills with Claude to optimize the design process and make the workflows even more efficient with automation in the best possible ways.

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Situation

I personally felt that as new AI technologies emerged and rapidly improved, the surrounding time and conditions shifted. All design fellows noticed these changes and had to adjust accordingly. Consequently, it became crystal clear to me that it was time to adapt. I recognized the potential of AI features appearing everywhere and the opportunities to enhance my design work through their synergistic effects. So, I seized those opportunities for my growth.

Personal objective

  • Revisit my design process and identify supportive areas that might be carried out more easily or can be subject for task automation.

  • Spot the weak points to be left out or improved for effective time management.

  • Improve my concentration and time on core design activities related to the critical thinking & judgemental solutioning & experimentation.

Context

Challenges

Constraints

  • A new approach, along with uncharted territory, set me on a journey where my efforts became my goal to explore and learn as much as possible on the go.

  • I promised to myself to turn on my newbie mode with a sense of curiosity and courage to dig throuh it.

  • Open to a mutual iterative conversational approach with Claude during the creation process.

  • While working on the skill, I decided to examine the tiniest details of the task to maximize the benefits of any slight improvements that could be achieved through accurate skill specifications.

  • Prioritize my free time and essential daily credit allowances to develop a comprehensive and realistic reusable skill that can be crush-tested and applied to real future cases.

UX approarch

At first, I took a careful steps while exploring how it all best fits my purposes & goals. I learned by doing. Upon my observations from other fellows' examples and experience, I made my proper preparations in following stepsflow:​

  • Know your workflows & processes well.

  • Define your core valuable expertise and keep it in your hands (you're an expert, not AI).

  • Spot activities that are slowing you down or could be automated - free to be handed over to Claude a.k.a. material for a skill.

  • Pick the right activity/flow for a skill depending on its inner complexity & impact on your core activities.

Key impact

Both of these established skills have a significant positive effect on my daily works. I can confirm that this capability plays a big role in creating a synergy in the effectiveness & time saving in the design process.

  • In the initial project phase, I managed to complete the research by half-time.

  • Having automated analysis executed by a triggered task flow with this skill allows me to compile a deep-dive data synthesis.

  • For the second half of the project, once usability testing is in place, I can conduct an overall evaluation in parallel with other activities.

  • Thanks to the automation, I can have the material ready in just a few moments.

Competitive analysis

In the second round of customization, I decided to pick an exercise of the competitive analysis. This is quite important but extensive and time consuming activity. I always felt a lack of time to execute it properly to receive a quality data from various anckles to analyses project's potential & success in comparission to the existing competition.

Thus, I assumed that having strustrured and standardized guided work flow potentially with the automation features could be very beneficial to all of my next projects. This all I took into the account while preparing specifications & requirements for this skill.

My intention with this skill resulted in this step flow, completely driven by Claude, based on the trigger data set specified.

  1. Action gets triggered by the completed project brief that includes all required entry data for this execution.

  2. The analysis starts based on a combination of manually uploaded documents about suggested competitors & automated instructions script for online search.

  3. This data processing carries on with the completion of the standardized report in Excel for direct & indirect competition in the required analysis framework criteria.

  4. The final step is preceded by populating key data into an analysis summary piece to get a final overview for the requester's review & approval.

After particular iterations & review rounds to put it all together in required manner as I needed, forllowing skill artefacts got ready:

  • Project brief template - includes all specifications about the triggered project usefull for a proper competition research in two launguage mutations (svk/en).

  • Analysis report template - contains direct and indirect competitors, research them against a fixed set of business & UX dimensions in two versions (svk/en).

  • Analysis summary template - generated from the structured execution file to highlight specific features on the competing market field in compliance with set criteria in both language versions (svk/en) for the requester's review & final approval of completion.

SUS evaluation in Usability testing

For my pilot skill customization, I chose to focus on a specific activity within usability testing. While I truly enjoyed planning and conducting usability tests for my projects, I realized that I would have benefited from assistance in the specific exercise of the System Usability Scale (SUS) evaluation.

In my past projects, I experienced usability testing with clients & employees for simpler, straightforward website designs as well as the (re-)designs of more complex processes / digital services. This taught me that, as for the design works, the same applies to their usability testing; it was critical to adapt the approach for each of them. This affected my specifications formulated for Claude to build the skill around the SUS evaluation.​

My aim for this skill was to elaborate on an automated & self-sufficient task flow that would cover the following:

  1. Based on the project type, select & adapt a proper version & localization (svk/en/de) of the SUS questionnaire.

  2. After having the usability testing completed and SUS questionnaires filled out by the testers, these are uploaded for processing.

  3. All evaluation processing is executed automatically in the form of an Excel evaluation template.

  4. Evaluated data are populated in the executive summary by the established automation script.

  5. All documents are presented to the requester in an English version for further review and approval.

All iteration rounds & several version reviews resulted into the following skill artefacts:

  • SUS questionnaire for website - contains customized questions for website project requirements in the primary Slovak version & two localizations (de/en).

  • SUS questionnaire for process & digital service  - contains specialized questions for process & digital services project requirements in the primary Slovak version & two localizations (de/en).

  • SUS evaluation excel template - includes standardized SUS calculations, letter grades, adjective ratings & benchmarks.

  • SUS executive summary - prepared based on a bridged automation script to populate key results data from the evaluation file.

  • Automation guide - describes the steps required to transfer the embedded automation in case of storage transfer.

Process of skill customization

Building the skill - where fun & great learning begins

  • Don't chase perfection, just start with your task context description in your own words.

  • Pin the started chat on your activity sidebar (pretty comfortable to find it a day later during work-in-progress).

  • Keep in mind each and every aspect of the practicality of that task being translated into the skill, and describe it in every possible detail to Claude.

  • Check everything generated in progress and iterate with Claude, like with your colleague.

  • Don't limit your creativity and ask questions about advanced features you wish for the skill.

  • Consider integrating automation elements in the flow and take advantage of module integration with your other applications.

  • Do ask for description and guidance materials, if you anticipate to share them further with your team.

  • Document your experience with that skill and continue exploring next skill options.

If the preparation is managed well, you won't burn your energy on unnecessary trying. And potentially overwhelming process changes into a creativity challenge, as I experienced recently.

Final reflextions

I admit that I was initially hesitant about creating Claude skills. I felt like I needed an idea that would be universally relevant and easily replicable once developed. However, a few days later, I completed the job. I approached the entire skill creation process iteratively and focused on the future benefits it could bring to my upcoming projects and design work.

 

The effort, time, and credits I invested were definitely worth it. Despite my initial doubts, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and realized that a new approach, combined with the right tools—AI included—can lead to valuable insights and opportunities.

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I promised myself that this is the initiation of building my skills library to support & exagerate my design process in supportive areas & all tasks that could be set on automation. This would save my time & effort for the full concentration on critical thinking and solution shaping in more effective ways, thanks to AI support.

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