UX Engineer Skill List

ux-skills.md

Off the top of my head, a UX team needs to collectively have the following talents. No one person will know all of these, nor would I expect someone who is learning something in the Advanced category to have fully mastered everything above. Paths vary.

Prerequisites

• Writing and rhetoric, including constructing a thesis, providing supporting evidence, and tailoring your delivery to your audience

Intro

Enough to poke at things and learn more

• Visual page construction
  • HTML
  • Basic CSS
• Tooling
  • Browser dev tools

Beginner

Enough to fix bugs, make small tweaks, and contribute to bigger features

• Visual page construction
  • CSS, SCSS, incl. specificity, responsive layouts
• Browser Programming
  • JS
  • imperative programming
  • jQuery
  • DOM manipulation
• Network
  • HTTP status codes

Intermediate

Enough to lead major feature work and fix thorny bugs

• Visual page construction
  • SVG
  • CSS animation
  • BEM, OOCSS, or other frameworks
• Network
  • URLs
• Browser Programming
  • JS oddities
  • Regular expressions
  • OO design (read POODR)
  • Asynchronous programming, Promises
  • event handling, bubbling
• Network
  • HTTP headers, esp. Accept, Vary, Content-Type, Encoding, Cache-Control
• Tools
  • Dev tools, including Make, Bash, npm, Bower, Broccoli
  • asset minification
  • Spriting
  • browser release cycles and support trends
• Design & Product
  • Experimentation & play, because we're often the first team to code on a project and play a major role in shaping it
  • Empathy for the user, because we're often closest to their experience

Advanced

Enough to lead whole technical projects and optimize whole systems

• Visual page construction
  • Accessibility, WAI-ARIA
  • Cutting-edge specs like web components, HTTP 2.0
• Browser Programming
  • Data structures and algorithms
  • State machines
• Network
  • Push connections: server-sent events or web sockets
  • Content Delivery Networks
  • DNS
  • TCP, esp. slow-start (read Grigorik's HPBN)
• Design & Product
  • Color theory, architecture, painting, or other visual arts
  • Some ability in a second language
  • UX research
  • Internationalization, including why interpolation is better than concatenation and how I18n affects layout and design
• Tools
  • Ruby, Python, Go, or another server-side language -- enough to work on small web apps
  • SQL -- enough to write simple queries and understand what sorts of operations might be expensive
  • Semantic versioning, dependency management -- useful for coordinating subsystems, especially cross-team
  • Apache, nginx, Varnish, or another web server or proxy

Elite

Enough to push the state of front-end engineering forward

• Memory allocation, stack, heap, tail recursion
• Compiler theory, including parsers and lexers -- useful for asset compilation and optimization
• Lua, Go, or C -- enough to write add-ons for Apache, nginx, or another web server
• BGP, Multicast, Anycast
• Cell-tower routing
• Cell phone power management, including the RRC cycle