Paul Wilshaw · Designed for Humans

Claude skills

Claude skills for design teams

A Claude skill is a set of written instructions that Claude follows whenever a certain kind of task comes up. I write skills for the parts of design work that should happen the same way every time, from writing user stories to testing builds. Writing the standard down once saves explaining it every time.

Why write skills at all?

Without a proper brief, AI is inconsistent. Ask it to write a user story on Monday and again on Friday, and you'll get two different formats, two different levels of detail and two different ideas of what "done" means.

A skill fixes that. It's the brief, written once, covering what to ask for first, what format to use, what standards to follow and when to stop and check with a person. It works the way a good team handbook should, except Claude actually reads it.

Which skills have I written?

UX user stories

Writes user stories in the Jobs To Be Done format ("When… I want to… So I can…") and fills in the Problem Statement, Hypothesis, Metrics, Scope and Variations sections of a ticket in Azure DevOps, Jira, Trello, Notion or most other trackers. Before writing anything, it asks for the Figma link, the ticket, the assignee and any competitor references. If there's no ticket yet, it can create one on the backlog. Download it free.

Azure DevOps tickets

Writes and updates Azure DevOps tickets in a consistent format, so the whole team's tickets read the same way. It pairs with UX Tickets, my Figma widget that brings those tickets onto the canvas.

Design system workflow

A seven-step process for building accessible UI against a design system's MCP server. Claude gets the tokens and components from Design Systems for Humans, builds with them and checks its work for compliance, instead of guessing.

UAT

The automated design QA skill that checks a live build against Figma at three screen sizes, grades the issues and hands the report to a person. Read the UAT case study.

Pixel art clean-up

The skill behind every building in Willowmere. It takes the output of a Figma Weave flow and enforces the house style: 16 colours at most, a one-pixel outline, readable signs, and consistent sizing.

What makes a good skill?

After writing a fair few, these are the things I've learned:

  • Ask first. The best skills start by asking for the information they need, all in one go, instead of guessing and getting it wrong.
  • Show the output. Give Claude the exact format you want back, ideally with an example.
  • Name the standards. British English, sentence case, WCAG 2.1 AA, whatever your team uses. If you don't write it down, Claude will use its own defaults.
  • Build in a check. Anything that goes into a ticket, a codebase or a client's inbox should get reviewed by a person first.
  • Keep it short enough to maintain. A skill nobody updates slowly drifts out of date.

Skills for your team

At Designed for Humans I write Claude skills for design and product teams, built around how you already work, and train the team to maintain them. If your skills need a design system to work from, Design Systems for Humans gives Claude your real tokens and components through its MCP server.

Start with the free user stories skill, or see how we can work together.