I’m curious about your next part / step.

that would be somebody whose job it is to come in each morning to say “hey guys…you’re doing a great job.”

I’m sure you meant “complement”…

I think one of those less tangible qualities that is very important is a designers ability to reflect. Reflective designers are always improving and learning from previous projects and experiences. I think this is as valuable as any skill listed in this article.

A couple comments about roles where I seem to draw boundaries in different places than you have. First, I think it’s useful to separate out “usability testing” from “user research”. If we step back far enough and squint, we can say, “They both involve collecting data from users,” but in practice the differences are more interesting than the similarities. User research tends to be done in advance of the release process, or as input into the release process, while testing is done after design (hopefully in an iterative fashion, of course). In other words, user research produces collateral to enable good design decisions, testing validates whether good design decisions were made. In many projects, user research on the next release is being done at the same that testing is being done on the current release, so having one person responsible for both is problematic. Second, user researchers tend to be more experienced in the domain, because it takes quite a bit of experience to understand where the gaps exist, while testing is done with the assumption that the gaps have already been identified. In other words, it’s always harder to find something that’s missing completely than it is to find something that exists but is broken. And third, in my experience the deliverables coming out of user research activities (personas, task analyses, conceptual design) are both different and more difficult to do well than the deliverables coming out of testing activities (reports, defects). Bluntly, I consider a good user researcher far too valuable to spend their time performing testing.

I also think there’s a useful distinction between graphic designers and visual designers. Graphic designer create the building blocks, visual designers put them together. I’ve worked with brilliant graphic designers that seemed to have a preternatural gift for turning a vaguely-defined object into an icon that was both attractive and informative… but had absolutely no skills whatsoever in, say, properly laying out a panel. The opposite is true as well – folks with a deep understanding of white space and grid layouts and visual primacy, but no particular skills in “pure” graphic design (which I loosely define as the art of creating an image). If I need a visual designer and I hire a graphic designer, I may end up disappointed.

If you mean the former, I agree with you that this is something else to look for when evaluating candidates. So under Anthony’s “Screening tips” section, I’d want to look for prototyping skills in Visual Basic, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Flex, Flash, Powerpoint, etc. Heck, I’d want to see real example of prototypes that they’ve created.

If you mean the latter, I agree with Anthony that that’s the exception to the rule and probably wouldn’t be useful in making a hiring decision, because it’s so rare and in many shops it might even be inappropriate. However, I will add that I think this IS a skill that designers should learn. True GUI development is really difficult and I would expect designers to be able to code all the externals from soup to nuts… but a designer that can produce solid, ship-quality code for the final on-the-glass pieces is valuable indeed, and in many cases that technology is not that difficult to learn… no more difficult than it is to become a Powerpoint guru.