About
About Design Credibility Index
Design Credibility Index (DCI) gives designers an expert-reviewed, credible way to have their design case studies assessed: a score and a per-metric breakdown produced by our review team against a defined rubric, rather than self-reported claims or peer upvotes.
The process is straightforward: purchase a submission credit, submit a case study for review, and receive a score with detailed feedback. If you choose, you can publish a public profile showing your score and a link to your LinkedIn profile, giving employers, clients, and collaborators a credible, third-party-reviewed signal of design quality.
Public DCI Profile
Metrics Assessed: 10 skill areas
The Case for a Standard
Visual polish alone stops being a reliable signal of design skill.
For decades, industries have relied on standardized frameworks to evaluate capability. Language proficiency has globally recognized assessments. Financial expertise has globally recognized certifications. Design, despite its strategic importance, has not had an equivalent framework.
AI-assisted tools now make it fast to produce a polished case study, a clean interface, a professional-sounding process write-up, whether or not the person behind it has the underlying design judgment to solve a real problem. For an organization hiring a designer, or evaluating one already on staff, that's a real risk: the wrong hire for a specific product problem is costly, and there has been no consistent, reusable way to tell design capability apart from AI-assisted output at a glance.
DCI exists to introduce that consistency: a shared, structured standard designers and organizations can both rely on, wherever they are.
Grounded in Real Practice
Real-world pattern recognition, tested and refined into one consistent structure, is what became the ten metrics.
Defining what "good design skill" actually means, separate from how polished a portfolio looks, is a genuinely hard problem: most companies solve it informally, through their own hiring criteria and internal design reviews, built up over years of trial and error.
DCI's methodology draws directly on that experience. Senior design practitioners and strategists at product companies shared how their own organizations already evaluate design work, in hiring and in internal review, and where those evaluations tend to go wrong: which patterns point to a strong hire, and which quietly point to a mismatch between a candidate's skills and the problem they'd actually be solving.
Before wider rollout, the assessment was piloted with roughly a dozen product companies. The results held up: teams could see a clearer, more consistent read on a candidate's actual design capability than an unstructured portfolio review gave them. Adoption has grown from there.
Initial Pilot
Discovery
Research
Problem Definition
Structure
User Flow
Information Architecture
Wireframing
Craft
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Usability & Accessibility
Validation
Prototyping & Testing
Presentation & Communication
The ten metrics, grouped by phase. See How It Works for the full scoring rubric.
Three Principles
Independent
DCI evaluates. It doesn't coach, influence, or optimize submissions toward a better outcome.
Structured
Every submission follows the same documented process, evaluated against the same defined criteria.
Transparent
Assessment criteria and reviewer standards are published and explained.
Already in Use
Already in use by design teams at 25+ product companies. See For Teams for how this works.
Who's Behind It
Design Credibility Index is a product of Crazydes Private Limited, a company registered in India. Crazydes Private Limited is the legal entity responsible for the Platform, for processing payments through Razorpay, and for the commitments made in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
What We Don't Do
We don't use your personal data for marketing, and we don't sell or share it with third parties for their own use. See our Privacy Policy for the full detail. We also don't offer a subscription or recurring-billing model: every submission is a single, individually purchased credit, described fully on our Pricing page.
Questions
If you'd like to know more about DCI or Crazydes Private Limited, reach out any time. See Contact.