Week Notes: Vol. 3 – № 4

Advice: Refining your UX portfolio and case studies

Recently, I’ve met with a number of people in UX, mostly those just starting. I’ve heard variations of the same questions, so I wanted to put my thoughts in one place – not because they're original, but because someone else may find them helpful.

Question: When reviewing a UX resume and portfolio, what common issues do you see, and how can someone refine their materials to better reflect their skills?

First, know that my own portfolio case studies suffer from some of the same problems. I created them in 2020 and haven’t gotten around to fixing them.

It’s easier for me to give advice than follow it.

A common recommendation I give: Recalibrate and optimize for scannability. Order bullets and rewrite descriptions so that the most important words or topics are first.

Like they say in journalism: Don’t bury the lede.

If key information isn’t front and center, it’ll likely be missed entirely. Busy hiring managers – or recruiters who might not know much about UX – are looking for specific words and phrases.

What tracking my own site has taught me is that people only spend 30-45 seconds on a single case study.

This will also help you tighten up how you talk through a case study during an interview.

When applying for jobs and interviewing applicants, I've usually only had enough time to show one case study (with a bunch of follow-up back and fourth).

Restructure your case studies to tell a clear story.

You should be able to open with a single-sentence summary that hits on: the problem and the need, what you did and why, the outcome, and a reflection or action.

Those points then become the flow for organizing your case study.

Lead with your strongest visual to attract attention and set the stage. But put your collection of "final" designs at the end for people to flip through as a reward for scrolling to the end.

If all you have is a bunch of screens from a project, you don’t have a case study. You have a gallery.

I see this a lot with UX designers who come from graphic design, marketing, or other industries where visuals are the main measure of skill.

Skip textbook intros

Avoid using one of the many design processes you can find online to describe your process.

A case study demonstrates your process better than one of those framework diagrams.

You rarely get to do the full end-to-end design process you learn about. And if you have completed a bootcamp or have been working in UX for a year or two, I expect you to start by understanding users, then do research, make prototypes, test hypotheses, and iterate as needed.

Also try to avoid defining well-known UX artifacts or activities. Assume your audience (hiring managers and other UX practitioners) already knows what things like personas and usability tests are.

From a hiring perspective, I care less that you know what something is and more that you know why you would do it and how.

On a related note …

Artifacts aren’t the story

Including artifacts in your case study are only useful to me as a hiring manager or evaluator if they are a stepping stone to explain how you turned research or insights into action.

Even in my own case studies, people kind of glaze over a bunch of diagrams and wireframes. It's the story of why I did them that is more interesting.

Instead talk about why you did it, what you learned, and how it directed you. If you interviewed subject matter experts to understand a flow or system, then diagramed it, say that. Then explain how that helped you later.

With any research, explain how you took those learnings into consideration to inform your work.

It’s important to connect your design decisions to your research in a concise way. This skill will serve you well while on the job as well – so get some practice in.

You don’t need to write a dissertation. It can be as sample as: “Because most users struggled with X, I did Y so they could quickly understand Z.”

Amping up the work you have

If you’re in a bit of a panic because all you have is a bootcamp project or a small freelance project, don’t fret.

The project may be over, but your work doesn’t have to be.

Consider testing your designed solution. Even if the sample size is small, were there common stumbles or did you see your idea really improve one area of the app that was problematic?

Maybe you believe one of your stronger portfolio pieces is where you tried to “redesign Instagram” or “make a better Spotify.”

First, don’t. Second, you might want to consider a usability test of the existing app and have people do the same activities in your prototype so you can compare and contrast. That would make for an interesting story and show some applied learning.

That’s ultimately what I’m looking for – not a perfect process or a bunch of artifacts.

If your case study is proof you can observe a problem, make a thoughtful change, and explain how that happened, the rest is supporting detail.