The Foundation of a Great UX Portfolio

In the past year I’ve reviewed over a hundred portfolios, mostly for “Visual Design” and “Interaction Design” positions on my team. After reviewing so many portfolios, you begin to see patterns. You start to recognize the gaps that are missing from portfolios.

I want to talk about a few of these gaps.

The most important thing I ask when I’m looking at your portfolio is: “Can this person do what we need them to do?”

Sounds simple, right? Having been on the other side of the review, offering critique to fellow designers, it’s surprising how often this question slips by unnoticed. Many designers put up work in their portfolio “just because” it’s stuff they’ve worked on in the past. You think it’ll help “round out” your skills, or show that you have lots of experience.

But it works against you. You should be highlighting the type of work you want to do more of, so that people looking at your portfolio know you’re capable of doing it.

If you have lots of print design stuff, but want to move into more UI design, highlight your UI design projects. All your print stuff can live elsewhere, in an archive. Don’t have many UI projects yet? It’s ok… you only need 2 or 3, and you can get those by working on side projects, doing pro-bono work, or heading to hackathons.

A good portfolio has a 3 key elements:

1. Describe yourself as you want to be seen, meshing a future version of you with a smidgeon of background context: “I’m a UX designer focusing on interface design for mobile apps. My foundation in graphic design strengthens my UI work, where applying layout, typography, and color theory help guide the people I design products for.”
2. Clear ways to contact you: social media or email is good. :thumbsup:
3. A curated collection of case studies: structured stories about the work you did for a project.

Guess what’s most important? The case studies. With only a handful of strong case studies, you’ll answer most of the questions any interviewer would want to know.

I’ve seen case studies come in all shapes and sizes. They can be long, more focused on the process (e.g. T+L on their Medium project), or shorter, more focused on visual/interactive work (e.g. Justin on his Foundation project.) So which form do you follow? It depends.

You want to tailor your case studies to the type of work you want to be doing more of:

• Trying for more visual work? Include more screenshots of the exploration process.
• Want more strategic stuff? Include more design process & decision making.
• Looking for research-based roles? Include more methodology and persona work.

But no matter what shape you settle on for your case studies, holding them to a consistent structure is incredibly useful. What sort of structure should you follow?

I believe these are 7 essentials components of a design-focused case study:

1. Overview: what’s the elevator pitch?
2. Problem definition: what’s the problem you were trying to solve? what were the success metrics?
3. Audience: who are your target users/audience for the project? Personas go here.
4. Team / Role: who did you work with on the project? What was your team structure?
5. Constraints: Talk about the constraints; time, access to users, undefined problem
6. Design Process: what was your design process? Did you facilitate any design exercises? What deliverables were you responsible for? Speak to messiness.
7. Retrospective: did you reach success metrics? Solve the right problem? What would you do better if you could do it again?

1. Overview

Start with a short summary of the project. Think of it as an Elevator Pitch. It should be brief, concise, and catchy.

Sometimes you’re working on a well known brand and the title can speak for itself, but most of the time you aren’t. Use the overview to appeal to the reader about the “why” you worked on this. What sold you on working on that project? That should be the Elevator Pitch.

2. Problem definition

Set the stage for your case study. What’s the problem you were trying to solve? What were the success metrics? Who identified the problem? Did you agree with the problem, was it well defined or was it still pretty grey and needed further exploration?

3. Audience

Who are your target users/audience for the project? Personas go here. This is where you can connect with the reader. Help them understand the person you were designing for.

4. Team / Role

Who did you work with on the project? What was your team structure? Explain how you communicated, and help meetings or reviewed deliverables. Who was responsible for what?

5. Constraints

Talk about the constraints; time, access to users, undefined problem. No project is perfect, and it’s the constraints that add a little spice to each project.

6. Design Process

What was your design process? Did you facilitate any design exercises? What deliverables were you responsible for? How do you conduct your process, and let others into your process?

7. Retrospective

Did you reach success metrics? Solve the right problem? What would you do better if you could do it again?

Funny enough, most of the portfolios don’t have all 7. But don’t let that hold you back! If you cover all 7, you’ll have answered most of the questions that an interested reviewer will have… 5 gold stars for you!

I’m working on updating my own case studies to showcase this stuff, but in the meantime, here’s a few portfolios that do different sections well:

• Harald’s Google+ case study does #1 and #4 well… but #6 is very visual. I would freaking love to see #2, #3, #5 or #7, but alas, none of those are there.
• Michael E.’s case study is very much a story, so the sections aren’t clearly defined, but Michael hits all 7 points in his gratuitious offering of design story-telling.
• Klare Frank’s work has my favorite overviews #1, as well as concise #6. I’d enjoy more juicy details though.
• Teehan + Lax on their case studies have my favorite #7: they actually list out lessons learned for each project in the last section called “What We Learned.” Like Michael’s above, they like telling a story, and they try to hit all 7 points as they tell the story.
• Beatrice Law runs through a usability study, covering #1, #2, #3, and #6 quite well.
• SFCD project Campus does #6 very well focusing on the more technical aspects of visual design, it also has #1/#2 jumbled, #3 mixed within the study. It’s unfortunately missing #4, #5, and #7.
• Last (and possibly least) is my current portfolio. It’s well-structured, doing #2, #3, #6 alright, but it’s missing a nice #1, #4, and #7.

And there you have it folks… two foundational pieces to keep in mind when crafting your portfolio: 1) highlight the work you want to be doing, and 2) structure your case studies appropriately. If you have any questions, or want to share your own portfolio, feel free to reach out to me anytime over on Twitter @brim.

Looking for more portfolio help?
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