Not Another Guide for Building a UX Portfolio
The bittersweet lessons I learned, wishing I had known them earlier.
After investing more time than I initially planned in crafting my portfolio, I really want to share my thoughts and lessons with fellow UX designers, especially those who are working on or about to build their first UX portfolios.
Spoiler alert! It’s not your typical guide on building a UX portfolio, but it might just spark some inspiration and motivation.
🚀 Dive into the Portfolio Competition Game as a Newbie
Despite my years of experience in the UX discipline, I am relatively new to the portfolio competition game. I used to be the fortunate one who skipped the portfolio screening process and dove directly into presentations, all thanks to my strong referrals.
Before entering the UX field, I earned a living as a tech journalist. My writing, while in that role, never received complaints about being too wordy. However, transitioning to case study writing in the UX design proved to be a different challenge. It was surprising to learn that people want to grasp my UX rationale without diving into detailed reading. (To those who made me realize this hard truth, even though you kept asking questions already answered in the case studies, I still appreciate you all.)
So, the main thing for me is making sure anyone checking out my portfolio can quickly get what my case studies are all about.
👤 Understand the Target Audience
Before diving into the specifics of the case studies, a crucial initial step involves understanding our target audience, which, in this case, predominantly consists of recruiters or hiring managers. An effective UX portfolio should provide a clear demonstration of our skills, enabling them to assess whether we align with the roles they are seeking to fill.
One mistake I made was presenting my work similarly to how I would explain a product feature to colleagues. There’s a significant difference between explaining to recruiters and coworkers. For instance:
- Recruiters are usually in the dark about your project context, and let’s be real, they probably won’t dive into the nitty-gritty details of your case studies. (No offense to recruiters, been there, done that, I get it.)
- Let’s face it, recruiters likely aren’t the ones using our products, so they won’t geek out on every little project detail unless it’s very similar to what they’re working on.
After a few rounds of testing my portfolio, it turned out that my ‘weakest’ project was the streaming data analytics platform. The main reason, I found, was that the test participants — mostly UX designers — had no experience with similar products and struggled to relate to the problems we aimed to solve in the project.
It got me frustrated, and I began to wonder if I should even include this project. But then it hit me — the test participants I recruited weren’t exactly the same type of people I’m targeting. The golden rule for including a project in our portfolio is whether it’s related to the domain we want to work in. For me, I’m all about enterprise-level products, so I gave a thumbs up to dashboards.
🧑🎨 Design our portfolio space
Imagine a scenario where recruiters or hiring managers have scrolled through countless portfolio websites — will yours be the one they remember?
In product design, we say it’s easy to be different but hard to be better. However, in the context of portfolios, making yours unforgettable involves a bit of both — being different and being better.
A valuable lesson I learned while crafting my portfolio was treating it like a UX project. The big hurdle was finding value or a payoff in building a website just for self-branding. But, what if it’s a tool that helps recruiters and hiring managers efficiently screen candidates? That’s when I found my motivation.
📑 Design our case study content
Understanding that our portfolio’s audience — recruiters or hiring managers — won’t likely spend more than a minute on our case studies is crucial in this step.
So, planning our case study content isn’t just about writing well about our projects. Good content design makes our work more efficiently and pleasantly digestible for our target users, and it’s at least as crucial as the writing itself.
In my tests, participants were more interested in finding contributions, strengths, and impact. We need to figure out a way to shine a spotlight on those aspects.
🎙️ Ask for feedback
Don’t go solo.
The most intriguing, albeit slightly terrifying, aspect of portfolio building is sharing our work with peers. It feels a lot like usability tests, especially if you’ve taken a non-traditional approach to designing your portfolio website, as I did.
However, I’ve come to realize that this step is even more valuable. Building our portfolio can become a self-indulgent, almost suffocating experience if we’re completely on our own. Having people around, getting feedback, pulls us out of our bubble and reconnects us. We need that support from each other. So, reach out.
💡 Other thoughts
- If time is short or you’re risk-averse, go ahead and include your entire design process — personas, wireframes, user flows, the whole shebang. While some voices on LinkedIn argue that the design process can make a portfolio forgettable, I agree to an extent. Yet, not including it seems riskier, especially in this competitive job market. In any case, including your design process is never a wrong move.
- It’s important to accept that our portfolio isn’t everything in our job-hunting journey. But, we shouldn’t get too frustrated or even give up because it’s one of the few things we can control.
Ironically, this entry doesn’t quite exemplify good content design.
