Creating a winning UX Research portfolio

Let’s face it — creating a portfolio can be challenging. You want to balance what can feel like bragging with humility. But it’s not bragging to highlight the awesome work you’ve done! As a leader of UX Research teams, I’ve seen countless portfolios and hired many researchers. A well-crafted portfolio is an important way for hiring managers to start to get a sense of your talents and expertise, and feel confident you can do the job.

Whether you’re a career researcher who’s just been laid off from your job and your portfolio needs a reboot, just leaving school and starting out in research, or switching from another profession, these tips will help you showcase your work.

What goes into the portfolio

You’ll often be asked to share something about yourself because people want to know a bit about you in addition to what they can see on your resume. But we have different levels of comfort about disclosing our personal lives at work, so what and how much you reveal is totally up to you. If nothing else, say why you want that particular job at that company. One approach is to connect that job to your personal interests so you can give the hiring team some insight into the real you without over-disclosing personal details. For example, “I’ve been playing cello since 5th grade so I’m excited to work for Company X that provides a payment platform for arts educators.”

Show your best work! Obviously. But don’t assume you only need to show complex studies and over-index on the fancy. If the company indicates that scrappy (or the ubiquitous “fast-paced”) is important to them, show something that was done quickly, super efficiently, with rigor, and still achieved impact — “scrappy, not crappy” as I like to say. If they say they work quickly and you only show a mixed methods study that took 3 months, you’ll look like you can’t work at their pace, even if it’s the most brilliant study ever done.

Be sure each study includes these basic elements. You don’t need to go into super detail, you could summarize each topic on one slide.

Objective: What was the objective of the research and how does that relate to the business question you were answering or the problem you were studying?

• Research has the most impact when it moves business objectives forward. Demonstrating that you’re conducting studies that have clear objectives and relate to business goals is key. A lot of researchers miss this one. Of course we want to help users have a better experience, but that’s happening within the context of a business. The business question might be something like “increase engagement on the page by 10%” or “understand key pain points with the signup flow to inform our Q3 roadmap” or “uncover why we’re seeing a significant drop in satisfaction scores around fee transparency.”

Approach: What research approach(es) did you use to answer that question and why was that approach chosen?

• Demonstrating that you can identify when the best approach is a usability study vs. interviews vs. a survey is an important part of being a researcher. Relate the technique you chose back to the business question you were answering.

Outcome: What were the outcomes/key findings?

• Don’t laundry list every single finding. Identify the top 1–3 insights you uncovered with the study and relate them back to the business objectives (see a theme here?). For example, “we learned that most users couldn’t find the fees on their credit card statements, which likely contributes to our low satisfaction scores around fee transparency.”

Impact: What was the impact i.e. what action was taken by the product/development team?

• Okay, now you might be thinking “I have no idea what the impact was because I moved onto a new project as soon as the research was done.” That happens a lot. But take a deep breath, even if you don’t have metrics, like percentage lift on engagement, what impact DO you know about? What decision did the team make based on the insights you provided? How did the insights you provided help them make a better informed decision than they would have made if they didn’t have that data? Did the team learn new ways to value research from their work with you? Did they save several weeks A/B testing multiple solutions because your research identified a clear winner among multiple design options? Something was impacted from this study, you may just need to think more broadly about what that “impact” was.

Role: What was your role in the research project?

• Pretty basic, but say it anyway. Did you lead the study from start to finish? Partner with another researcher? Coach a designer to run the study?

Reflection: After the study was done, what did you learn about yourself or your research process and what would you do differently if you were to do the study again?

• This is so important and I see people skip it all the time. Hiring managers want to know what you’ve learned along the way about how to improve as a researcher. Sometimes candidates wonder how to handle this one because they don’t want to come across as a non-expert. I’d say we’re all learning from prior work and improving as we go. Good leaders value a growth mindset and want to see their employees approach work open to learning from mistakes or unfortunate circumstances. Even simple reflections are valuable. For example, “if I’d had another week I could have interviewed another 5 users and we would have had even more data, but as it was we learned enough to inform the next A/B test” or “I thought I was including all the key stakeholders in the study but later in the process I discovered there was another PM who should have been involved.”

Research has the most impact when it moves business objectives forward. Demonstrating that you’re conducting studies that have clear objectives and relate to business goals is key.

When considering what to include in a portfolio, you might wonder how you can share previous work without violating any non-disclosure agreements. It’s totally possible to share without oversharing.

• For the business question, for example, you could say “we were asked to identify new ways to engage our target audience” without being specific about who makes up that audience. For outcomes, you could focus on high level outcomes “we discovered that participants could not complete the 3 core tasks” or “we learned that the language in our original prototype was not understandable” without getting into additional detail.
• When including screenshots you could redact sections that contain sensitive info. Too much redaction and it’ll look like a government document, but if it’s a matter of covering a couple of things just blur that content or put a tasteful gray box over it, then when you tell the broader story the artifact will be there as a reference.

One last tip: think (sort of) like a designer when crafting the artifact.

• Though no one expects the same level of visual craft from a researcher as they would from a designer, it is important for your slides to be well-considered, polished, and well-executed. There are plenty of templates in Google Slides or other tools that make it easy to create a polished presentation.

How to excel during the presentation

If you’ve been asked to share your portfolio with the hiring manager or team, great news, congrats on making it this far! Now it’s time to prepare.

Put your portfolio into slides

• A website might be a great way to showcase your work ahead of an interview, but for the actual portfolio presentation slides are preferable. For one, slides make it easy to tailor the presentation to this specific company. Even if it’s 95% the same across companies, even having a one slide “this is why I want THIS job” can make you a more desirable candidate. Slides can also make it easier to manage the presentation if you’re nervous. All you have to do is press the spacebar or down arrow to progress, rather than needing to navigate around a site.

Get as much info about what to expect during the presentation as you can

• Ask the recruiter for details. Find out how they’ll be assessing your work. Specifically, what are they expecting to see? What level of detail about studies? Anything beyond the standard categories described above?
• Find out how many studies the hiring team expects to see. Often the hiring manager will want to see two case studies to see the variety of your work.
• Ask how long you’ll have to give your presentation. Assume it’ll take about one minute to share each slide, and don’t forget to leave time for questions and discussion. So if you have 45 minutes for the portfolio review, that means prepare max about 30 slides to leave time for Q&A and slight overruns.

Practice your presentation ahead of time

• This is so important, and often people skip this step. It’s like piloting your study, you want to check that someone else understands what you’re trying to communicate. You don’t need to practice with someone who deeply understands research, a friend or partner will do, just get comfortable with presenting, the cadence, and uncover any obvious changes you need to make.
• Rehearsing also allows you to check your timing. Be sure you can cover the material in the time you’ll have and not run over. Even after rehearsing, you may start to run over during the actual presentation, so be prepared to adjust on the fly and calmly skip slides if that happens. Just know in advance which slides you can skip and not lose the core message.

Once you’ve done all of this preparation, you’re set. Now you get to a deep breath and tell them about all the awesome work you’ve done.