Portfolios that got designer hired at Uber
Getting jobs at the top 100 companies are difficult (but not impossible) because it seems every Tom, Dick and Fisayo are interested in having those companies on their resume, understandably. It could be because of their impact, a 6-figure compensation, work culture or maybe even bragging rights, but only 2–3*%* of application received get a callback to move to the next stage.
Our community is dedicated to closing that gap between designers and designers who get those low acceptance rate jobs. I hope you can appreciate that wordplay.
We will go through two case studies from the portfolios that got these designers hired at Uber. Whether your goal is to climb the corporate ladder from mid-weight to senior or you’re a freelancer trying to transition into full-time employment, you will pick up tips from these case studies that will elevate your portfolio and design thinking.
Femke van schoonhoven
Femke popularly known as Femke design is a design lead in British Columbia, Canada. She has worked with companies like Gusto, Wealthsimple and of course, Uber. In the next few minutes we will go through the portfolio that got Femke hired at Uber.
It’s important to show range in your portfolio, as much as big companies usually hire for a specialised role they also want to see your strengths in more than just UX research or design systems. A few things to include would be visual design, brand identity, interaction design to name a few. To show visual identity and interaction, Femke showcased some freelance work she had done for a client, Amsterdam UX Camp — see excerpts below.
Full case study here
This features a full page footer from the web design, showing interaction. The brand identity uses elements that bring out the quirkiness of the brand including a sharp blue as the primary colour and a supporting orange as secondary. You can also feel the quirkiness on the other pages including the team and schedule below.
While these show some visual design skills, there’s not much UX thinking here. Companies want to see your design thinking, different explorations to solve the problem you are designing for and why you made those design choices. Femke made sure to highlight this in her next project, Parent Interviews. The parent interview task involved developing a platform where parents could book interviews with their children’s teachers. The UX was already in place but redesigning for a visual update gave an opportunity to improve the overall experience.
This project showed more UX thinking and design process, from the sitemap she designed to show task flows and user flow to low fidelity sketches where she explored different ways to go about pages. As the project was a redesign, she started off exploring the existing flow for the current web app, the target audience, brand goals and competitors.
This project was done in 2016, at that time Femke was just getting into UX, as you can imagine going through her work again in 2022 she commented on areas of improvement (now as a senior designer) in line with her accessibility considerations and contrast on some screens. Below are the after screens for the redesign, visualising the time table of the teacher, empty screens and different button states.
Femke’s portfolio included case studies she had done from take home assignments from other design interviews. You should use this as a guide to updating your portfolio case studies to show design thinking by including sketches, design explorations, prototypes to show micro interactions, different states and breakpoints for responsive layouts. To show range as a product designer, you may also want to include elements for creating a brand identity by going into detail on design systems and illustrations you created for the projects.
Conclusion
In this series we will continue to dive deep into portfolios that got designers hired at companies like Spotify, Apple, AirBnB, Etsy and other companies on your radar.
We haven’t covered these here but you should show the part of the design process where you define the user through personas, customer journey map, defining the problem and solution explorations which we will go through in later articles.
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