Why UX portfolios is a bad thing
Have you noticed lately that more and more companies looking for UX:ers to employ or hire are asking (demanding) a portfolio even before an initial interview? In my experience as a UX practitioner with involvement in the recruitment process at previous employers, a portfolio is the last thing I look at trying to measure the competence of a candidate. Let me tell you why a portfolio is misleading, deceitful and unfair.
The goal of a portfolio is to make someone sufficiently informed about the qualifications of a candidate as to be able to decide if he/she makes the cut for the next step, eg an interview. So, how can I compile my experience in a short description with accompanying images, being informative but not too long and tedious? In today’s working culture, recruiters are pressed for time and wants to make a quick decision, but how can you make a good decision without being seduced by good looks?
Browsing the net I find lots of UI portfolios sprinkled with a dash of UX on top. Show-cased projects start with already stylish UIs sometimes iterated upon with user input, more resembling end-process activities rather than start-up. Working with UX, the end-result is the conclusion of a sometimes long process during which loads of decisions have been made and numerous problems have arisen and dealt with. Those decisions and problems tell the real story behind a design. And that, that is UX.
The most important thing in UX is understanding the users. So how can the reader of a portfolio understand how well you have understood your users by looking at your design? How can the reader know that you have done your research in a trustworthy and unbiased manner? A picture or a sentence will never tell that. Trustworthy and unbiased answers are of utmost importance in UX and how do you rate that skill without meeting the candidate? Just looking at a portfolio will make you judge a candidate from a subset of UX skills, risking to reject qualified candidates early in the process.
A lot of people, like me for example, work with internal, b2b, business critical systems and all information and design associated with that work is to be considered business secrets. Competitors would be very grateful if they would be shown analysis data and even wireframes that cost a lot of money to research and design. I have signed lots of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) to prevent me from spreading any of it to other parties. Therefore, including this information in a portfolio would make me susceptible to hefty fines.
There is always the possibility to anonymize the information but having worked in specialized businesses makes it really hard, not to say impossible, to achieve a level of generalisation and at the same time still be meaningful.
Without understanding a complex business, often with multiple target groups, how can you judge how well a design support it? You need thorough information about the various user groups as well as a pretty deep understanding of the business before you can even start considering evaluating a design. Yes, you can check for violations of standards but those standards can have been deliberately violated because the situation required it. And frankly, following standards is the easy part, so all you do is judging a design from the least important aspect.
I work mostly in complex businesses which gives me the challenge and inspiration I need. One of my goals is to reduce the complexity to its core and base my design on that. All special cases and non-frequently used parts are pushed aside as to not obscure or complicate the core, which makes a super-simple and clean design. If you only look at the end-result you will not understand all the hard work that went into it. All my designs have a near simplistic touch and rating purely from studying screen-dumps will put me in the amateurs’ corner.
What I most lack in the portfolios I have seen are the failures. Everyone with some experience have to a certain extent failed sometime. A failure is one of the most precious moments when you can learn — about the users/project/product, about UX and about yourself. I myself have failed big time with personas, to a degree where the personas (and also me) were rendered ridiculous and lost all meaning. From that I learned a lot about personas and how to go about it in the next projects with extra care on presentation and content.
All portfolios seem to belong to perfectionists with unhealthy relationships to failures. I’d rather employ someone that has had some failures in the past than someone without, just waiting for the first real set-back to occur. A seasoned UX:er without failures turns on the warning signs for me.
The arguments against a UX portfolio are strong enough to consider its existence. It only benefits the visually talented and if you are not tilted that way, you will be judged in an unfavorably way. Be brave and resist the trend — skip the portfolio!
