The UX Design Portfolio That Got Me Hired

The process of designing a public portfolio to land a job as a UX/UI Designer (Spring 2023)

Overview

Breaking into the design field without much prior experience can be challenging, but I was able to do so by building out a professional portfolio. With the guidance from professors of my master’s program, lots of research, and plenty of feedback, I built out a portfolio showcasing some of my best work.

I aimed to portray my skills and personality in a way that would attract potential recruiters. Using a WordPress template, I built the website, and using additional CSS, I added my own touch to the design.

Challenge

I needed to display credible work while having not been employed in a professional position. I also needed to define my personal brand and add personality through design elements and word choice.

I wanted to detail my efforts, while summarizing my work for an audience who would prefer to absorb as much information in as little time as possible. Therefore, it was necessary that the layout of my pages were thoughtfully designed for skimming and good readability.

Design Process

To organize my design process, I set out to emphasize with my intentions for the portfolio, define how I want my target audience to perceive it, ideate on the portfolio design, prototype it, and test it for insights.

Emphasize

I began by identifying my goals, personally and professionally. My personal mission statement came out to be:

To provide brands with successful products and users with enjoyable digital experiences using thoughtful design.

Define

I considered my dream job positions and how this portfolio could be catered to recruiters from those companies, firms, and locations. Using this information, I was better able to choose the projects that best showcased my skills that are most applicable to those positions.

Ideate

Collecting inspiration from several portfolios I found through Dribble, Career Foundry, LinkedIn, and other sources, I pulled parts and pieces into my own design. Some consistent styles I was drawn to include: sleek, professional displays, the use of playful colors and animations, and simplistic, minimal pages. Here are some portfolios I drew inspiration from:

From my assessment, I planned to include a home page with a short bio of myself and a featured projects section, an about page with a longer bio and personal details, and another page that could be a contact page or resume.

I really enjoyed the use of bright colors, coordinating a project color with the highlight color used to highlight words on that project page, short bios, and only having 3 pages.

I created a bright and colorful primary color palette to compliment my chosen projects and a lighter color of each primary color to create my secondary color palette. These secondary colors would be used as highlights and other features on the project page that uses the corresponding primary color.

Prototype

I sketched about some page layouts for the landing page, considering how I wanted to display the nav bar and the amount of projects I wanted to show — and if it should be 1 across, 2 across, or 3 across. I also wrote out each topic I would want to cover and page organization for the project pages.

Using the sketches I had in mind, I searched for a template that had what I was looking for already built out. After some trial and error, I found an acceptable template and got to work uploading my information and branding the site according to my personal brand style guide.

Here, you can see how I’ve implemented my color palette into my projects section.

Test

I interviewed several of my peers and design professionals to review my portfolio and provide feedback. Some qualitative feedback I received includes: weak personality due to dull colors and broad wording, too much information on project pages making it difficult to scan, and no direction for a call to action.

To gain more quantitative data on the performance of my portfolio, I installed Google Analytics-4. This provides information on the amount of people visiting my website and what their user journey looks like.

With all of this feedback and data, I went back to the drawing board and iterated several functions of my portfolio.

Results

I successfully built a portfolio, showcasing my design skills in an appropriate manner intended for recruiters, and landed a job as a UX/UI Designer!

From several rounds of interviews and peer workshops, I was able to shift my perspective into the experiences of different users on my site. I appreciated peer support, but the real help came from professionals I would ask to review my portfolio. Their insights and guidance moved along my progress in greater depths to help finalize my portfolio.

As I gain more experience and work on more projects, I will update my portfolio and continue to improve its performance.

View my portfolio: https://kellymay.me/