Photo by Robyn Budlender on Unsplash

Hiring UX Designers Part 3: Tell me a story

How to ace a portfolio review

Jenny Shirey
Jul 25, 2017 · 6 min read

This is Part 3 of a series of posts on hiring UX designers, distilling the process I go through when I screen, interview, and hire designers. If you missed it, you can go back and read Part One about applying for a job, or Part Two about the first interview.


You’ve sent in a thoughtful application and shown potential during our first conversation. Now it’s time for a crucial step: the portfolio review! This is where you’ll show us your stuff and let us get to know you as a designer.

During the portfolio review, you’ll be presenting to me (the hiring manager) and one other person, usually a Product Manager if you’ll be embedded in a product team. We’ll introduce ourselves and I’ll ask you to give a short introduction—another chance for you to highlight your experiences that make you a great fit for our company. After that, we’ll get right into the work: you’ll plug in your laptop and lead the presentation while we ask questions. At the end, we’ll ask if you have any questions for us (make sure you do!). The whole thing takes about an hour.

My main goal at this stage is to figure out if you have the level of design skills that we need for the role, as well as the ability to present and thoughtfully describe your work. In this article, I’ll share with you what’s going through my mind and what I’m looking for. What are the qualities of an excellent portfolio presentation?

You lead us through a curated sample of work

Presenting your work in a structured and consistent way is a foundational skill and one that you’ll use in your role as a UX designer. A good portfolio review demonstrates that you know how to edit and you care about craft. Many candidates choose to put together a formal presentation of their work (Keynote, Google slides, a PDF), which helps with consistency and gives a nice frame to the work itself.

If you’re very organized and know exactly what you want to show, you don’t necessarily need a presentation; I’ve had one person open up Sketch files and take me through iterations and comps in a way that was easy to follow. However, I’ve also had the experience of watching candidates go through folders on their computer looking for the right comp to show, which is painful and tells me that you’re not very organized.

Another tactic that candidates often take is to open up their online portfolio and take me through projects. Personally, I’m not a fan of this approach, because I don’t usually learn anything new about the candidate’s skills. I’ve already looked through your online portfolio; the in-person review should go much more in-depth and show me something I’ve haven’t seen before.

Some presentations incorporate motion into the Keynote to show transitions, or demo a key flow or interaction. The motion helps with the problem of how to show interactions within a presentation (plus, it’s fun!). If you’re going to use movement in your work, however, make sure that it’s adding information and enhancing, not distracting. You can always open up the actual app after going through your design process as well.

You tell a story about your work

A good storyteller doesn’t just say, “I made this, and then I made this, and then I made this.” She paints a picture of the situation by telling me what the problem was, how she approached it, what she learned from users, and the evolution that she went through from the first sketches, through iterations, until the final design, based on user insights and feedback.

When I was studying design, I applied for an internship at an agency. I was proud of my presentation showing all of my sketches, research findings, whiteboards, and visual comps. But halfway through my presentation, the interviewer stopped me. He drew out the design process on a piece of paper and pointed to it. “You’re not showing me what you learned in this stage of the design process, and how that affected the work you did next,” he said.

At first I was offended: how could he imply that I didn’t know the process! But after getting over my hurt pride, I understood what he meant and realized he was right. I hadn’t connected the dots or shown that I’d actually learned any insights from the research I’d done. I also hadn’t considered that my audience didn’t care about the details. In short, I wasn’t telling a compelling story. Going through that painful interview early on made me a better presenter and storyteller.

Remember, a good story has a beginning, middle, and end; conflict and resolution. And a good storyteller knows how to focus on the main point and not get bogged down in details. How can you apply that to your own work?

The design is current and shows a range of abilities

A successful candidate has up-to-date skills. While it’s fine to show something that you designed five years ago, it’s crucial to mix in recent work as well. You’re showing your growth and capabilities, and also that you understand and follow what’s happening in UX design today.

You’ll also need to show that you can work with different types of content and media. A designer who can do that is more likely to be successful switching to our company’s context. For example, if a candidate shows only mobile work done for iPhone, this makes it difficult to judge whether he would also be comfortable designing for large-screen websites.

You can tell us why you made decisions

During the presentation, my colleague and I will ask you specific questions about why you made certain design or process decisions.

Why did you choose to use those particular colors?

Why did you choose this interaction for that feature?

Did you do any exploratory research with end users, and what were the insights that led you to create this feature in this way?

What did you learn from the usability testing, and what changes did you make in your product afterward?

Why did you decide to create a mobile app instead of making a mobile website?

Notice that these questions are not only about UI design choices, but also about the process and the product. This is because our UX designers are responsible for every aspect of design, including the conceptual work and the final visuals. We want to make sure that you can make thoughtful decisions based on user needs throughout. Even if you are not responsible for talking with users in your current role, a solid product designer cares about the results and will use the findings to improve his designs.

This also has to do with taking responsibility for your work. If you know that the final outcome wasn’t as good as it could have been, I want to hear how you take responsibility and what you believe could have been better. Some designers will blame bad product design choices on others (“my product manager told me to do it this way”, or “my CEO said it had to be puke green”). This makes me worry that you won’t stand up to others when they want to make choices that are bad for the users. So even if your CEO did pull rank and force you to use a terrible color for your app, focus on what you did about it, what you learned from the experience, and what you would do differently next time.

You care about the impact of your design work

Even if you’ve created the most beautiful UI with the most subtly gorgeous transitions ever, if it didn’t ship, it didn’t make a difference. It’s fine to show concept projects (sometimes that’s the only place you get to fully express your creativity and range), but I want to see that you care about making products and services that improve users’ lives.

Numbers speak, and designers who can bring metrics along with their work show me that they honestly want to know whether their design is making an impact. I love when someone can tell me during an interview, “this feature that I designed brought our retention up by 35%”, or “we got 10% fewer support tickets after we released this usability fix”. That shows me that you care about making a difference with your work and you’ll bring value to our product.


As you can see, an excellent portfolio review isn’t just about beautiful images. Put in the effort to tell a great story and you’ll prove that you’re the kind of designer I want on my team.

Jenny Shirey

Written by

UX designer and leader. I love helping teams build better products.

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