UX case study playbook
A case study is an important tool for designers to showcase their skills and approach in a story format, to recruiters, hiring-mangers, colleagues, or fellow designers. Approach it with the same lens and rigor as you would for your client or company project. Write a brief, outline key stages of the journey, collect artifacts, research, sketch, define a system, design, get feedback, iterate and constantly look for opportunities to raise the bar.
Sharing a playbook that can help get you started, or evaluate an existing one. This is not a template, it’s not meant to be a one-size-fit-all, treat these as broad strokes to help ensure you are hitting the key points. Your case study, project, approach, and journey will be unique and should represent true honest yourself.
1. Give an Overview.
Provide an introduction to the project, design brief, goals, and challenges, set the context that will help the reader empathize with your journey.
2. Define your and your team’s role
It’s always important to acknowledge the team’s work and your specific role within it. This helps build trust with your reader and most importantly lets the recruiter know about your skills and knowledge.
3. Define the Customer and their Pain Point
There is a reason we are called User Experience Designers, customer/user has to be, should have been at the epicenter of all your conversations. Define the User, their tasks/jobs they would like to get done using the solution, and challenges/pain-point they face in completing these tasks.
4. Present your Findings
Walk through your approach in what helped you in defining your customer, how you arrived at it, how did you gather the details, the pain-points. Share representative artifacts (not all) to help establish your work. Always good to show some in-action visuals.
5. Share your Analysis
It’s important for readers to know your inputs, before you walk them through the solution. Share steps/activities you or your team conducted to analyze the data, how you synthesized, prioritized, phased-it. Show the output that you shared with your partners/stakeholders to drive alignment. Empathy mapping, noun-action analysis, persona, design briefs, journeys, etc.
6. Present Solution
Now I get it, showing pretty visuals, high-fidelity designs are catchy and makes your case study look good. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, for UX designers it’s important to show the foundational work, what led to that design. User journeys, task flows, Information Architecture, wireframes and its iterations, design explorations, low-mid fidelity mock-ups, there is a lot that goes in before a final design is delivered. It’s important for your reader to know what led to the final design. And more importantly you need to tie these back to the user and your findings, connect the dots.
7. Share outcome
These gets tricky, especially if your project has not yet released, it’s still in development, or in a beta state with few disclosed users. And even for projects that are out, you might not be at the liberty to share specific outcomes. First up front, you need to make sure you have the permissions to share the project details, vet it through your client, team, leadership to ensure you are not sharing any confidential data, that you are not supposed to. For projects that are still in progress, if you have done any summative studies to evaluate your solution, you could share that or anecdotal feedback you might have got from users, stakeholders. For released projects, you could share % impact, or anecdotal data, or trends, needless to say, with right approvals from your stakeholders.
8. Acknowledge learning
No project goes as expected, there are always misses, improvisations, trade-offs, follow-ons that you would have agreed along the journey to deliver the project. Ideally, acknowledge these specifics during each phase of the journey, helps build trust with your reader and allows them to empathize. But this is where you can be vocally self-critical and acknowledge what you could have done differently and what you’re learning were that you will apply in your next project.
Some tips and tricks
- Right in active tone,
- Keep it short and sweet,
- Lead with the headline; make it easy to read
- Balance between visuals and text,
- Captivate readers; take them along on your journey,
- Connect the dots, as you progress through your story,
- Showcase design wisely; screens/design where you have solved an interesting challenge or have come-up with a unique solution.
- Design process, it’s a known knowledge :). Skip it!
