Portfolio Tips for Breaking Into UX

While your resume initially gets you noticed by people, it is your UX portfolio that really helps you to land your next opportunity. Here are my tips and tricks to help you create a great UX portfolio to publish online and show to hiring managers, recruiters, and potential clients at your next interview.

UX Portfolio of Kevin Schumacher

Tip #1: Tell Stories about Your Thought Process

Designers are problem solvers. Hiring managers want to know how you solved problems. You need to be able to tell stories with your portfolio. Screen shots, slides, links, and videos are just eye candy without a compelling story. Recently, I heard a UX recruiter tell a group of students:

Many hiring managers glance at your resume, but they study your portfolio. They look for how you solved a problem. All portfolio sites have visual artifacts. Most of them do not tell a compelling story.

So, you must be able to describe a problem, explain your thought processes, show examples of your work, lead the reader to your solution(s), and describe its impact. Let’s review each of these below.

Tip #2: Describe a Problem by Building Gaps

Everyone loves a story about an underdog, who overcomes incredible odds to solve a problem. You are the hero of your own story. You are the master of your fate. When you describe a problem, you need to create a gap that you had to overcome:

• Current state versus future state
• Legacy technology adapting to modern world
• Old business versus new entrants in the market
• Current business adapting to new regulations
• Old platform migrating to a new platform

By creating a gap, you enhance the impact of the problem you are solving. You make the narrative of your portfolio more compelling.

Kevin Schumacher’s portfolio site (http://schubox.com/) does a wonderful job at describing problems by creating gaps. His featured project called “Day Out” really sets the stage for his entire portfolio site.

Kevin describes the problem of planning for family events in this way:

Having the ability to gather points of data concerning age groups, mashed-up with difficulty levels for activities, such as those posted by the National Park Services, is crucial to begin to draw conclusions on what types of events are best suited for various family types.

In one sentence, Kevin has described all of these gaps: family size, ages, activity levels, national park data, and event planning. After setting up each problem, Kevin describes his thought processes, explains his research, shows visual artifacts, and more.

Tip #3: Explain Your Thought Processes

After you have framed your design problem by building in gaps, you need to explain your thought processes, too. Your thought processes could be:

• Research methods you used on a project
• Design decisions you made for a specific page
• Sequence of steps you took to create an app
• Multiple variations of designs with a description of final solution

With his Day Out app, Kevin Schumacher opted to explain his design decision to in-page filtering in this way:

Creating an ‘always-on’ filtering system was key to the idea of having immediate feedback while zeroing-in on exactly what your family’s needs for your trip might be. This means that web-service data needs to be pulled into the app at activation and be always available to the user while associated with saved user data and their profile information.

Immediately after his description, Kevin shows a quick picture of the on-page filtering of the Day Out app to illustrate his work.

Tip #4: Show Examples of Your Work

Most designers will not have a problem showing examples their work. You want your portfolio site to be filled with visual artifacts of your work. Here is a quick list of some UX portfolio sites that show great examples of their work in different ways:

• Arshad Walla (http://www.uxaviator.com /)
• Kevin Schumacher (http://schubox.com/)
• Simon Pan (http://simonpan.com/)
• Nick Finck (http://blueflavor.com/people/nick-finck/)
• Mark Thomas (http://mrcthms.com/)

In some cases, you may not be able to show your work because on non-disclosure agreements, competitive intelligence, and so on. You may need to create a dummy project to illustrate your thought processes.

For the dummy project(s), move it to a different industry and provide context to a similar situation. You can create personas, sketches, prototypes, user scenarios, and usability test scripts. The main point is to show examples of your work and describe your thought processes.

Tip #5: Lead the Reader to a Live Site

Over the past few years, I have interviewed many different recruiters to help designers find new opportunities at the Big Design Conference. I consistently hear the following statement:

A portfolio site without links to live sites lacks credibility.

Ironically, you want people to leave your portfolio site to go to a live site you have helped to design. Here are some usability tips for these jumps:

1. Do not open a new tab. When clicking to a live site, do not open a new tab. Let users bounce between a live site and your portfolio site.
2. Underline the links. It is an accepted usability behavior that people know links as being underlined. So, keep them underlined.
3. Use great trigger words. The user should know where the link will take them.
4. Do not use hover states alone. If you just use a hover state alone, users may miss a potential link. Make it obvious.
5. Design for blue links. A common pattern still seen in usability testing is blue links equates to navigation. So, use blue links.

Nothing builds your design credibility more than links to live sites you have helped to design.

Tip #6: Describe Your Impact to the Project

You need to explain you impact to the bottom line on each project. In simple terms, you want to show how you helped the company make or save money. You impact can measured in many different ways on your projects:

• Increased conversions on the site
• Decreased phone calls to the Help Desk
• Large number of downloads
• Awards received for the product
• Number of usability issues found
• LinkedIn acknowledgements from co-workers

You have to move beyond just telling the duties you performed. By describing your impact to a project, you are evangelizing the importance of your profession and marketing your…………self.

Many people are marketing themselves. I understand it. I am an introvert, too.

Here are a few tips to help you better market your impact:

1. Review product press releases. You can glean some really excellent points from press releases, such as the number of downloads and efficiency savings on time and money. Use this to show impact.
2. Embed LinkedIn testimonials. You should embed LinkedIn testimonials from respected members of the product team. Let someone else brag about you, instead.
3. Write yourself a recommendation. Act like you are writing a LinkedIn testimonial or recommendation for another person. As a writer, you literally become a character in your own story.
4. Ask another person. You may want to ask a product manager or another person to talk about your impact to a project. You can use their words as a first draft to show your impact.

Final Thoughts

Your portfolio is never really finished. You are constantly working on projects, which changes your experience. The best portfolios tell a compelling story about you. As you progress in your career, you will be constantly updating your portfolio.

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