Tips for building an amazing UX Research portfolio

Companies are increasingly asking researchers to share work samples along their resumé when applying to a position.

While there are great articles (like these from UX Design, Semplice, and Sarah Doody) that provide valuable tips for portfolios as a whole, creating a research portfolio comes with unique challenges. Here are some tips that are more specific for researchers looking to showcase their work.

1. Highlight your researcher profile, not just the craft

A researcher's value lays on enabling better decision making for teams and organisations. As such, a great research portfolio showcases not only how you conduct research (the craft), but also your thought process and ways of working.

What's more, your portfolio is a reflection of you. Before jumping into creating content, think about your overall profile as a researcher:

• Your core research skills: What methods and tools are you experienced with? How do you select the ‘right’ one for a specific study?
• Your problem solving skills: How have you handled constraints, like time and budget? What challenges have you experienced during a project, and how you solved them?
• Your collaboration skills: How do you work as part of a team? How do you involve stakeholders during the research process? How do you collaborate with other researchers?
• Your communication skills: How do you share the outcomes of research studies with others? How do you maximise the reach of such studies?

🎯 This about page from Katie McCurdie is a great example of showcasing one’s skills, ways of working and value.

2. Focus case-studies on research

I have seen many 'research' portfolios where most of the content is about creating pixel perfect UIs, and somewhere along the way it touches upon conducting a few interviews.

When applying to research positions, your work samples should be about research. In a nutshell a research use-case follows the following structure:

Why? — The business problem and research goal

Describe the reason why research was needed; the problem at hand and the decision(s) that the study aimed to inform. Show how the research goal and questions stemmed from these.

What? — The research set-up and why you chose it

Based on the research goal, describe what the research set-up looked like (methods, participants, etc) and the decisions you made to get to that plan. Include any constraints and factors that influenced your thinking.

Talking about the research is within our comfort zone, so at this point we are tempted to get deep into the nitty gritty. Beware of that feeling and keep in mind that your portfolio's audience probably includes non-researchers.

Use simplified terminology and brake the approach into bite-size chunks. A diagram is usually a good way to illustrate this. The moment you start listing every interview question or sample size calculations, you’ve likely gone too far.

How? — Conducting the research and the learnings

Tell the story of how you conducted the research. Focus on key learnings that drove action and share obstacles, or pivotal moments along the way.

Remember that good research doesn't happen in isolation. Mention how stakeholders were involved, how insights informed their decision-making, and your role in facilitating this.

Include assets that you developed as the result of the research, like archetypes, journeys, or diagrams. When adding these, don’t just dump a bunch of pictures into the page without context. Describe why you created them and how they were used.

So what? — The outcomes triggered by the study

Close the story by highlighting the study's impact. As researchers, we often struggle with this point because we think about impact as a direct consequence of one action: doing A resulted in B.

There are multiple reasons why this formula is hard to apply to research, but it helps to think about impact beyond this definition. Some examples of impact are:

• The company or product metrics that were impacted
• The decisions and actions taken — big or small, strategic or tactical — as well as those avoided
• The level of customer understanding and alignment gained by the teams
• The knowledge gaps that surfaced and fuelled subsequent research initiatives
• The process frictions that were identified and improved

All of these (and more) are valuable outcomes from a feature, product, or company perspective. Read more on tracking research impact in this article from UserInterviews.

🎯 Check out the PDF case-studies from Alessandro Battisti, which guide the reader through the research with just enough level of detail.

3. Beware of confidentiality

There is no need to have ten different case-studies in your portfolio, three to five well-crafted ones are more than enough. Select projects that you can actually share, and even then, beware of posting sensitive information. When appropriate, redact the deliverables to avoid displaying details.

If most of your work is under NDA, be honest about this and build your portfolio around your profile and value. Pay extra attention to non-case study sections, like the 'about' page or your blog, and give them a more prominent role.

Consider creating high-level case studies that don't disclose confidential information, but mention the overarching challenges, your role and methods. I like to see these as the intersection between a regular case study and what you would mention in your CV.

🎯 This case study from Rachel Fleming shows how to create a case-study when the detailed work cannot be shared.

4. Respect participants’ privacy

We all want to show pictures of us conducting research, and because we conduct research with people, those pictures likely include others.

Even if you aren’t based in Europe (yay GDPR 🙌), respecting participant's privacy is central to research ethics. Unless people explicitly gave you consent, don't display their names, faces, and other personal data.

5. Stop trying to imitate design portfolios

It is easy to get discouraged when seeing design portfolios with shiny images and cool animations. As researchers, our content tends to be ‘less visual’. We have documents with research plans, interview guidelines, and excel sheets with survey answers.

But we also have a story to tell. To captivate your audience, focus on how you tell that story.

Narrative

Research is not just about the insights, but also about the steps we took and challenges we faced to uncover them. Story-telling is a great way to give structure and create an engaging and memorable narrative.

Writing style

Synthesising a lot of information is a critical skill for a researcher. Keep the story story by including only what is relevant and filtering out anything that may be distracting. Focus on key learnings and pivotal moments and shaped the path and incited action. Use short sentences, make direct conclusions, and avoid jargon.

Tone of voice

Be intentional about the feeling you want to convey. A portfolio doesn’t need to be formal, you are not writing an academic paper. Don’t be afraid to bring your personality into the mix.

Visual cues

Use visual cues to grab the reader’s attention and point them to the relevant information you want them to see. Some examples of visual cues are:

• Headlines: most people scan headlines before they read. Use headlines in your case-studies to actually say something. Don’t waste them on simply naming a process step.
• Text highlights: using bold text or colour highlights is an effective way to convey a text's overarching message without reading every word.
• Emojis or icons: bring in some emotion and visual appeal by adding emojis or icons to strengthen your message.
• Diagrams: mind maps, funnels, process steps, matrix charts, etc. There are many ways to visualise information, which don’t require you to be a drawing artist!

Creating a UX research portfolio can be intimidating. I hope these tips and the resources that I’ve linked give you inspiration to get started.

Do you have any other tips to share with fellow researchers? Share them in the comments!