Tips for UX Student Portfolios

Your portfolio is your chance to show a hiring manager what you can do, and it can be tough to create and curate one that captures your experience and skills. On the Upstream UX team at ExxonMobil, we review many portfolios every year, and we have identified some common themes in the ones that stand out. In this article, I’ll share some tips and best practices that you can apply to improve your portfolio.

This article is the second in the series of tips for how students can improve their chances to land that first UX designer or user researcher role. The first article covered resumes.

Basics

Do I need a portfolio? Why?

Yes, as someone who is early in their career, you need a portfolio. If you have a long work history in design or research, you may be able to do without a portfolio or body of example work, but, as someone applying for a junior role, you need something to show a hiring manager that you know and can apply the basics of design and research.

As a researcher, you also need a portfolio: just don’t think of a portfolio in the “examples of pretty pictures” sense of the term. Think of a portfolio as a collection of case studies that give you a chance to show how you do research, the conclusions that you’ve drawn, and how your research impacted a project.

A portfolio allows a hiring manager to see what you’ve done and imagine how you could be doing something similar for them. If they can imagine how you’d do something similar for them, they are much more likely to schedule you for an interview.

Portfolio format and style

Your portfolio is your chance to show your style and establish your “brand,” but, unless you are trying to be a visual or graphic designer, it’s okay if you use a hosting site template if the template allows you to show your work properly and doesn’t cause user experience issues like forcing your portfolio to only be comprised of small thumbnails without connecting text.

Some hiring managers from a visual or graphic design background will place a greater emphasis on your portfolio’s overall style, but the most important part is whether your portfolio allows the hiring manager to get a good feel for what you can do through your sample projects.

While not ideal, you can even use a PDF hosted on a file sharing site or one of the web-based whiteboard or wireframing solutions if the hiring manager can easily view and navigate through your work.

For web-based portfolios, a custom domain name like “ronuxdesign.com” can make it easier for hiring team to find and review your portfolio. That said, having a custom domain is recommended but not required.

Spell check and proofread

Spell check the text on your portfolio site, especially if you aren’t using a word processor to create the text. And proofread it again and again and again.

Ask a trusted friend to proofread all of the text: you may read over your typo multiple times, but another person may catch the typo immediately. Proofread it by reading the text out loud to your friend. Or use web accessibility features to have your browser read the site to you.

The repeated proofreading may seem a little excessive, but it is astounding how your brain can fill in what it expects to see as your eye skips past errors.

Test your portfolio

Test your portfolio once you create it and after every edit. Make sure that all of the links work and that the portfolio behaves how a hiring manager would expect. Test the site on different browsers, on different desktop operating systems, on a tablet, and on a phone. You don’t know how a member of the hiring team will view your portfolio, so you’ll want to make sure that it works and looks good no matter how they view your site.

Maintenance

Once you create your portfolio, be sure to keep it up to date: add new portfolio pieces as you create them and update the included resume. And, if you have a custom domain name, make sure that you pay for the domain registration and hosting. The last thing that you want is for someone to try to go to your website and hit an error.

Portfolio contents

What should your portfolio include? What should you exclude?

A hiring manager is visiting your portfolio site primarily to see examples of your work. Make sure that your site reflects and facilitates that goal.

Home page

Your portfolio’s home page is the first example of your design ability and individual style that a hiring manager will see. Does the home page represent what you can do and the message that you want to send? Does the home page show that you know why a visitor is there?

Make it easy for a visitor to get to the good parts (examples of your work) and to other interesting content like something about you and a resume. Don’t make a visitor scroll through less important content to get to the examples.

Make sure that visitors also know what role that you want to have. Do you see yourself primarily as a designer? A researcher? A generalist?

If you are primarily a service designer or a user researcher and your home page isn’t elegantly beautiful or strikingly stylish, that’s fine: showing that you understand why the hiring manager is there and what they want to see is also powerful.

Case studies / projects / examples

Make it easy for a visitor to get to examples of your work, either on the home page itself and / or available from a menu item.

How many case studies should you have? Realistically, a hiring manager is unlikely to have the time to look at more than a few examples of your work, at least on the first review, so you want to have 3–6 examples, arranged in the order of importance so that if they only review one or two projects, they review your best work.

Curate your work to reflect the type of position that you want. If you want to be a researcher, most if not all, of the examples should show your research ability. If you want to work on mobile game design, most of the examples should be from mobile games. If you want to show that you are a jack-of-all-trades, select examples which show the breadth of your skills and interests.

Each example should have a title, a short description, and a small to medium sized hero image. Make it easy for the user to tell what to expect if they click on the hero image. For example, is this a “mobile game app” or a “research for service design” project?

We’ll look at this section in more detail below.

About me

An “About me” page allows you to tell a bit about your story and reveal a glimpse into who you are outside of the office. Take advantage of the opportunity but know that what you reveal can help form a hiring manager’s opinion of you, positive and negative. Talk about why you are interested in design and research as well as your other interests and be careful about how much time and energy you spend sharing your other interests. If you declare that “fashion is my passion,” a hiring manager might be justifiably wary about your real interest in UX.

Resume and contact information

While it’s likely that a hiring manager already has your resume and contact information because they didn’t just stumble on your portfolio, include a link to your most recent resume as well as contact information. Particularly if you were referred to the hiring manager by a recruiting or contracting agency, the hiring manager may have a heavily modified version of your resume.

What to exclude

There are a few things which you should exclude from your portfolio because they aren’t helpful and because they consume your valuable time to little benefit.

First, exclude any significant mention of passions or examples which aren’t relevant for the type of position that you want. For example, if you have a sideline as a wedding photographer, include a single photo and mention your sideline on your About me page, but don’t include a large set of wedding photos on your main UX portfolio. Create a separate wedding photography portfolio site so that you don’t dilute the impact of either portfolio. If you are a 3D modeler trying to get into UX, maybe include one example, but don’t make the portfolio primarily 3D models.

Second, exclude any generalized UX process information. Hiring managers aren’t coming to your portfolio to learn about an idealized design or research process. They want to see how you applied a design or research process in the context of a specific project.

Finally, please exclude skill bars or skill ratings. Skill bars and skill ratings aren’t useful because hiring managers have no idea of how the skill was evaluated or what a “5/5” really means.

Projects / Case Studies / Examples

Your collection of projects / case studies / examples should form the bulk of your portfolio, and you should consider these factors for each.

Remember why

Remember why the hiring manager is there to look at your portfolio and their context: they want to get an idea of what you can do and how you do it, and they are under a time constraint. Keeping this “why” in mind will help guide what to include and what to exclude.

For example, for team projects, you’ll want to spend more time on the parts that you did and less time on the parts that others did. Rather than going into exhaustive detail about every single design decision, talk about the important decisions that you made and briefly describe the alternatives and why you made the decisions that you made. Remember that hiring managers only have a few minutes for their initial review of your portfolio.

Also remember why you are including a particular project. Does this project highlight something that the others don’t show? Or is this project very similar to something else in your portfolio which means that your time would be better spent preparing a different example?

Tell a good story

Each project should tell a good story that focuses on what you did and how you did it. There should be a clear narrative with a beginning, middle, and ending. The project narrative should be just long enough to tell that good story and no longer.

The story should have these elements:

· What: a short description about the project including the problem that you were trying to solve and the project context. Is it a team class project? An individual assignment? A volunteer effort?

· Why: why is this problem important to solve?

· Who: who was this project for and with whom did you work?

· When: when did you do this project? How much time did you have for it? How long did things take?

· When Part 2: Did you come into the project at the initial conception phase? After the primary design concept was created? Only at the end?

· Where: Does location of the user, team, or you matter in how in research or design decisions?

· How: how did you complete the project? Tell a good narrative of how you got from the starting point to the ending point and the challenges that you overcame along the way. Show how you solved the problem.

· What Part 2: What was the result? What impact did this project have?

· What Part 3: What did you learn? What did you do well? What mistakes did you make?

You are the hero of the story

For team projects, you want to balance showing that you worked on a team with showing the parts that you did and how you made a difference. If it’s not clear who made the included artifacts, a hiring manager can’t get a good picture of what you can do. Be clear about who did what.

Like a good hero’s journey story, there are other characters, but you should be the focus of the story.

Talk about how the team worked together to solve problems, showing the artifacts which are important to illustrating the story and then spend most of the time talking about what you did and how your work impacted the team’s work or the team’s work influenced your work.

For example, you might briefly describe the research that the team did and then go into considerable detail about how you took these three research insights and created the initial sketches which led to these low to medium fidelity wireframes (which you also did) that were later turned into a high fidelity prototype by someone else on the team.

Show your work

Show how you solved the problem by tracing the steps from the beginning to the end that are most relevant to your story and illustrating with pictures.

Hiring managers do not need to see every step that you took, just the most important ones to the story that you are trying to tell. In novels where the hero undertakes a long journey, the author doesn’t describe each travel day: they describe only the most interesting days and compress the uninteresting ones into “for two weeks, the hero traveled west into the wilderness.”

For example, trace the design of the most interesting dashboard from beginning to end rather than showing all of dashboard and supporting dialogs, especially if they aren’t all your work.

Illustrate your work with relevant pictures (which you or your team took) that are big enough that hiring managers can easily discern details. Show pictures of whiteboarding or research sessions. Show sketches. Show low, medium, and high fidelity images of the same screen. You’ll also get bonus points if you show design alternatives and explain why you chose one option over another.

While it’ll be helpful to have small versions of pictures and mockups in the body of your case study, make sure that hiring managers can click on each image to zoom in to examine details.

Show, don’t teach the process

Show how you applied a design or research process, particularly if you had to adapt an idealized process. Briefly describe how some steps impacted the outcome or what you did next. However, you don’t need to show an idealized process or try to teach an idealized process to the hiring manager.

For example, explain what you learned by researching and developing personas rather than explaining why personas are important. Or, “I changed my design in X way because of Y that I learned during usability testing” rather than “usability testing is important to learn what users really do and this is how usability testing is conducted…”.

Some more suggestions

Some more suggestions that will allow you to avoid mistakes:

· Just including a class project presentation slide deck, while better than nothing, will make it harder for a hiring manager to evaluate what you can do. Investing the time to create a proper portfolio piece is important to make a good impression and showcase your abilities.

· Not having sketches and low to medium fidelity mockups will make it hard to tell a story of how the design evolved and the alternatives that you considered.

· Only having pretty pictures with no description shows hiring managers that you can collect pretty pictures but gives no idea about your role, the problem that you were trying to solve, your thought process, or whether you were successful at solving the problem.

· Use stock photos very sparingly (if at all) and make sure that you indicate that they are stock photos if they are stand ins for photos that you should have taken while doing a project. Actual project photos will be far better.

Closing Thoughts

Your portfolio is your chance to show a hiring manager what you can do so that they can imagine how you could do that same work on their team. Show your design skills and your style, but most of all, tell good stories of the projects that you’ve done. For each, have a good narrative that highlights your contributions and is illustrated with pictures that show what you can do. Spark their imagination so that they can see you on their team doing similar work.

We’ll continue this series with a set of tips for your job search.