A guide to designing conceptual case studies for your portfolio
What to include in your conceptual case studies and some of the pros and cons of adding them to your portfolio
Have you received feedback that you don’t have enough meaty projects in your portfolio that illustrate your design process well? If your next thought is, “…but I’m showing everything I have, do they expect me to make a bunch of stuff up?”
Well, not exactly, but close.
If you’re a Design student, an entry-level/Junior designer applying for roles, or simply looking to add more diversity to your portfolio, you might consider looking into adding a conceptual case study or two. So, what exactly are conceptual case studies, you ask? Great question!
What are conceptual case studies?
Conceptual case studies in a designer’s portfolio are hypothetical projects that showcase the designer’s skills, process, and problem-solving abilities and aren’t necessarily projects that have been implemented to serve user and business needs at scale.
There are a few ways in which you could go about designing your conceptual case studies. Here’s a method that has worked for me when I was starting out, and I’ve also seen it being effective in a few other portfolios. Let’s dive into it.
Identify a pain point
Kick it off just like you would an actual project that you’re working on with a cross-functional team. The only difference here is that it’s mostly just you, wearing multiple hats. Pick an app, tool, scenario that you think is an interesting space to explore. This could be a tool you use on a regular basis or a new tool that you just started playing with. Try to answer this question: what’s a point of frustration for you when using this tool? Identifying a problem that you want to attempt to solve can act as the beginning of your discovery process.
The next step is to form a hypothesis around this problem space. You can frame your hypothesis statement in a few different ways. Here are a couple of examples:
If we fix X part of the flow, doing so will increase user value and result in Y% increase in Z.
How might we address X (pain point) so our users feel confident when performing Y task.
A great reference article: Using HMW questions to ideate on the right problems
At this point, you can imagine a user journey map, draft an empathy map, and other artifacts that help you further understand your user base and their needs and goals.
Bonus: validate if this is a problem worth solving
I say that this is a bonus step because you can arguably skip it and simply use your own experience as the basis to solve a problem. It would be super impressive, though, if you put on your user researcher hat and went on to actually determine if this is a problem worth solving or simply your isolated experience. You could do this in a few different ways:
• Post on social channels to ask if folks who use this tool/service would be willing to fill out a short form answering a few questions you have
• Reach out to family and friends who might be willing to share their experience
- Read app store reviews, Reddit, other platforms to see if others share your perspective
Ideate
Diverge first
This is your opportunity to go all out in terms of exploring solutions. Diverge as much as you can without constraining yourself at this point in the process. The explorations you come up with during this part of the process can be great artifacts to show in the case study as you start to build your narrative. Start with low-fidelity paper or whiteboard sketches to show early concepts. Don’t restrict yourself at this stage; that will come later.
Converge later
The next step in the process would be to start converging and picking concepts and ideas that would be worth diving deeper into. At this point, put on your PM hat and consider the technical constraints/feasibility of your concepts as well as usability.
Bonus tip: you can go a step further and bring in business goals here as the third factor by either forming your own perspective on what they might be or doing some research on the general strategic direction the company is headed in. Doing this will add a lot more validity to your conceptual case study.
Iterate
Once you’ve converged to 2–3 ideas that you’d like to further iterate on, bring your designs to med-high fidelity and start gathering feedback to validate your ideas. This will help you collect early learnings that you can use to iterate further. Apply feedback to another round of iterations.
Validate
You’ll eventually land on a solution that does a decent job of solving the problem that you set out to solve. This is when you’ll want to revisit your hypothesis/problem statement to make sure the solution you’ve come up with ties in well to start testing your hypothesis.
Bonus: do another round of lightweight testing at this stage because it will add more weight to your process and close the loop on the project.
It’s important to call out some of the pros and cons of adding conceptual case studies to your portfolio.
Pros
A richer portfolio
You’ll have more substance to your portfolio if you feel like you’re lacking content or diversity.
Showing your ideal process
In real-world case studies, it’s not always possible to showcase what your ideal product development process would have been if you had it your way. With this approach, you’re able to do just that. Sure, the world isn’t an ideal place, but I think it’s still valuable for hiring managers to see how you would approach solving problems if you were given full control.
Taking initiative
As a hiring manager, I’d be impressed to see that you’ve gone out of your way to ensure you have another quality case study in your portfolio when the alternative of not including it might have been completely acceptable. It’s great for hiring managers to see candidates take this sort of initiative.
Cons
Not rooted in reality
Of course, the biggest downside to including conceptual case studies in your portfolio is that the process that you’re highlighting is not “real”. There were no meetings or conversations about scope, feasibility, or technical challenges along the way.
To work around this, try to inject as much real-world data and insights from reach users as possible so the project isn’t completely made up based purely on your thoughts and intuition.
Time-consuming
Yes, it’s time-consuming to work on a project like this end-to-end. To combat the feeling of dread that you might feel when thinking of devoting a bunch of your time to a project like this, I would encourage you to see it more as an interesting puzzle that you get to solve, an intriguing challenge that you get to take on. To make things interesting, pick an app/tool/service that you enjoy using and are invested in. This will make the process more enjoyable. Remember, even though you might be putting in a lot of time and effort upfront, this is a one-time investment that you’ll definitely reap the benefits of.
Conceptual case studies can be a great tool to fill in some of the gaps in your portfolio. If hiring managers still have open questions after seeing your conceptual case studies, your other real-world case studies can hopefully help answer those questions. The biggest reason I see designers avoid adding conceptual case studies is because they’re worried that hiring managers won’t be satisfied seeing this work, but I’m here to tell you that, as a hiring manager, I care more about seeing your thought process and willingness to solve user and business problems than seeing a portfolio that exclusively has real-world examples, especially if there’s sound reasoning attached to why you chose to include conceptual projects.
