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Achieving The Right Balance in Your Case Study
In December 2024, I hosted two group sessions on ADPList. During each session, I discussed the most common mistakes designers make when creating a portfolio. I provided them with a bunch of good examples of case studies free from these mistakes as an inspiration for approaching different problems when building a nice-looking and engaging portfolio.
The sessions, which 150+ designers joined, weren’t a one-way road, where I would be the talking head and not listen to the people who came. For maximum interactivity, I included a Q&A segment in each.
What’s great about the Q&A segment is that I received tens of super interesting and thought-provoking questions about things I’d never considered. Today, I’ll try to answer the first of the most intriguing ones.
Here’s the question asked by a designer who joined one of my group sessions:
What is the right proportion of content in a case study of a product designer? How much text, images, context, data, and other things make a case study well-balanced?
What was my immediate answer?
There’s no magic formula to calculate this ratio.
Or maybe there’s one?
Let’s find out.
Portfolio as a product
The reason why every product designer has a portfolio is quite clear. Designers somehow must prove their visual and non-visual skills, such as prototyping, critical thinking, planning and executing user research, and collaboration. They demonstrate these skills through their past projects, showing and explaining what obstacles they faced and what design decisions they made to achieve their goals and move some business metrics. At the same time they communicate to future employers and clients what kind of projects they enjoy working on.
After seeing such rationale for the existence of portfolios, one can come to a conclusion about the target group of the designer’s portfolio: it’s busy hiring managers and not other designers (unless you treat your whole career and portfolio as a wiener-size contest).
What’s the first thing to do when designing a new product? Learn about your target group and the problem this group is facing so your product can fix it. And what do we know about the target group of a designer’s portfolio? The hiring managers are busy for two main reasons:
- Over the last 20 years, our attention span has dropped significantly, from an average of 150 seconds to 47 seconds.
There are several factors influencing the shorter attention span. Some of these are environmental, such as digital distractions and chaotic surroundings, while others are psychological and biological, such as stress and anxiety, sleep deprivation, or depression. Whatever the reasons, our reality blocks us from being focused on a task for long. For example, when we start watching a video on YouTube, after roughly the first 30 seconds, we know if we want to invest more time and watch the entirety of it or switch to a different one. - The current job market is saturated and rough, resulting in more people looking for a job in design than there are available jobs.
Hiring managers need to go through tens or sometimes hundreds of applications for a single job. They must make decisions quickly if they want to do their job right and find the best candidates. Instead of reading all case studies from A to Z in a portfolio, they scan one or two projects, searching for hooks such as business outcomes.
Core sections of a case study
A good case study is like a good story, and a good story always consists of five core elements:
- Character — an individual who drives the story forward. In a case study, that’s you, the designer, and a little bit about your role in the project.
- Setting — the time and place when the story occurs. In a case study, that’s the introduction to the project, where you briefly explain what the heck this project was.
- Plot — the sequence of events happening in the story. In a case study, that’s the specific order of steps you took to come to the final solution.
- Conflict — the central struggle the character faces, which drives the plot and creates tension. In a case study, that’s everything you considered but haven’t finally used in the final solution or all the obstacles you encountered while coming up with the final piece.
- Message — the specific insight or lesson emerging from the story. In a case study, that’s one of the most essential bits to include, and that is the set of outcomes, lessons learned, and achieved business goals.
To be more specific, when we talk about a case study written by a UX and product designer, we must remember to include one more section that can’t be compared easily with any of the core elements of storytelling. And that is the problem definition.
Since our job is not only about drawing beautiful pictures in Figma but we are paid to spot and define problems that we later try to solve, problem definition usually occupies a healthy portion of a good case study. Einstein once said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about it and five on solving it.
Because we are visual beasts, we complement our case studies with many visual aids, such as videos, mockups, user personas, user flow diagrams, and core components from design systems. What’s the good ratio of text to media? Maybe that’s a way to create a formula for the perfect case study?
Magic formula — does it exist?
To answer the initial question, I conducted a fun experiment. For my research, I handpicked three case studies from experienced designers: Jon Yablonski, Dawid Mlynarz, and Fabio Di Cecca. The projects I visually analyzed are very different in terms of content and text-media ratio. However, when we look closer at them, we can spot some emerging patterns. These patterns, in fact, make a good recipe for a universal case study of a UX and product designer. So, are we closer to finding the formula?
All the case studies include the core sections that we already mentioned when we compared case studies to the storytelling principles:
- Title, role in the project, and short brief pieces of info such as client, timeframe, industry, or tech stack.
- Introduction.
- Problem definition.
- Solution.
- Outcomes.
The order in which these sections appear on the screen is quite essential. However, what’s worth noticing is Dawid Mlynarz’s case study, where Dawid put the key achievements quite early. It’s a nice hook for hiring managers who don’t have to read the whole thing and scroll to the very bottom of the page to see the business outcomes.
Looking at the results of my little analysis, you can clearly tell that the Solution segment always occupies the heaviest space, on average, 51.5% of the entire case study. This totally makes sense because the solution is something we are most proud of, and in many cases, it’s the most visually appealing.
Examining the text-to-media ratio reveals that it is nearly 1:1 in two projects, whereas in Jon Yablonski’s case study, it stands at 1:4, favoring media. I wonder if Jon hadn’t included a video explaining the solution. Would the ratio in his case study be different?
Another thing worth noting is the rhythm that is valid for all three projects that I analyzed. There’s usually a portion of text followed by a visual aid, such as an image, which influences hierarchy and makes the article easier to scan.
What’s the conclusion?
I think there’s no single formula for every case study. Every project is different, and there’s no single design process. Good advice would be to make sure you have all core sections in your case study that are followed by a good rhythm and hierarchy, keep the text-media ratio the same, and if outcomes are significant, communicate the most yummy bits early, somewhere in the intro section.
TL;DR — A few things to remember
- You’ve got 30 seconds (or even less) to grab a hiring manager’s attention and convince them to invest more time into reading your case study.
- Outcomes are one of the most crucial things in your case study.
- A case study isn’t the place to show all the process artifacts.
- Write about your role in the process and who you collaborated with.
- Whenever possible, support your points with real data.
- If you have done user research as a part of the project, don’t show the research plan or the questionnaire you used. Instead, include the most insightful bits from the data you have collected that have helped you make the right design calls.
- If possible, collect notes about the project while you work on it. Remembering the small details that came up along the way will make compiling the final case study much easier later.
- Remember to justify your decisions and chosen methods.
- Keep your case study concise. Leave a bigger story for a deep dive during a job interview with the design manager.
- There’s no single magic formula for the perfect case study.
Portfolio Done Right
If your portfolio is holding you back and you face rejection after rejection, there’s a way to fix it. In our ebook, we demonstrate step-by-step instructions on how to:
- Not repeat the most common mistakes other designers make when building their portfolios
- Structure your case studies in a way that does not make recruiters fall asleep
- Work out your resume so it looks like one made by an actual designer
- Prepare for a job interview
- Land your first job in UX and Product Design
