Junior to Senior UX Portfolio in 5 steps 🚀
From Design Hangout episode 5 👩💻
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to change your portfolio so it looks more Senior 🦄 and will help you attract better work opportunities.
We will focus on tangible things you can actually change — how you present your content and build a narration.
Disclaimer before we start: Of course, I understand that a big part of going from Junior to Senior Designer is the scope and difficulty of the projects but in this article, I want to help you change the projects you have in your portfolio so you can gain the most from the work you already did. With that in mind, let’s go to the first step!
Step 1:Align with company goals 🎯
- ❌ Do not: Focus only on project goals, without any mention of the high-level company goals that the project contributed to.
- ❌ Do not: Describe the solution and its capabilities in the goal. Here is an incorrect project goal example:
Create a visual timeline view that allows users to easily add, remove, and change the duration of the time entries ❌
This statement is totally backward. This is a description of a solution, the scope of the design phase.
- ✅ Do: Formulate your project goal correctly. Focus on metrics that you want to affect or how you’d like to change the experience for the users:
Improve discoverability and decrease cognitive load when working with time entries.
- ✅ Do: Connect your project goal to a company objective (a goal or an OKR, depending on the system you’re using)
Step 2:☝️Focus on key takeaways
The art of creating a good portfolio lies in synthesizing and highlighting only key details, especially when it comes to research since it’s the most information-heavy.
Usability testing
- ❌ Do not: Overwhelm readers with a lot of text and details
- ❌ Do not: Attach test scenario directly in the case study
- ✅ Do: Start with a short intro (number of users, methodology, etc.)
- ✅ Do: Add questions and considerations — explain why you needed to test the design and what feedback you were mainly looking for.
- ✅ Do: Briefly show the test flow.
- ✅ Do: Focus on issues — improvements pairs. Show the ‘before & after’ versions of your design and annotate them!
Sometimes I see people separating issues in one section, and then solutions in the next one. People will not connect those two easily when reading or scanning your case study.
Surveys
- ❌ Do not: Pasting all the survey questions you’ve asked
- ❌ Do not: Present complex answers for every question or raw results
Your role is to answer the question ‘what next’. Your readers what to know what you did with those results.
- ✅ Do: Provide a quick visual intro (number of participants, number of questions, etc.)
- ✅ Do: Focus on key insights. Pay attention to visuals as well. Large numbers and short descriptions are great for scanning.
- ✅ Do: Sum up with a decision that the Team made in the light of the survey results or explanation how it impacted the next steps in the project.
Step 3: Present meaningful visuals 🚀
In one project, you’ve made 1000s decisions and produced 10s of mockups. You need to select which ones are key to understand the solution.
- ❌ Do not: Paste a ‘wall of mockups’. Majority of reviewers will probably scroll through without much thought.
This way you may be doing yourselve a disservice. Many valuable details that would be omitted because of the volume of screens.
- ✅ Do: Focus only on selected screens that were key to the flow and are really worth talking about because of the quality of the solution and the level of difficulty.
- ✅ Do: Add annotations to guide viewer’s attention
Step 4: 👩💻Talk about accessibility
- ❌ Do not: Forget about the topic of accessibility!
In many Junior portfolios this topic simply doesn’t exist. Designs may be meeting the standards but calling this effort out explicitly is very rare.
- ✅ Do: Highlight decisions made to improve the accessibility (UI elements, colour contrast, keyboard navigation, etc.)
Being aware of the importance of accessibility and showing that you’ve consciously put effort into it is a great sign of design maturity.
Step 5: Define the success metrics 📈
- ❌ Do not: Skip the ‘metrics’ section (even for personal projects)
- ✅ Do: Highlight which metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) you want to impact and track for this project.
- ✅ Do: If possible, show the actual results (numbers) for those metrics. *Confirm with your manager that you can share those numbers before publishing.
Mentioning metrics always leaves a great impression about your business thinking and being impact-oriented as a Designer.
What about my personal (example) projects? 😨
You may ask:
What about the personal projects that you just made for the portfolio? They don’t have any metrics or numbers to show for themselves.
- ✅ Do: Speculate how you WOULD measure the success of this project. What metrics you would track to see if your designs work.
The most important part is to mention the metrics and show that you’re a data-focused designer.
Final thoughts
I hope this article was helpful and that your portfolio will only be getting better and better! 🚀
If you have any questions or comments about the content, please leave a comment or reach out to me at alicja@outdraw.design
Want to learn more about how to take your portfolio to the next level?
I would like to invite you to join my Free 5-day Portfolio Masterclass!
- Day 1: Take the inventory of your projects
- Day 2: Include project goals & company goals
- Day 3: Show your design process
- Day 4: Text & engaging structure
- Day 5: Mockups & visual assets
👉 Join the Portfolio Masterclass
Use this week to significantly improve your chance of landing your dream job!
