UX portfolio presentation: Lessons learned as interviewer and candidate
Hidden pitfalls that got me rejected and how I corrected them
Every interview is a learning opportunity but the most powerful insights came when I sat on both sides of the interview table.
Over the past years, I’ve been alternating between the roles of an interviewer and a candidate in numerous UX portfolio presentations. Sometimes I was disappointed as an interviewer that the candidate did not have the right skills for the team; other times I was frustrated as a candidate that I got rejected after making a solid presentation.
It was a turbulent yet exciting journey as I got eye-opening insights on both ends of the interview process. So I decided to write this article to share what I’ve observed in UX portfolio presentations as an interviewer and how I’ve applied it to my presentation as a candidate.
Strong candidates were successful salespeople
After every interview I participated in as an interviewer, I made a thorough reflection about what made each candidate stand out or fade away. My biggest takeaway was that a strong UX portfolio presentation resembled a compelling sales pitch.
Successful candidates (salespeople) managed to sell their UX skills and competency (service) to their hiring managers and interviewers (potential clients).
Then what was the key to their success? How did they make a sale and get thumbs up from the interviewers including myself? The answer I found was, not to my surprise, storytelling. A presentation with a captivating narrative took the interviewers on a journey and resonated with them. This finding taught me that the famous quote in the world of sales — facts tell, but stories sell— applies to the world of UX interviews as well.
So I decided to rebuild my portfolio presentation around a cohesive narrative to make myself a good salesperson in this UX job market. Following are 3 strategies I learned and executed.
- Build the presentation around your skills, not the project
- Make it easy to follow — don’t make interviewers think
- Leave out unnecessary details even if it’s your favourite deliverable
1. Build the presentation around your skills, not the project
Just as a sales pitch exists for one ultimate goal: to make sales, a UX portfolio presentation exists to sell a candidate’s skills and competency. In the presentation of strong candidates I interviewed, every slide of their deck helped me tick the checkboxes of skills I was looking for. Then I asked myself.
Is every small or big piece of my presentation thoroughly built towards this goal? Am I helping my interviewers tick their checkboxes?
My answer was, to my disappointment, no.
While crafting the presentation, I failed to keep sight of the ultimate goal: spotlighting the excellence of my skills. My attention was overly centered on detailing the project itself.
I should use this project as a tool to show how amazing my skills are, rather than solely highlighting how amazing the project is.
My learning was that the project is a vehicle that carries my skills, similar to a truck shipping a parcel. While a sturdy truck can ensure safe delivery, it will not satisfy the recipient if the parcel does not include what they were expecting. So I decided to shift the focal point from the project to my skills and competency.
I started by listing my strengths and skills that set me apart from other candidates. Then, I carefully went through my slide deck, ensuring that each slide demonstrated my proficiency in each skill. This helped me decide what to add to or remove from my presentation. For example, to showcase my proactiveness in improving the work process, I added an extra slide about how I ran a team retro and created a design handoff checklist. On the other hand, I had multiple slides showing UI skills so decided to trim them down to create space for my other skills on the list.
By adopting this approach, I was able to weave all my strengths into the presentation, allocating the right level of emphasis to each of them.
2. Make it easy to follow — don’t make interviewers think
Another notable aspect of engaging presentations was that I didn’t have to think. I didn’t struggle to follow along— it all just made sense effortlessly.
Successful candidates made their presentation easy to understand by providing just the right amount of explanation. They zoomed in and out of the story whenever they needed to. When zooming in, they gave extra details to set up the context. When zooming out, they concisely summarized a long process into a couple of bullet points or a simple chart.
This streamlined my process of gauging the candidates’ skills since I was already fully onboarded with the story in their presentation. My learning here was that assessment comes after comprehension. Only after understanding their presentation, was I able to confidently rate their skills highly.
Building on this lesson as an interviewer, I put my candidate hat back on to craft an easy-to-understand presentation. Here are a few strategies I took:
- Analogy: Drawing parallels to something simpler or more familiar saved my effort and time to explain a new or complicated concept. This strategy was especially useful when presenting a B2B project since the interviewers were unfamiliar with the B2B company I worked for.
- Recognition over recall: When referring to something I mentioned more than 2 minutes ago, I added small graphics or short texts to the slide so that the interviewers could recognize it without having to remember it. (Side note: As you may have noticed, this strategy is coming from one of the core UX principles.)
- Connecting the dots: After sharing the details of a certain design phase (zooming in), I summed up key takeaways of that phase in the following slide (zooming out). This served as a shortcut to help the interviewers put different pieces of information together and understand the bigger picture.
3. Leave out unnecessary details even if it’s your favourite deliverable
The design process is full of twists and turns, leading to a large number of in-depth deliverables for a single project. When putting together my portfolio presentation, I was tempted to include all of these deliverables because I was proud of the hard work that went into them.
However, while listening to other presentations as an interviewer, I realized this was a major pitfall. Some candidates included deliverables that didn’t contribute to their overall story, making me wish to move on to the next slide.
My learning was that adding a deliverable presents a double-edged sword: it can either enhance the presentation by adding depth or increase the cognitive burden on the interviewers. When a deliverable doesn’t align with the core narrative, the risk of confusion outweighs its value.
Deliverables that do not contribute to the narrative become a distraction.
This observation prompted me to reframe how I presented my deliverables. Instead of showcasing the sheer volume of work, I started focusing on using each deliverable as a building block for my narrative. For example, I removed the detailed visuals of an extensive competitive analysis I conducted. Instead, I summarized its main insight in a single sentence, demonstrating how I used it to develop the project’s design principle.
Letting go of some of my favorite deliverables was a challenging process that required a lot of self-objectivity, but it allowed me to cut out excess details and build a more compelling story.
If you’re a UX job seeker and have finished reading this article, now it’s turn to revisit your portfolio slide deck through the lens of an interviewer. Remember, you’re a salesperson selling your UX skills and your portfolio presentation is a sales pitch.
Let me know what you think by leaving a comment on this article or reaching out to me at gleamwtr@gmail.com or LinkedIn.
Readings I recommend on storytelling in UX portfolio presentation
- The easiest way to tell a good story in portfolio review by Xiaofang
- 5 storytelling tips for UX portfolio review by Taylor Nguyen
- Crafting a compelling story for your on-site design portfolio presentation by Dan Shilov
- Good design portfolios are great stories by Simon Pan
