How to UX your portfolio to get more interviews
Raise your hands if this has happened to you — You decide to brighten up your UX portfolio for one of many reasons, usually before you start job searching. You spend weeks (sometimes, months) revamping and redesigning your work until voila! The day comes when you’re happy with what you have done and you start showcasing your hard work in your brand new portfolio!
But, uh oh! You’re not getting the responses that you expected — What happened, you wonder? My portfolio should work on paper: It has the projects I’m most proud of, it talks about my process in detail and there’s a little bit of branding as well. Then, what am I doing wrong?
It took me a while to figure out that my UX portfolio was not UX friendly enough. I had created a product that did not appeal to my target audience.
It was obvious to me that I had to apply my skills as a designer to my portfolio as well and I had to put myself in my users’ shoes. So, let’s start with the most fundamental question:
Who is your target audience?
This depends on why you’re creating a portfolio. For most of us, it’s a means to showcase our work through a website, which is especially useful while job-hunting. That means the folks who’d check out our portfolios the most would be HR, recruiters, UX/product designers, UX leads, art directors and so on.
While these personas are quite different, I decided to look into their common traits as all of them should be impressed by my portfolio.
I found that all of them, regardless of their background, are visual people. Their first reaction to a portfolio is based on what they see and that subconsciously gives them an idea about you and your work.
That means your entire portfolio should be aesthetically and visually pleasing. Subtle micro animations also give the impression of a dynamic website. This will engage your target users the moment they land on your portfolio’s home page and make them think ‘wow, that’s impressive!’ — without even looking at your work.
If you’re not a visual designer: Add some delight elements in your portfolio. Take a look at visual designers’ portfolios, make a Pinterest board or use dribbble.com for color and graphic inspiration. Like they say, good designers copy, great designers steal (although I don’t really abide by it). Further, I’m sure most of us use templates for our portfolios. However, if you can, you should definitely code it. This allows you to completely customize the animations and elements to bring your brand to life. If you can’t code your website, there are some fantastic templates on Squarespace and Wix that give a wide variety of web elements to choose from and the freedom to create custom animations. This leads to a beautiful portfolio website that looks like you coded it from scratch!
So, should you create a pretty website and set sailing? Nope. You’ve just passed your first hurdle — now, your user is engaged and thinks you’re awesome. They want to explore your portfolio a little more now. They’ll want to do two things now — learn more about you and your work. If they’re not impressed with either, that positive feeling they had in the beginning will vanish. After all, we are human beings and it doesn’t take long to change our minds. So, let’s talk about this:
You are more than just a UXer
Let’s start with the ‘getting to know you bit’. Traditionally, we do it with an ‘about me’ page. However, this approach is lacking because almost no one goes to the ‘about me’ section on a portfolio:
That’s because people very rarely read text. This becomes more pronounced with the users we have in mind. Think about it: They may go through at least 20–40 portfolios a day, spending a couple of minutes on each page. There is a small chance that they’d take the time out to read everything on your ‘about me’ section.
Here comes the confusion: your personas are looking at your portfolio because they want to get to know YOU as a candidate. Culture fit is now given more importance than your ability to work. But, how will they judge if you’re a good fit if they don’t even read the ‘about me’ page?
That means you should showcase what makes you YOU as soon as a user lands on your portfolio’s home page.
Few ways to achieve that:
- Include the ‘about me’ section on your home page — Having a few interesting snippets about you on the page your users land on saves their time AND teaches them a little about you
- Be your own brand — Have a theme through your portfolio so that your target users understand how you think a little better.
- Show your work in other fields — As an example, if you’re a professional photographer, include a section in your home page with your top picks or a link to your Instagram account. If you code on the side, sync up your Github account. Show that you’re more than just a UX’er.
- Create a video of yourself talking about you, your background, your work or anything that you want!
Show your work smartly
This is most important — presenting your work. Everyone has a different approach to this. However, a common lesson that all of us were told to keep in mind while designing our portfolios was to talk about our design methods and thought process in detail. After all, your design instincts and thinking is what is most important in UX.
If people don’t know how you think, how will they know how you’d work?
Except that’s not entirely true. Let’s go back a few steps: We just found out that our target users don’t read text and spend a lot of time on each portfolio. How do we give them an understanding about the process in a concise manner?
By taking into account another previous finding — We know that our users are visual people. That means you need to be visual to convey your story.
Few ways and examples to do this:
- Highlight the important findings, design decisions and processes by using different font sizes, weights or colors. For example — By using Medium’s different fonts to highlight important points, I can easily get my point across to them in a few seconds.
- Incorporate pictures of your process, wireframes, redlines, high fidelity designs or prototypes. Instead of talking about your design process, show a flowchart diagram. While discussing a design change, display the previous design and the new design for easy comparison.
And that’s a wrap! I hope my insights were useful to you. I’m currently working on implementing these changes in my own portfolio and I’ve already started getting positive feedback. Fingers crossed for even better reactions once it’s completely rolled out 😁.
Liked this article? Want to know more about my UX work? Or do you just want to grab some Peet’s Covfefe (sorry not sorry) in the Bay? Either way, check out my portfolio at http://salonijoshi.net or email me at salonijoshi2608@gmail.com.
