10 UXDERS, 10 QUESTIONS, 10 WEEKS

Week 3, Creating a standout UX portfolio: 10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

Our experts share tips for making your UX portfolio shine.

PatternFly Team

Published in

PatternFly

10 min readOct 20, 2021

The title card for this week’s question, “What makes a UX portfolio stand out to you?” featuring headshots of all 10 contributors.

Ah, the UX portfolio: One of the industry’s most coveted (and tricky) materials to master. Whether you’re a designer, developer, researcher, or content designer, how you tell your UX story matters. Let’s dive into what our experts look for in a standout site.

What makes a UX portfolio stand out to you?

Wes: Research Operations Coordinator

I like looking for a succinct portfolio or succinct presentation — just enough content there. If you can use a small amount of words to get your idea across, I think that’s really skillful. It is something I work on myself. I really appreciate when someone can tell a research story of a research project and it’s about your audience. If they can make it impactful and tell the story in a small amount of time, we can get into the details in an interview or maybe they link out a full report. If I look into a resume and it has three or four sentences about a project, I read that and I understand why they were doing research and what the point was, and what was the outcome. If I can get that in three or four sentences, I will be really impressed. I really like when people can condense. From a research perspective, communicating details like that is important. If you can get your point across and make an impact quickly, that’s fantastic.

Beau: Principal UX Designer

I think it’s really really nice if a portfolio can demonstrate process. Just maybe being able to articulate you understand what process is, like discovery and then you do some research prototype, then you can show examples of that process. It’s great if the portfolio isn’t just me, me, me. I like seeing ways people talk about a team and demonstrate how they collaborate. Seeing artifacts like deliverables is also great, if you work for a company that allows you to share that. If they don’t, I have seen people make a mock of something they did and abstract things out, or lock it with a password. I’ve seen people create something new that replicates their UX design process.

Roxanne: Associate Manager, User Experience Design

I really gravitate toward consistency. Consistency in not just the UX portfolio, but if you have a LinkedIn profile, if you have something on Medium, does everything match up? What’s your personal brand? What are you trying to sell me? Who are you? That always stands out to me more than when I see a portfolio that is not necessarily bad, but they were dabbling in some sort of color scheme here and on this site, they were dabbling in something else, and their LinkedIn profile is a completely different tone and tenor. I do like it when I see a complete package, especially one that highlights your personality.

In general, personality is probably the most important thing to me. You want someone who is kind, someone who is collaborative, someone who is opinionated. All those qualities are really hard to train. Anybody can learn tools like Balsamiq and Sketch, but having a personality that wants to learn and work with others, that cares about other people? That’s irreplaceable. And frankly, when teams are working in a collaborative dynamic fashion, and everybody generally gets along, the work output is just going to be better. Period.

Alan: Senior Director, User Experience Design

Certainly, the initial impression. When I look at a portfolio or even a resume, that first impression makes a large impact. Is it logically laid out? Is the intent clear? If it’s multiple pages, is it clear what the information architecture is? What’s this person emphasizing? These days, we see portfolios from researchers, designers, and other UX professionals. They all have a slightly different flavor. A unique voice is important, and that might be one of the most challenging components to master.

I’ve been around long enough where portfolios used to be presented on paper. When I’d go for an interview, I’d have a nice portfolio and I learned this from industrial designers who have physical objects. Honestly, if I were going for an interview today, I would definitely have a hard copy of things if it were in person. When I interviewed at Red Hat, I had an aluminum folder that opened up with screenshots of my work. A UX portfolio in person should have a slightly different approach than a UX portfolio online. Being able to show something in person one-on-one is important. If you think through that situation, you want to be able to look the person in the eye, and a laptop may work, but it may be better to show somebody paper or physical objects.

Personality is huge when you’re interviewing potential new team members. For me, it’s the first minute of an interaction that can carry so much meaning. Just saying hi, connecting with somebody. When the group was smaller, Paul Lightfoot and I would often do screening interviews together. I know for both of us, first impressions were essential. It was rare that if someone made a weak first impression, they’d be able to turn it around during the interview.

Matt: Principal Interaction Designer

I think reviewing portfolios is an interesting and hard process. When you initially look at a portfolio, what’s going to stand out to you is, “how does it look.” If you’re interviewing visual designers, then you want them to have great visual skills. If we’re talking about interaction designers or user researchers, it’s harder to just look at a portfolio and say a person is really talented or not.

When you’re working in a large company with a large team, it’s harder to specifically point to what you contributed. You don’t always have absolute control.

The best thing about having a strong portfolio is it’s the basis for having conversations about projects you worked on and telling stories about them. When I was more involved in the hiring process and reviewing resumes, I always looked more at how a portfolio reflects someone’s thought process: How do they think? How are they able to adapt and learn new things? What I always like to see in candidates is some evidence of a multifaceted background. Those are the people who can bring different perspectives to the job, they can adapt, learn, and grow.

Joe: UX Developer

When it comes to portfolios, we don’t require them from developers. Instead of a portfolio we gave out an interview project. The solution to the project contained most of the tech that was needed in the UXD group. So that, in effect, became the portfolio piece that we focussed on. This was good for the candidate as well as the interviewers because it narrowed down the focus of the discussion. And it became just that, a discussion where we could see how the candidate reacts in real life to questions, criticism, etc.

When we started hiring for the Boston office, I remember talking to management about hiring strategy. We’re not looking for attitude. You need someone who’s able to take criticism and is conversational. There’s the aptitude but then there’s also the willingness this candidate would have to collaborate with the entire team. There are a lot of tech divas out there — their resume is stellar and they know everything. But when it comes to collaborating, communicating, taking feedback, those soft skills are important too. I don’t know anyone on my team we’ve hired that I don’t want to go out after work or have a conversation with in the hallway which makes collaboration much easier.

Shiri: Senior User Experience Designer

There’s a problem today with portfolios, the designs all look good: But they might not be usable. So I think for me, if I would look into portfolios, I would just try to understand if it’s only aesthetic, or usable. That’s easier to understand if the portfolio contains an explanation, that higher-level view of what they did, why they did it, and why this solution is practical. First, answer the questions that are needed to understand your designs, add your personality (maybe a picture and some hobbies), then worry about making it pretty.

Marie: Interaction Designer

Honestly, I don’t have much experience looking at portfolios. I really like when someone is trying to design and implement something together, combining those two skills. And I appreciate when someone can describe that whole process in detail. The person needs to be flexible and receive feedback well. When someone gets offended by feedback, they won’t make a strong designer, because we receive critiques all the time.

Allie: Senior Interaction Designer

I care about the story. A lot of times, the pictures and wireframes in a portfolio are complex systems that I’m not familiar with, so I don’t always know what I’m looking at. When I go through a portfolio, I really want to hear about what was given to you, your goals, and how you got there. What was the end result? Did you get X percent more customers, or achieve other business goals? How did your design accomplish that?

What matters most is your process. Having pictures helps break up the text, but the text is the most important part of a UX portfolio. Anyone can show a picture of a great UI. But why is it great? What’s the story behind it? I don’t care if your picture is pretty, I want results.

And personality makes a difference. Almost every single portfolio has a picture and a blurb about them, or even includes their name in the URL. So there’s not really a way to take the person out of it and purely look at the work. But I mainly look for personality at the interview stage. When I look at a portfolio, it’s about if you can get the job done. Then at the interview, I consider whether I want to interact with you every day at work, and whether you’d make a good fit for the team.

Margot: Interaction Designer

I haven’t been part of the hiring process. The closest thing I’ve done to hiring is giving people a referral. The first thing I do is look at their website to see if they have an online presence, and how that presence is designed. Is it organized? Does it look clean? Those aspects matter because they tell you about the person: Are they organized? Do they structure information clearly?

In terms of actually clicking into their projects and work, I think it’s important to have a description of what the project was and details about the process they went through, not just a picture of the final product. I want to see their trial and error, what they thought to do initially and why it didn’t work, whether that was because of a user interview or other considerations. I think it’s great to include information about the design decisions you made, especially because on the job, you’re constantly having to do that, even at design shares. You have to show up and really answer questions about why you did this instead of that, to show that you actually thought through your design. I don’t want to read an essay. But I want at least some background so that I can grasp how you think and how you got to your design.