How portfolio of UX designer should look like
What you need to show
Work of UX designer looks like iceberg — most parts are invisible. I often asked how to showcase your work, how the portfolio of UX designer should look like.
Here I want to mention some moments which I think should be shown at first place.
Just screenshots and pictures like in dribble is not enough here: often they are quite meaningless, not thought out, torn from reality and don’t play in your favor at all, sometimes even vice verse. Here are my tips on how to best showcase your portfolio as UX designer:
Most important thing here is to show the process, how you approached the task, what hypotheses you make and based on what, how you made research and analysis of target audience (spoiler! It’s 100% need to be shown) and what insights you received.
1. Task
The first thing you need to pay attention to — is to bring up to date, briefly to say what kind of client, business. And then it is necessary to indicate which tasks you solved, whether they were tasks from a client or you discovered it during a strategic session, or after an audience research, observation, or this is your personal hypothesis.
2. Show your problem-solving process
There are several main points that need to be disclosed. The first is how you research your audience. As you know, UX without users is not UX. There are several variants of what you can do: polls, interviews, observations, analytics, usability testing … But something related to users is necessary.
After that usually goes creating persona, in order to understand the basic image of the user and keep it in front of eyes. If you decide to use “jobs to be done” technique, ok, but don’t forget to explain why.
After goes a work with scenarios, variants are also possible here, whether it is a text description or, in the form of screens, wireframes or user jorney, as a plus will, of course, be creating CJM.
As a plus will be moodboard, storyboard (yes-yes, same old hand-drawn sketches), empathy map, wireframes and other artifacts that will help you to understand and outline user problems. If you was generating ideas, show it, show the criteria for prioritization, what ideas you choose to work on, which one was postponed and why.
Next, show the architecture of the project, how and why you decided to place and group elements.
3. Show prototype and testing
Most interesting part is coming… You can show even your paper prototypes! Yes, yes, we all know that the sooner we start testing, the more money we’ll save.
Looking at portfolios of ux designers you can find paper prototypes and this is cool, cause you’re not rushing to open photoshop but think over how it will look like and keep working on a project. And only after iterating the edits you made based on usability testing, you proceed to a more detailed prototype.
At this stage you can show screens, perhaps interactive, which you made.
Don’t forget to attach testing results, achieved success and KPI.
You can finally show final design, conclusions and further plans on maintaining and project development.
As you see, a good UX portfolio consists not only of pictures, but it should be an article-case about your work on the project, client should have clear understanding what you did and why, and what results achieved.
Of course, this should not be a dry text, otherwise no one will read it, it is desirable to spice up this story with images of intermediate stages, photos, your work process, conduct interviews etc.
