Make movie trailers for your UX portfolio
Movie trailers are made with the primary purpose to get audience excited enough that they want to see the actual movies. Your UX portfolio is meant to do the same thing. It’s your personal highlight reel. it’s your marketing department, and it’s your sales representative.
Good UX portfolios sell, and they open door for new opportunities.
A key component in your portfolio is your work. For the rest of this article I’ll focus on this area. However, what I am sharing in this article applies to your resume, your About section, and just about any other elements you put in your portfolio.
Tell great stories — movie trailer style
Making a great (movie) trailer and making a great film are two very different skills. When it comes to telling your war stories the same logic applies. Great works don’t turn into great stories auto-magically. In Great Design Portfolios Are Great Stories, Simon Pan talks about showing your work by carefully curating 3–5 projects to showcase. This curation process should extend to how you describe and illustrate your projects in your case study write ups.
Here’s how…
Start with intent
A common mistake many designers make in their writing is to tell stories without an intent. What are you really trying to communicate in each of your project case studies?
Are you trying to paint yourself as a detail-oriented designer in one case study, highlight your leadership skill in another, and to impress your audience with your resiliency in overcoming obstacles in the third? If this is all news to you, it’s time to think hard about what messages you want to communicate, and whether each of your case study achieves your goal.
I’ve seen far too many projects written as documentation of work that happened, rather than stories with clear intent. Before you begin writing the first word, make sure you know why you are writing.
Curate the pieces
Now that you understood why you are writing, and what messages you want to communicate to your audience, it’s tempting to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them.
You have personas, pictures of your stickies, the sitemap, and images of the 26 iterations you’ve done on the task flow. The temptation you have to fight is to include every one of these artifacts in your story.
“Why not?” you might ask. After all, you poured your heart into every one of these deliverables. The inclusion of everything can only help illustrate the breadth of your skills.
The thing is, if you did, then your story becomes diluted, and you are now putting the burden on the audience to figure out what your messages are instead of you controlling them.
Just as you design to minimize cognitive load to achieve simplicity and great usability, your job as the portfolio curator is to pick out the relevant pieces that accentuates your messages and to tell a compelling story. Artifacts that don’t help the cause should be left on the cutting room floor. If you can do this, you will leave recruiters / hiring mangers a create picture of who you are and what outstanding qualities you have.
Choreograph the events
Great stories aren’t necessarily told in chronological order. The story of an all-time Hollywood classic, Memento, is told in a reverse chronological order — the sequencing in itself becomes the story and it is what makes it special.
Movie trailers are the same. They are curated clips that are first broken apart and then recomposed to orchestrate a message around why you should see this movie. Your portfolio case studies should have the same feel to them. They should explain what challenges you faced, how you overcame them, with whom you went to battle with, and what the outcome in each case was. However, no one ever said these events have to be told in chronological order.
Conscious sequencing of your events can help you tell better stories. Consider it as another tool in your storytelling.
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Good movies trailers make bad movies look good, and good movies look great. As a story teller, your job is to first identify your purpose, pick the relevant pieces from your design journey, prioritize them and then sequence your selections into the an exciting highlight reel, leaving your audience wanting to learn more.
If your portfolio can achieve this, you have a really good portfolio that will do the hard work for you and pay dividends down the road.
For more articles like this from me, check out /stevenmadesigns.
