Your Unique UX Story: The Portfolio That Gets You Hired
Forget cookie-cutter templates! My advice for building a portfolio that showcases your personality, passion, and why YOU are a great UX hire.
You’re working on a UX design portfolio because you want to showcase your skills. Maybe you’re coming fresh out of school or you’re making a career switch. Now that you’re ready for the job market, you notice that everyone is asking you for one.
Your portfolio might be the first interaction a potential employer has with you, so it’d better represent yourself well. You might be starting from scratch, or you maybe you already have one in place… but you’re not exactly sure what you should be putting into the portfolio. You might be having trouble getting started, because it feels like there’s an insane amount of stuff you have to go through. Do you build one, or use a template? Do you show more images, or focus more on writing about the process? How do you share it and talk about it?
If all this describes you, then you’re in good company. I know what it feels like because I’ve been in this position myself.
After I transitioned into UX/UI after 5+ years of working in traditional digital media, I faced the challenge of building a UX portfolio. I spent roughly a week to finish building it. Once it was public, I was contacted by several recruiters and got invited for interviews with really amazing companies. I also got featured on various design publications. My journey has been full of growth and exchanging ideas with other amazing creatives.
I’ve been privileged to teach at several design workshops where I got to know aspiring UX designers. I shared stories about my work, about my process and about my personal struggles as a Product designer. A lot of these designers ask about portfolios and getting jobs: “Do I need a portfolio? What’s a good portfolio? Should I build it myself? Do I change it company-to-company when applying? How do I land interviews?”
I answered these questions many times in my conversations, and I realised that surely there are many others who run into the same dilemmas.
Be Yourself, Be Creative
Whether you are just starting off as a designer or you’ve been in the game for a while, the primary reason for a portfolio isn’t for others… it’s to help you! To showcase what type of designer you are. It’s a platform for you to display your talents and connect to the world.
What do you put in a portfolio? Screenshots? Writing? Sketches? Lists of skills? Contact info? Testimonials? SO MANY THINGS!
The basic structure of your portfolio should consist of:
Your Goal
A description of what type of Designer you are, clearly state your current goal. This will take a bunch of iterations, so keep trying until you find a goal statement that feels right for you. Aside from your goal statement, share a bit about yourself. Put your passion for design into words. Talk about your background, and how you’ve ended up where you are today. Talk about your hobbies. Talk about your dreams. Talk about your loves and hates. Don’t be scared to refer to your past work experiences. Make it part of your portfolio and showcase how you have a unique skill set, it doesn’t have to be lengthy either: a quick 2–3 sentences is plenty to get a conversation started.
Your work
Summaries of your projects, These summaries are commonly referred to as “case studies” in design circles. I’ll be diving deeper into this topic.
Contact Info
Best way to reach you. Sorry for stating the obvious, but please clearly list your contact info. A few not-so-obvious things to keep in mind:
- Don’t list every possible way to reach you. Instead, mention the top 2 best ways (for example, Email or Twitter)
- Your contact information should be clearly visible: don’t hide it in a footer, or tucked away in a menu.
- Contact forms are useless. Seriously, when’s the last time you used one? Just put down an email.
These three parts lay the foundation for your portfolio: they are the required bits.
Nice-to-haves
Yes, there’s more stuff you can add. Most UX designers successfully integrate more of themselves by showing off their writing (blog posts), delving deeper into their hobbies, and sharing resources (like favourite books) that they enjoy.
But start first with the three basics listed above so you can stay focused on getting things done. Once you have the basics for your portfolio, get it out to the world. You can always add more to it over time as you learn more.
Structuring your Work — Showcasing your Technical Skills
People looking to hire you are trying to answer one primary question:“Can this person do what we need them to do?” That’s it. That’s all they’re looking for. Writing about your projects helps you learn about what you want. It lets you define and reflect on your process. Being able to clearly articulate your process is the marker of a great designer. Reflecting on your process helps you refine it so you do better work the next time around.
“Pretty pictures aren’t everything” — When most people think “UX design portfolio”, they think of a flawless page, with thumbnails of beautiful, pixel-perfect, feel-good visual masterpieces. Your portfolio needs to be much more than just a bunch of pretty pictures. You need to share your stories, your process, your constraints and real-life struggles and successes.
Your story is more powerful than the screenshots of the final product.
A design process is repeatable, but the results (beautiful UI, pixel-perfect icons, wall-pinned user flow mapping) may not be the same every time.
What’s in a Case Study?
Case studies tell the story of a particular project or experience. You’ve probably heard this a million times — storytelling brings UX projects to life. It’s the difference between rambling through a presentation, or taking your audiences on a journey of emotions and lessons.
Good stories make people care — emotionally and intellectually. This is the best opportunity to establish expertise, show your personality and make you a much more memorable UX Designer. Remember, you are marketing yourself. You are showing someone all of the value you will bring to a team. You’re showing what you can do, the problems you can overcome and how you can deliver the results despite any setbacks.
Vital pieces of a Case Study — Show & Tell
The best case studies are structured, but should flow like you’re telling a story to a friend. Each case study should have (at minimum) these parts:
Building your Portfolio
One of the most common pitfalls people find themselves in is obsessing over the prettiness of their portfolio: how’s it going to look? Where am I going to put it? How am I going to share it with people?
Now let’s assume your short bio is written, you’ve started writing case studies for 2 or 3 of the projects you want to showcase, and you’re itching to get a draft online so you can start iterating. You’ve got a huge list of things to pick from in getting your portfolio out there, all with varying skill levels and flexibility.
Do you build it yourself with code from scratch?
If you can’t code well, then you shouldn’t pick this path. Even if you can code, you might find that skipping the coding process saves you a lot of time and lets you focus on the most important part, which is, presenting yourself and your process in the case studies.
Do you host it on a CMS like Wordpress, WebFlow or Squarespace?
I would recommend to start with an editor. They have beautiful templates with an easy-to-use editor that lets you focus on getting your writing and screenshots up on the web. The best part of this path is that, these platforms are created by designers for designers.
Do you use an online designer platform like Behance or Dribbble?
The most unfortunate part is that people are easily anchored to how many “likes” or “hearts” your work gets which may affect the perception of your work.
Don’t rely on these sites to act as your portfolio, but if possible, having a curated presence on these sites can help you to be seen as more established.
Lastly- Be Uniquely, You!
Some people assume that being a designer means that you have a natural eye for aesthetics or that you’re a whiz with Sketch, InVision or other design tools. But in truth, creating a beautiful and functional app or website goes far beyond aesthetics alone. Showing your skills through your portfolio tells the story about your background, your work experience, your way of thinking and your ability to have empathy for your users.
Consider your portfolio as a story about your evolution and keep working on it. I wrote this article because “I get you”, and I want you to know that, “A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a step”. To stand-out as a UX designer, remember to be yourself and think outside the box!
Good luck on your portfolio review and getting that job or your first client. Any feedback? Leave it here — I’d love to hear from you.
