Tips for a great UX portfolio
Many job postings for UX design and research roles ask applicants to submit a portfolio showcasing their work. For people moving into the field of UX, creating a portfolio can be a daunting prospect and bring up many questions.
What kinds of elements should a UX portfolio include? What kinds of projects should be included? How should they be organized? If you’re new to UX, how can you translate your previous experience into terms that employers will respond to? And why is a portfolio necessary for applying for UX positions?
UX@UA, a community group of UX professionals and learners in southern Arizona, recently set out to answer these questions as part of a community event where we shared UX portfolios and highlighted best practices. This article summarizes what we learned at the event and offers tips for how to create a successful UX portfolio.
Why make a UX portfolio?
Employers request to see UX portfolios because they want to get a sense of your process and approach to your work. For this reason, your UX portfolio should include several examples of projects you’ve worked on from start to finish, or case studies.
There are many options for presenting your projects, but typically each case study will include the purpose of the project, the methods and tools you used, examples of outcomes and impacts, and a narrative that ties the whole project together. Often, UXers include images and screenshots to illustrate their case studies.
As one aspect of your job application, your portfolio plays a role in forming prospective employers’ initial impressions of you, your level of experience, and the quality of your work. Creating a portfolio can also help you prepare for telling your story in job interviews and case study presentations. For these reasons, it’s important to think carefully about how to craft your portfolio so it represents the best of what you bring to prospective employers.
Portfolio dos and don’ts
During our portfolio-sharing event, UX@UA collected feedback from the audience on portfolios created by UX professionals at all levels of experience. Based on crowdsourced feedback, here are our suggestions for what to do (and what not to do) when assembling your UX portfolio:
Build your brand through color and theme.
Each of the portfolios we viewed had a distinct visual appearance, and attendees appreciated how the authors used different fonts, colors, and layouts to communicate something about their identity as a designer/researcher and human being.
Do:
- Create an eye-catching main page that draws readers in and makes them curious about your work.
- Choose fonts, colors, and page layouts that feel like a good representation of your personality and approach to your work. For example, if you are especially creative, consider choosing an unusual color palette; if you’re more traditional, choose more conservative colors and fonts.
- Be sure to maintain consistency across pages. The appearance of your portfolio is part of what makes it memorable, so you want every page to reinforce who you are and what you bring to prospective employers.
- Impart aspects of your personality that you would want potential employers to know about. For example, you might spell out your values, as Héctor Iván Correa did in his resume, or share something about your background or hobbies, as Charles E. Amyx III did in his “about” section.
Don’t: Use too many different layouts or elements in different parts of your portfolio. Readers expect consistency across pages and may think you’ve made an error if different pages aren’t visually aligned.
For case studies, keep it brief.
It’s challenging to talk about a big project in a small amount of space, but UXers who can do this demonstrate their storytelling ability, which is essential whether you are a designer, researcher, or writer/content strategist.
Do: Condense information into short blocks of text. Use headings and white space to organize information and break up blocks of text. Provide just enough detail to make your story memorable.
Don’t: Overwhelm readers with too much detail or present information in large blocks of text or long strings of paragraphs. Attendees did not like pages that were text heavy without headings to function as signposts or images to break up the flow of text. They also disliked pages that required too much scrolling. This suggestion applies to “About” pages as well as case studies. Your biography should be as brief and to the point as case studies of your work.
Be specific.
Details can stick in readers’ minds and make you and your case studies memorable.
Do: Specify your contributions by role (e.g., UX designer) or in terms of services offered (e.g., editing services). Name the specific skills you used (e.g., wireframing, usability testing) and tools you used (e.g., Figma, Adobe XD) to help readers understand what the project entailed and what level of responsibility you had.
Don’t: Focus so closely on details that you neglect to communicate the bigger picture. While attendees were impressed with the look of Héctor Iván Correa’s portfolio, they were left wanting the author to provide more context for some of the featured projects.
Incorporate images.
Images and photographs draw readers’ eyes, help them understand the author’s process, and “bring work to life,” as one attendee put it. They serve as artifacts that demonstrate both process and product.
Do: Include artifacts from the early stages of a project (e.g., sketches, wireframes, affinity maps) as well as later deliverables (e.g., HiFi prototypes, research reports). Images can illustrate your process and the range of your abilities.
Examples:
- Ngan Pham, a UX/UI designer, showed us how she incorporated a variety of visuals to illustrate the process of designing a virtual ore microscope in her portfolio.
- Jack-Morgan Mizell, a UX researcher, shared how he created images to represent each step of data analysis in his portfolio. One of his case studies features a screenshot of a brainstorm in Figma because “UX researchers love sticky notes.” Several attendees also liked the journey map in Abby Bajuniemi’s case study of a process writing workshop, which demonstrated the author’s ability to illustrate the user experience.
Keep the reader moving through your portfolio.
Do: Link to other projects at the end of each case study so readers can keep moving forward without going back to the main page. Attendees liked how each page in Vera Chen’s portfolio ended with a link to the next case study.
Make connections for readers.
Attendees liked research portfolios that helped readers understand how the researcher’s academic background (e.g., in linguistics or sociology) relates to their current work in UX. [provide some examples] Examples like these showed attendees that academic work can be included in UX design/research portfolios — it just needs to be framed in terms that will be understandable to an industry audience.
Do: Create case studies from academic projects that involved similar skills to those that UX professionals employ. Be sure to translate academic terminology into language that UX teams will understand. If necessary, adapt your deliverables to make them accessible for an industry audience.
Include interactive elements.
Attendees liked portfolios that included interactive elements.
Do: Allow readers to interact with content in your portfolio. Interactive elements may include content that can be expanded and minimized, content that appears when the reader hovers over an image, or hyperlinks between pages. For example, the reader must hover over a project card to see its title in Abby Bajuniemi’s portfolio.
Don’t: Use interactive elements if they will make your portfolio inaccessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies. [maybe add something about how to check this, using portfolio design app or an automated checker?]
Be mobile friendly.
Attendees learned that recruiters may spend only a few seconds reviewing a portfolio, so it needs to look good at a glance on any device. There’s no way to know what kind of device your recruiters will be using, so it’s best to prepare your portfolio to work on a variety of platforms and screen sizes.
Do: Test your portfolio on different screen sizes and in different browsers. Have your friends test it too, and ask them to let you know if there are any issues.
Don’t: Format text or images in ways that aren’t responsive to different screen sizes. Text formatted in multiple columns, for example, may be difficult to read on a mobile device. Some portfolio hosting sites, such as Wix and Adobe Portfolio, automatically resize and rearrange content for mobile devices, so it’s worth finding out whether you need to take this aspect of design into consideration or whether your hosting site will do it for you.
Key takeaways
The UX@UA portfolio-sharing event showed us that everyone sees UX portfolios differently and underscored the importance of sharing your work to get feedback from multiple people with different levels of experience in the field of UX.
For more information and to get involved with UX@UA, check out our upcoming events.
