Translating academic research for your UX portfolio
How to share a story with a new audience
One of the hardest aspects of a career transition is translating previous experience into something recognizable to the new field. For me, as an academic researcher turned UX researcher, this meant reframing aspects of my academic career on the psychology of language into a case study for my UX research portfolio. One of the more difficult aspects to this transition for me was infusing a lifeless research report with the UX field’s love of storytelling. Here is my advice for other academic researchers trying to present their research experience in a UX portfolio.
Think about your reader
In the case of the UX portfolio, your primary readers are your future employers. Finding a project from your past that is interesting to future employers is the first step. This project might be one that is overlooked or minimized by academic audiences. For example, the project I highlight in my portfolio focuses on how I tested and refined a research product: the stimuli used in my dissertation. To linguists, it was the uninteresting prep work. But it was critical to evaluating how the product was interpreted by real people.
How can you find out which projects will resonate with UX audiences? Ask someone in the field. In informational interviews, describe your projects to UX professionals and gauge their reaction.
Emphasize the parts your readers would find most interesting and speed through the parts that would make them stop reading. Like most readers, they are interested in the journey that the characters take and the challenges they had to overcome.
Emphasize the problems in designing and executing your study and your process to solving these “design problems.”
Did you have to secure funding for the project? Did you have a hard time recruiting participants? Did you have to choose between two different methods? These are a few challenges inherent to research that will resonate with your desired audience.
Avoid confusing, frustrating, or boring your reader. For example, nothing confuses an audience more than reading words they don’t understand. Yes, I am talking about avoiding jargon. For my portfolio, I threw out linguistic jargon like “syntax” and “semantics” and replaced them with more common-place terms such as “sentence structure” and “meaning.” I also avoided discussing the theoretical underpinnings of the project.
Think about the moral of the story
The moral of traditional stories are the lessons that the reader should learn and remember. In the story The Boy who Cried Wolf , the moral is to avoid creating false alarms. In the story The Tortoise and the Hare, the moral is to work steadily. In a UX research report, the moral is the insights and recommendations. What is the moral(s) of the research in your portfolio? What are the key takeaways? Given that you are creating a UX portfolio to get a job, it becomes part of your job application. So you should make sure to highlight your transferable technical and soft skills. In my portfolio, I summarized the skills demonstrated by the project in my header.
Think about the plot
Organize your project into a recognizable story arc. In the literary world, common story arcs include Cinderella stories and hero’s tales that readers can recognize to understand the plot.
Research processes are useful tools to guide the reader through the project. You can use the scientific method that outlines the Question, Hypothesis, and Analysis stages.
To speak to a design audience, an even better framework would be the Stanford d.school Design Process which includes Empathize, Ideate, and Test stages.
For my own portfolio, I focused on the product testing stages of the development process and included the headings Testing, Product Redesign, and Product Verification. I also included common UX headings such as: Research Plan, Problem, Solution, and Impact.
Think about your characters
Just like a story has recognizable protagonist and antagonist roles, your research project has characters too. Make sure you identify and develop your UX cast of characters in your portfolio. Understand their motives, background, and contribution to the plot.
Here are some UX roles and examples of how they translate into the academic domain.
User: Are you conducting your research to improve someone’s life or solve someone’s problem? Are you trying to understand a population and how they interact with the world? Chances are your users are people that will benefit from your research. It can also be the person whose problem you are trying to solve.
Designer and researcher: This is most likely you! Did you create or plan something? You were acting as a designer. Did you seek or elicit information? You were acting as a researcher. Given that lots of academic work is often completed by extremely small teams (or a team of one!), don’t be surprised if you filled both roles.
Stakeholders: Stakeholders are the people and organizations that support the project and affect the outcomes. In the academic world, research stakeholders could be members of the scientific publishing community such as reviewers and journal editors that evaluate the project and whose support you need for your research to have a impact. They could also be the grant agencies and academic departments that provide the funding and other resources for the project.
Show off your ability to problem solve and collaborate by emphasizing how you worked with these groups and satisfied their needs.
I hope these tips are helpful! To see the example I described, look at my portfolio’s product redesign case study.
I also accept LinkedIn connections from people, so if you liked my article and want to connect, find me on LinkedIn.
Best of luck in your career transition!
