The Essential Guide to a Stellar Design Portfolio
A step-by-step tutorial to help you create the ultimate representation of your talents
In UX design, portfolios matter more than degrees. Employers and recruiters will use your portfolio to determine your experience and aesthetic and, most importantly, your ability to solve real-world business problems.
Creating your first portfolio might seem like a daunting task. I’ve put together a comprehensive guide to help budding UX designers create a portfolio that will showcase their unique stories.
#1. Build a website
This is the obvious first step of creating a good online portfolio. Your website is more than just a description of your work — it is your work. Do everything you can to make it perfect.
A. Implement site analytics
Add Google Analytics to your website to collect valuable statistics on visitors. This will help you build a profile of visitors: Who recently visited your website (location of visitors), for how long, and the specific projects they looked at. This will help you optimize your site for maximum impact.
B. Make your navigation crystal-clear
Don’t try and be clever here. Make sure visitors know exactly where to go to find out more about you: E.g. About, Portfolio, Contact etc.
C. Create additional portfolios on other sites
Your portfolio shouldn’t be limited to your website. Behance and Dribbble are great places to share your designs. They will help you find prospective clients and employers, and also get you serious street cred with fellow designers.
#2. Tell a story
Make sure your portfolio is user-centered. Figure out what your audience seeks and show them how your skills fit their needs.
- Search and analyze job listings and assess project types. This will help you figure out what level of skills, education, and expertise is required for the job(s) you want.
- Find out who are you competing with. Looking at other portfolios will help you figure out where you stand out.
Next, you should identify your strengths and focus on those in your portfolio. Finding answers to the following questions will help you better present yourself:
- What is your background? Which of your skills would be most useful for a UX design role?
- What is the differentiator in your aesthetic? Do you have a particular style? Do you specialize in a certain aspect of design?
A. Create a nice intro and “About Me” page
Your intro page should provide a short but impactful description of who you are and the kind of job you are looking for. Give them a short teaser before you give them the longer version in the “About Me” page.
The “About” page is great for in-depth information about your current level of expertise, your passions and interests, and who you hope to become. Use this to give potential employers a glimpse of who you are on a personal level.
B. Use testimonials
Social proof is an excellent way to build trust on any site, but they’re especially good for portfolios. Testimonials are easy to collect if you have good relationships with your clients.
C. Don’t pretend to be a UX unicorn
The “UX unicorn” is that elusive designer who has multiple skills in all of the main areas of design. Instead, think of your design skills in terms of being a T-shaped person. The “T-shaped” concept implies that there are certain skills that one must have in order to call oneself a professional (the crossbar), and other skills that one specializes in (the stem).
It’s tempting to be competitive by appearing to be good at everything, but avoid that temptation. Instead, be upfront about your particular skills and use your experience to communicate why they are important.
#3. Think about how to structure your projects
While the approach and aesthetic of your website is important, most employers want to know how you solve problems. Spend some time thinking about how you‘ll present your projects in order to maximize their value.
A. List the most relevant projects first (instead of the most recent)
Lead with your most impressive projects instead of listing your projects chronologically. This is especially relevant if you have limited experience and are trying get your first UX job. Keep in mind that your portfolio should demonstrate past work, but also future direction. Make sure you’re including only the type of work you’re looking to do more of.
B. Create a promising preview
The initial stages of candidate selection can be pretty ruthless. A recruiter or employer may need to go through dozens (if not hundreds) of portfolios in order to select a few. No wonder, then, that they often make decisions in under a minute or less. Troy Park and Patrick Neeman claim that people spend an average of 10–15 seconds looking at UX portfolios. Try to refrain from using text to communicate the details of a project, and use the 60 second test to make sure your most essential information is communicated clearly.
C. Get over the NDA
To a lot of designers, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are the greatest threat to a good portfolio. However, NDAs shouldn’t be a reason to exclude a project from your portfolio. Here are a few ways to handle NDA problem:
- Request for permission. If you have a good relationship with your client, they may allow you to mention the project, especially if you offer to remove all sensitive details.
- Anonymize the work. You can get your main point across by omitting certain information or censoring sensitive elements with blurring. A prospective employer is likely more interested in the big picture (what you’re capable of) and less so in the specific details of another company.
- Recreation. If you can’t use the real thing, build a recreation to show what exactly you did. Just make sure you say that it’s a recreation.
D. Don’t say you don’t have any projects
All recent graduates face the same problem — they can’t get experience without a portfolio, and they need a portfolio to get experience. I recommend showing your potential in any way that you can. One example is to participate in the Daily UI Challenge and include the favorites in your portfolio. DailyUI is especially good for beginners because it both helps you boost your skills and while also creating a social presence. In addition, I recommend including academic work as well as hypothetical projects.
E. Emphasize quality over quantity
Less is more in your portfolio. Choose 2 or 3 projects that you can describe in detail, and exclude work that is too similar to another project — you only need to tell a story once. It’s perfectly fine to have a portfolio of just one story, as long as it’s a good one.
#4. Describe in detail
While other industries can get away with presenting only the final product or explaining the results, UX design is different. More than just seeing a well-made product, most employers/customers want to know how you solved the problem. It’s important to show that your work had a process and that it didn’t just magically appear. While the description format may vary depending on the particular project, in general, I recommend that each project have at least two sections— overview and UX process.
The overview section should come first. The reviewer should be able quickly understand what the product is about and how it functions. Here are a subsections to include in the “overview”:
- Purpose of the project — Why was this project started?
- Objective — What were the deliverables?
- Project duration — How long did it take?
- Team — Who were your partners? Provide names and links to their LinkedIn profiles.
- Your role — How did you contribute to the team?
- Final product showcase — Pictures/videos (overview) or links to app download, view prototype, source code.
The “UX Process” section is perhaps the most important part of your portfolio. As a UX Designer, following and explaining the overall process is something that you should take very seriously, because you’ll be judged in large part by your process.
You should understand that your work can only be evaluated within its context. As you describe the problem and eventual solution, communicate the context by walking people through the process you took to get there. They should be able to follow through your footsteps by taking a look at:
- Design problem/challenge — This could be something as simple as a sentence or two that indicates what (business) problem you were solving.
- User research — Describe your users in terms of their needs, motivation and pain points. This part can include the tools that you used to find this information (like Personas, empathy maps, etc). You can also mention a competitive analysis (assess the strengths and weaknesses of competitors against your user’s needs).
- Ideation — Here you should provide answers on following questions: How did you solve the problem? Why did you choose that particular solution, and what influenced your decision?
- Design — It’s essential to describes how you went from insights to conception, to solution and and impact. Show wireframes, Lo/Hi fidelity mockups, and working prototypes. Employers need to know that you can do these, and can think through the detail that a developer will need. If possible, add an interactive prototype (such as inVision) to allow reviewers to play with it.
- Testing — How did you measure success / failure? How did you test your solution? What questions did you ask?
A. Craft a strong narrative
Your projects are a story about you and your work — a narrative that represents your journey and the obstacles and the successes and failures you faced along the way.
- Prioritize the information your reader needs and focus on the vital moments of the project that made it interesting.
- Demonstrate your problem-solving skills. As you describe different pieces of work in your portfolio, make sure you tell a clear story about what the problem was, and how you went about solving it. Convey your ability to apply the right tools and processes to solve a problem.
- Demonstrate your ability to communicate concisely with words and imagery. Explain each step of the process and give context to the images.
- Try to make obvious what you’ve learned from the project.
B. Describe the impact of your work
Showcase the value you brought to the company that hired you. If possible describe how your designs led to company success. If positive results exist, make sure to detail them: underscore why the project was success (e.g. success metrics went up X%) and reinforce you role in achieving it.
C. Don’t obsess over visual showcases
Don’t pretend you’re a visual designer (if you’re not). It’s important to remember that the purpose of the portfolio isn’t to demonstrate your amazing visual design skills. Having competent visual design skills will certainly give you additional credibility, but don’t confuse this with the “solving business problems by designing experiences” purpose of your role.
D. Don’t focus on just the destination
Quite often, UX designers focus on the deliverables and not the journey. But hiring managers are less interested in the final products and more interested in how the candidate got to those products. For example, a research portfolio case study on personas might show the final personas, but the personas won’t say anything about the research behind them. A good portfolio always explains the research behind the deliverable.
E. Don’t exaggerate your contribution to a project
Don’t lie. It’s not difficult to take credit for an entire project that was completed by a team, and your potential employer knows this. Remember, honesty is the best policy: If you haven’t done a particular activity or don’t have experience in an area, don’t list it in your work! Be explicit and honest about your role and who you worked with.
Conclusion
Creating a great UX portfolio is a journey involving a lot of effort (time, learning, and iteration), but it’s definitely worth it. If you succeed, your portfolio will demonstrate the depth of your abilities as a designer, showcase your thought process, and give potential employers or clients insight into what it might be like to work with you. Remember, people hire people, not portfolios.
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