3 things all strong design portfolios have and avoid

Optimize your chances at getting an interview.

Chris Lee
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readApr 8, 2020

I’ve had the privilege of screening hundreds of portfolios & candidates as a hiring manager. A few weeks ago, a designer I hired a few years back asked me to review her portfolio as she was looking for a new job (not while I was still her manager, don’t worry). She’s incredibly talented and I wanted to make sure that her portfolio accurately reflected her abilities.

Afterward, I thought maybe exposing that knowledge would help other folks level up their portfolios too, so here we are! As a caveat, I mostly hired for UX/Product design positions. These tips are mostly applicable to visual & graphic designers as well, but are steered a little more towards the former.

3 Things to Avoid:

1. Confusing Structure

Design is largely about your ability to communicate with users. That means if you can’t communicate your work to me, the hiring manager, what would make me think that you can communicate with our users?

Make sure that your high-level points are bolded/emphasized and have visual hierarchy applied to them — just like your work. I’m not proud of this, but I definitely skim a lot of portfolios due to time restraints. I don’t think I’m alone on this however, and if I can’t at a quick glance get a sense of your process it severely hurts your chances of getting through to the next stage.

For example, if you’re a product designer, I’d expect to see something that loosely follows:

  1. Describe the business problem
  2. Describe the user problem
  3. Describe the solution you came up with
  4. Describe how you measured the efficacy of the solution and what the results were.

Even if you’re a graphic designer, motion designer, or another kind — your ‘outline’ should string the whole story together without me having to dive into paragraphs and paragraphs of body text.

Here’s an example of the process being strung together with high-level points:

  1. Support staff were working 50 hours a week, leading to burnout and costing the company significant overtime pay.
  2. After research, we found it was due to people being confused when using the product.
  3. I worked with a product team to improve the usability of the product.
  4. A month after shipping, support staff saw a 30% reduction in tickets.

In each of these points, you can dive in with detailed paragraphs of text, images, annotations, and the like — but on a quick scroll I should be able to get a gist of your process without spending 30 minutes reading. If the high-level process makes sense, I’ll dig into some of the weeds to see how exactly you achieved what you did.

2. Confusing Timelines

When was the project done? What order were the steps in? How long did each step take?

These are things that I often find are left out of portfolios. Remember again that hiring managers are evaluating your ability to communicate! If you spent 5 days doing research and 1 day doing wireframes, I want to hear about why that was the case and what you got out of it. If you sum up your research description to one sentence but spend 5 pages showing me the wireframes, I naturally will assume that you spent basically no time on research.

That’s not to say that you need to proportionally indicate effort via length of descriptions, but you have to communicate it to the hiring manager or he/she will make assumptions.

If it’s a project from 3 years ago, tell me that it’s a project from 3 years ago and why you still chose to include it. Often I’ll see choices made in one project that seem very at odds with the choices made in a different project, only to find out over a call that there were 5 years of growth between the two.

3. Confusing Roles

I love hearing about the team — and I certainly don’t like a narcissistic candidate — but if I don’t know what your part in the project was, I can’t evaluate you as a candidate.

You don’t have to constantly be touting how you did everything. You do however need to mention your role, and more specifically what your responses were to challenges that the team faced.

Even if your role changed, that’s absolutely fine. Personally, I like to look for how the team changed course because of you. Did you have to convince a stakeholder to change his/her mind? How did you do it? What happened when you received pushback from the team on your work?

This gives the hiring manager a really good idea of how you would fit into the team they’re hiring for. Perhaps they need a superstar to champion some initiative with nebulous requirements — they can see that from your decisions & interactions with the team. Or perhaps they need a rockstar who is just amazing at leading an interdisciplinary team of juniors— they’ll figure that out too.

3 Things to Include:

1. Operational Influence

Along the lines of explaining what you did, I in particular really want to see how candidates interact with other team members. A strong designer needs to be able to step into a room of clients, engineers, product managers, etc. and add value in a way that they can’t.

Design, for better or worse, has a longstanding history of not having a voice or a seat at the table. So I love it when I see things like:

  • “The team was discussing something and I realized we all had different versions of what it was in our heads. I whipped out a marker and drew a visual artifact so we could align our disparate ideas”
  • “The client wanted to change the color because she said it felt too strong. I went away and gathered a whole bunch of examples of how strong colors were perceived negatively at first — but overtime became the hallmark of distinctive brands”
  • “An engineer wanted to add a dropdown where it didn’t make much sense — I walked him through a typical user journey anchored in the research I had done and after putting himself in the user’s shoes he realized it wasn’t the right move.”

As a caveat, if you have less experience, it’s fine to have less operational influence as you’re still learning. Just show even the smallest cases of how you moved the team forward and that’s already incredibly impressive.

2. Conscious Competence

The more senior the candidate, the more conscious competence hiring managers expect to see. For every decision and step that you took, the more you’re able to justify it the better. For example, if you say “here’s where I dove into research”, I want to know why. If you say “here’s the feature set we landed on”, I want to know how.

Even when it comes to visual design, tell me why you chose that color, affordance, UI pattern, you name it. Sometimes it’s even fair to skip what is commonly viewed as a necessary step — as long as you explain why. If you’re a UX designer, saying “I decided to skip research” is not a terrible move. Saying you decided to skip research without explaining why, is.

For more junior candidates, I look for more unconscious competence. I want to see evidence of them making good decisions. They may not yet know exactly why they’re good, but they’re not just following the ‘rulebook’ because someone told them to. They’re doing what they think is best and it happens to be a great sign of latent talent.

To be honest, I care less about what the deliverables were. I care much more about how a candidate got to those deliverables because if I see strong thinking I can naturally extrapolate to how that candidate will approach a problem I end up giving them later.

3. A Retrospective

You either learn from others or yourself. Either way, it requires examining what happened to determine whether or not the decisions you made were good ones.

So many candidates don’t include any nod towards this it’s shocking!

The strongest portfolios I’ve seen always include a careful critical analysis of the decisions made (whether they were right or wrong), and tie that into the results that were achieved.

That’s not to say that every decision you show has to be correct — in fact, I always interviewed candidates who, if a strong retro was present, showed enough humility to admit a decision was bad and how they learned from it.

By including one, you’re essentially answering the “what’s your greatest weakness” interview question without the hiring manager ever having to ask. Here are some strong examples of short retros that were incredibly powerful when demonstrating the abilities of the candidate:

“I was pretty personally happy with the results. The business certainly was. I did think though that if we spent a bit more time and created 3 variations of the solution instead of only 1, we would have arrived at an even better solution, or at least one that was less costly from an engineering perspective. The time saved wasn’t worth it in this case.”

“We had a ton of positive feedback after we built feature X. I was happy with the quality of the design, but felt I could have gotten there faster. I wasted a lot of time going back and forth with product management because of unclear requirements. I now have a list of questions I always get the PM to answer before I move forward with solution brainstorming.”

Pitching designs? Giving feedback? Try this screen recorder that lets you rewind and re-record so you never have to restart. Check it out here.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Chris Lee

Trained senior product designers at Apple & Meta. Weekly product design insights @ https://productdesign.substack.com/

Responses (3)

What are your thoughts?

Operational influence is something often forgotten. Thank you for the article!

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The strongest portfolios I’ve seen always include a careful critical analysis of the decisions made (whether they were right or wrong), and tie that into the results that were achieved....

Absolutely. Sharing what you would have done differently shows you have an understanding of the product beyond the deliverables.

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Hi Chris, this was very clear and concise article, with some very good recommendations, thank you. One piece of feedback, I found the title a bit off putting. Using words like “all” suggests your recommendations represent an objective truth, which…

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