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Are you boring your interviewer by over-explaining context?

How to use the power of narrative to engage interviewers with your design portfolio.

Kai Wong
UX Collective
A man nervously holding hands and sitting somewhere, where a bored interviewer is looking down and not really paying attnetion
Art by Midjourney

I was reminded of a common mistake I used to make when I was recently mentoring junior designers with their portfolios.

For designers with only a few projects to their name, I know there’s a temptation to over-explain what you did on them in detail. Nothing might seem more awful than quickly summarizing your work and having nothing else to your name.

But you may make a critical mistake when you do that: you might provide too much background and context.

To explain why this is a problem, let me walk you through how I struggled to talk about one of my first design projects: a Gesture-based Interface for surgeons to coordinate during Laparoscopic Cholecystectomies.

You can never fully explain the context, and it’s better not to try

I’m pretty sure you have no idea what I just said in the sentence above. To adequately explain the context of that project, here are the questions I’d have to answer:

  • What is Laparoscopic Surgery, and how does it differ from regular surgery?

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Responses (6)

What are your thoughts?

That's such a great approach, I can't wait to put it into practice!
Thank you for sharing, really good article! 🙂

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This is very cool!! Thanks for sharing.

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This is awesome! Thanks a lot for sharing. I’m going to use this to synthesis my User Interview sticky notes!

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