How to structure your UX portfolio
I love helping recent grads and new practitioners enter the UX field, this is a topic close to my heart.
The most common request I receive is either guidance on starting a portfolio or feedback on an existing one. In my career I have reviewed a huge amount of portfolios and interviewed dozens of graduate and experienced designers.
Often there is a mismatch between the candidates capabilities and how they represent themselves in their portfolio. I wanted to share some tips from the successful ones.
Frame your work
I recommend displaying 3 of the most relevant projects you have worked on in your portfolio. When I say relevant I mean relevant for the role you want. If you are going for a lead role, don’t show that project you’re really proud of from when you were a junior designer. Consistency in your message is important here.
Tell it like a story
When writing about your projects, tell the story. Stories are memorable and help the reader to empathise.
With any effective story telling you should flesh out the beginning and end, goals and outcomes, then fill the middle about how you got there.
Story telling is a crucial aid in explaining difficult concepts and establishing a shared understanding for the reader.
Start with the beginning
Establish the setting and set up the plot. Key ground to cover here is the problem, your role, who you worked with and what were your goals. Also a good one to note are the broader org and company goals you are aligning to.
Open with a brief high level summary of the project, here’s an example from my own portfolio:
In 2015 Workday sought to elevate learning from a disconnected, rigid experience to one that is consumer-like, on demand, relevant, and personalised. This is my part in enabling that vision.
In that one statement, I outline the problem, expected outcome (beginning and end), and establish my role in the story.
Once you have that summary you can narrow on the details.
Key points to capture:
- Your Role
- Team
- Goals (often increase or decrease something, e.g support tickets)
- Vision & Strategy
- TLDR (too long, didn’t read) a succinct overview of the whole story
The Middle
This is where the reader finds out if you are the UX hero they were hoping for or not. Know when to go from Macro to Micro to effectively tell the story, nobody wants to read about every granular detail but they do need the right information scent to understand what decisions you made and why.
Key points to capture here:
- Your approach to the problem
- Activities (explain what activities and why you chose them)
- Agile process
- Working with Stakeholders (influencing roadmaps, managing difficult situations)
I tell the story of my projects by breaking them out into four distinct sections based on the double diamond design process. It’s just my way of helping the reader navigate when viewing multiple projects, I don’t believe design should be so prescribed. Format is on you, I do recommend that you still hit the key points.
Know when to go from Macro to Micro views to effectively tell the story, nobody wants to read about every granular detail but they do need the right information scent
Discover
What research activities did you or your team perform? Why did you choose those methods? Outline your rationale and plan, tying them back to your original goals. How did you figure out what the right thing was? Maybe you didn’t, that’s an interesting story.
Key points to capture:
- Aligning Stakeholders
- Research plans
- Methods and rationale
Where possible use relevant imagery, you are a designer after all. Pictures also tell a thousand words.
Define
What are the insights you uncovered from the research activities and what did you do with them? Personas married to scenarios are a great way of telling the stories of your users.
It’s New Hire Bens first day at work. He’s eager and excited to start a new opportunity so wants to learn as much as possible. Bens manager selects content relevant to him which his new app bubbles up to his homepage once he launches it. Ben eagerly starts to learn about his new role on his commute to work.
This is an example of one scenario featuring New Hire Ben, interacting with a learning application to get ahead on his commute to work.
Multiple scenarios help to tell the story and give the big picture view of the product.
Kep points to capture:
- User Needs & Pain Points
- Personas
- Scenarios
- Requirements
Design
How did you go about generating design artefacts? Were you working collaboratively with other designers or going it alone?
Did you include stakeholders and users in workshops? This is a good time to flag if you generated multiple solutions or just one.
Key points to capture:
- IA
- Workshops
- User Flows
- Wireframes
- HiFi designs
Deliver
This is where I focus on how the product is actually getting made and discuss working with agile teams. I have worked with scrum and Kanban, it’s good to highlight your experience with these frameworks and what did or did not work for you.
Did you validate what you were building, if not why. Did you define success metrics or perform evaluative research activities? If so, what did you learn and how did it impact the product.
Key points to capture:
- Agile
- Working with PM, Eng
- Evaluative research
- Success metrics
The End
Similar to the opening, close with a brief high level summary of the outcome, focus on outcomes, not outputs.
Questions to answer here are whether the business goals were reached, Was the original vision manifested? If not, what happened and what did you do about it.
Also of great importance is articulating what you learned. This gives insights into how you adapted to difficulties and developed as a designer.
An example of a learning from my own portfolio is the following:
The key theme and takeaway was around shared values. Interview your stakeholders and understand what it is that they value, then you can talk to them in their language.
Key points to capture:
- Outcomes
- Business goals
- Lessons Learned
- What’s happening next (often ignored)
As I mentioned above, it’s not about being prescribed to the double diamond format. It is about structuring a story to help your reader gain a shared understanding of the journey.
Thanks to my friend Piers Scott for the feedback on this article. If you’re interested in going beyond the portfolio you can read his piece on applying for your first job.
