Beginner Friendly Advice for an impactful UX Portfolio
I’ve had a number of people reach out to ask if they can pick my brain about building my new portfolio, so I thought I’d share some insights here.
My portfolio process took a lot of ugly ideas, a lot of tears, some procrastinating and self-doubt, and then a lot of hard work to end up where it did.
Start with a theme
- Choose something you know a lot about and are passionate about.
- Choose a theme that's not polarizing or alienating.
- Choose a subject that will help your personality shine. For me, there is no shortage of cat puns, jokes, and memes out there on the internet and infusing humor was very important to my storytelling and personal branding.
Who are you building this site for?
Is it a hiring manager or is it a business that may want to seek you out for Freelance work? What type of role are you looking for? Advertise your intent early on in your landing page.
If you’re confused about what you want next in your career, others will be too.
Build a unique personal statement
On behalf of hiring managers everywhere, please let’s retire the “Hi, I’m Emily Backes and I’m a UX designer” intro. Let's put it in a bottle and send it far into the ocean.
I got a piece of advice during a portfolio review once and have regurgitated it over and over to other designers when they ask me about portfolios.
That piece of advice is: “Make sure your personal statement or elevator pitch on your landing page is unique to you.” Additionally, ask yourself, “Who are you and what can you do that no one else can?”
I’ll use my own former elevator pitch as an example: “Hi, I’m Emily, I'm passionate about solving complex UX problems for the everyday human”
If you polled 100 UX professionals, they would also say that the same rings true for them. That tells me I wasn’t focusing on what made me unique.
Spend the time to make your personal statement uniquely yours.
Portfolios, Case Studies, & Storytelling
Case studies are not the only place for storytelling. Weave the story thread throughout your portfolio. Your landing page and About Me are spaces to show off your personality and talk about yourself.
As a true born & raised mid-westerner, talking about myself in a positive light is hard. Trust me. But it’s okay to brag a little bit, after all, it’s your website.
What about your case studies?
Another area I get asked a lot about are my case studies. I can tell you the case studies on my site took a lot of effort, iteration, feedback (from other designers), and editing myself.
Even then, it’s still not perfect. The goal is not to be ‘perfect’, but to get to a place that’s good enough.
For all you long-winded Lisas (no offense to anyone named Lisa) out there, this part is for you so listen up. If you’re like me and initially created case studies based on the dreaded “Double-Diamond”, your case studies are probably too long.
My advice? Cut your content down by half and then cut it in half again.
On average, hiring managers have about 10-15 minutes to review a portfolio, and 2-3 to review each case study).
In the words of the hit TV show The Bear, “Every Second Counts.” IYKYK.
The hiring manager does not care to read through 100 book reports and they don't care about the intricacies of the project you have poured yourself into for months.
They want to know what the problem was, how you solved it, what roadblocks you encountered, and what the value-based outcome was.
Once you’ve done all that, ask yourself, “Does your content make the reader want to know more?”.
If you don’t want to read through your own case study, nobody else will either.
Do your visuals look sleek and polished?
Hiring managers also don't care about the sticky notes you arranged in Miro or a lot of the raw UX artifacts that are made as the result of the journey.
“If I see another visual of stickies on a wall, I’m gonna vomit” - A Hiring Manager, Somewhere
Make sure your supporting visuals are interesting and can symbiotically tell the story along with the brief content.
An easy win I use are sketches. Sketches to wire frames, to hi-fidelity mockups are great visuals to tell a story of how your project evolved.
Then, when it comes time for you to present and defend your work and decisions against a room full of people, you can whip out your competitive analysis charts, your card sorting, and evidence that you have data to back up your design.
Telling a cohesive story with text and some visuals is far more effective than dumping a ton of screens of your project that tell nothing about your struggles and wins.
Find sources of inspiration
Find a portfolio that excites you, let that be your guiding light.
There is a lot of the same kind of portfolio out on the internet and now I hear you can give Framer a prompt and AI will build an entire portfolio for you.
My intent is not to crap on AI but what's missing from AI is the personal human touch and isn’t that why we are all in UX? I sought out a handful of companies that really influenced the direction I wanted to go and the story I wanted to tell.
https://matteofabbiani.webflow.io/
Most of these designs are wildly advanced but in order to make something unique you can't keep returning to the same things you see everywhere. Above are a few portfolios / design sites that gave me profound visceral reactions. If something as boring as financial planning can keep my attention, “You had me at hello.”
Last but not least: Establishing your voice is hard
My portfolio process took a lot of ugly ideas, a lot of tears, some procrastinating and self-doubt, and then a lot of hard work to end up where it did. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, don’t aim for perfect, aim for good enough, and iterate to great.
But most importantly, be kind to yourself but also be confident in yourself.