The fabled, website-based UX portfolio can be a powerful tool to show your skills as a researcher or designer. It can allow you to demonstrate your breadth of knowledge by creating a website that shows you have visual design chops and the experience needed to articulate your UX knowledge.
If you're interested in creating a UX Portfolio you've likely seen the articles littered around the web such as: The 20 Best, Life Altering UX Portfolios for 2021 or 15 UX Portfolios That'll Make You Wish You Never Entered UX. These articles can be inspiring or downright overwhelming because they show the most fine-tuned UX Portfolios and it is easy to compare your own UX or Design skills versus some of the very best out there.
The journey to put together your own UX Portfolio is long and this post is meant to articulate five things to avoid to save you time and effort as you go through the process. It can be daunting but have fun with it and keep in mind that it is your story to tell- so do it in a way that shows YOU.
The goal of your UX Portfolio ought to be telling a story about how you work through UX Projects so writing the content of your Case Studies should be one of your primary goals before focusing on design. In an industry where aesthetics seem just as important as content - focusing on design first is an easy trap to fall into. Avoid it!
To do this, divorce content from design by using a word processing program to break down your case study into sections (Overview, Discovery, Research, Iteration, Testing, Wrap Up). Bulletpoint the items you want to talk about in each section so that you have a clear story and once satisfied transfer it to your portfolio.
By separating the design and content, you are focusing on story-telling rather than look-and-feel and this is a true time-saver for putting together successful case studies.
Your UX Portfolio will never be perfect. Perfection is a noble but typically unachievable goal in any aspect of life and can be a real timesuck in getting your UX Portfolio completed. While there are a multitude of details to figure out and detail is important, avoid striving for perfection as it is unattainable.
Instead, shoot for "good enough" and try to focus on putting together a great summary of your experience. If you've been in the industry long enough, you understand that UX is working through imperfections to find suitable solutions for people using products and there are always tradeoffs to hit this goal.
Find the right balance of great information first and solid design second - that works for you, your timeline and goals for the UX Portfolio.
Case Studies read like a story of a UX project from start to finish. Treat it like a book and use editing to your advantage. Do you need a full section to introduce the UX team and their pets? Does it matter what color of vis-a-vis markers were used when whiteboarding ideas? Probably not.
Avoid putting every detail about the project into the case study. Your readers will just want the good stuff at a fairly high-level: who, what, where, when and why. Be judicious but leave the filler on the cutting room floor and save your reader some mental cognition and yourself some time.
This was the primary feedback I received with the first version of my online UX Portfolio: "Your Case Studies Are Too Long!" My response was complete confusion as I had thought that people wanted every single gory detail.
Nope! Avoid it because when recruiters or hiring managers see that much detail at once they check out, fast.
Pick a design language and stick with it. Avoid endless iterations by establishing a timeline and goals at the beginning and carry those through the entire project. If you let it, a UX Portfolio can turn into a nightmarish process where you will want to redo everything over and ever.
Use versioning: complete a version and then plan updates from there based on feedback (sound familiar?). Using that methodology will allow you to build, release, gather feedback and iterate properly rather than make knee-jerk decisions based on your own perspective.
You are you. Your UX experience is your own and case studies are extremely situational. Looking at the best UX Portfolios out there surfaces the Yelp affect - meaning you are only seeing the best (and the worst) of UX Portfolios. There is a whole middle-ground that have just as much value but perhaps less bells-and-whistles.
Comparing your UX Portfolio to the best out there is good for inspiration but can carve out room for self-doubt. Do some research and then run with your own ideas to construct a UX Portfolio that is individually, unmistakenly your own. This will allow you to get an initial version out there and subsequently improve on it.
UX Portfolios can be quite hard to wrap your head around. On the one hand you want to show depth and experience and on the other you have to build them from the ground up, which is daunting.
Try to have fun with the process and by using the suggestions above you can avoid wasting time on design before content is written or endlessly chasing perfection or continuous iterations.
Keeping your case studies trim will promote people actually reading them and you can avoid self-doubt by avoiding detrimental comparisons to the best portfolios out there. You've got this, hopefully this was a tad helpful and best luck in getting your own UX Portfolio completed!
