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.

an image of me doing analysis from interviews

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.

an image representing a scenario for a learning application, actual designs omitted for legal reasons

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.

an image of a design thinking workshop

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.