Jon Boardman

6 April 2017

Applying design principles to your UX portfolio

As with any creative role, managers who are hiring for User Experience positions will often sift through a vast number of CVs and portfolios before a candidate even makes it through the door. As a potential employee it’s your job to impress, sell yourself to the company and most importantly give some insight into your design process.

So if you’re thinking about your next UX career move or even transitioning into a UX role, what can you do to increase your odds of success? How do you ensure that you stand out from other candidates?

Based upon our experiences of hiring talented designers at Redgate we’ve distilled our thoughts into three key considerations that we hope will help you to apply principles of design to your UX own portfolio:

1. Show your working

As you’ll remember from GCSE Math, a student’s understanding is evaluated on more than their ability to provide the right answer and requires them to also show their working along the way. Similarly, with user experience design, a candidate’s ability to solve a complex design problem amounts to more than their final solution.

We want to see and would actively encourage candidates to document and demonstrate how they arrived at that conclusion. What did you do to understand the problem and for whom? What ideas did you explore and discount along the way? How did you validate these ideas and rationalise your decisions? What did you ultimately learn and how did you apply that to your final solution?

The next time you’re tempted to share a few high fidelity mock-ups, please make sure you supplement them with excerpts or artefacts (research insights, sketches, user journeys, etc) from your design process that demonstrate your thinking and provide the rationale that supports your design decisions.

2. Be clear about your role and contributions

Ideally we want to see a range of work across multiple projects. For each one it helps to have a rough understanding of what the product does and how you personally contributed to its success. Often, we’ll receive portfolios that reference UIs for websites or applications where we have to guess or infer how an individual might have contributed to that project.

Please don’t make us guess, as the likelihood is we’ll get it wrong! Tell us, or better still show us how and where you personally made a difference on the project. Did you work alone or as part of a team of designers? Is this something you led or supported someone with? How did you interact with developers and other team members on the project? Did you perform a specific role?

Honesty is always key in all of this. We actually prefer to see candidates call out the work that other people have done and how they worked with them. Remember that communication and collaboration are the most valuable soft skills of a good designer!

3. Think about your audience

When applying for a UX role, treat your application like your next design project. First, do your research to understand the users (the people you are applying to) and ensure the material you provide is relevant, relatable and wherever possible industry-specific.

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who will be reading your portfolio and CV. What do they need to see and are you clearly presenting the best of your work? Avoid the common pitfalls of presenting small images without being able to zoom/expand, or showing your work superimposed on a Mac/other device, as this often obscures a lot of the interesting detail.

Trim away anything that is superfluous or distracting to help people orientate and find salient information quickly. Ensure someone reviewing your portfolio can find everything they need in one place, without requiring them to jump through multiples sites or profiles to get the full picture. Clarity and simplicity are always going to win.

Finally, do some testing to validate your work. Get some friends or colleagues to look over your portfolio and see if they can quickly get a feel for your process, experience and proficiencies. Get them to ask you some specific questions about your work such as what your role was on this project and who else was involved, what process you followed to arrive at this design, how you validated your ideas and how the solution addressed the problem outlined from your research/brief.

Summary

In summary, when applying for your next UX role and updating your portfolio (and associated materials), ensure that you:

1. Show your working – it’s as important (if not more so) than your final designs. Avoid the temptation of just showing final, polished visual artefacts. You’re not applying for a graphic/UI design role.
2. Be clear about your role and your personal contributions on a project – don’t leave it to guesswork. Be open and honest and help hiring managers understand where you were involved and what you delivered.
3. Think about your audience when preparing your materials – approach this like you would a simple design project. Understand your audience, design a solution and validate through testing. Ask yourself why this company would hire you for this particular role.

If you’re thinking about your next career move or are looking for an exciting new opportunity in the field of UX, take a look at our current vacancies on the Redgate careers page.