Thread by @jmspool

OK, UX designers. Let's talk about your portfolio.

I've been reviewing these lately (mostly for clients who ask us to help build their team, but occasionally for designers who ask nicely).

There are important things that many designers miss, especially early career folks.

#1 No sense of timeline.

When did each project happen and how long did each one take?

Hiring managers need to know when in your career each project takes place. Was it your first project out of school? Is it your most recent work? They shouldn't be left to wonder.

Also, inside each case study, what order did each step happen in? Was it strictly linear, or did you iterate (research, prototype, test, learn some stuff, researched some more, prototyped again, tested again, learned more…)?

Why not use some sort of calendar to help?

How long was each step? When you say you did user research, was that in an afternoon? Or was it throughout the project? How long did you spend talking or observing participants? How did the research change each time you talked to users?

In many case studies, the designers describe important steps with 1 or 2 sentences. That makes it seem like there was virtually no effort put in. There's no indication of the amount of effort.

(The answer isn't longer descriptions. There are other ways to indicate effort.)

Hiring teams want to know if you treat stages like a checklist item, to get through them as quickly as possible, or if you take them seriously and in-depth.

Putting some sense of effort into each case study would give an interviewer an opening to ask more about your efforts.

#2 No sense of your contribution to collaborative efforts.

Design is a team sport. Were you part of a team? If so, what role did you play? Did that role change during the project?

Who else was on the project? We don't need names, but roles and quantity would help.

Which pieces were you solely responsible for? Which did you work in pairs or small groups? What was it like to work in those for you?

Who did you need approval from? How did you present your work for approval?

Did you work with devs? PMs? Other non-designers?

Hiring managers are looking for how well you work in a team environment. They want to know how well you'll work on their team.

Are you a solo gunslinger that repels any notion of collaboration? Or do you thrive in a collaborative environment, helping support the team effort?

#3 No sense of your leadership skills.

If you played any sort of leadership role in any project, what was that role? How did it come about? How did you do?

Who did you lead? How did you support them? How did they thrive under your leadership?

What made that leadership challenging? How did you overcome those challenges?

Designers often find themselves in a leadership position, even if it's only for a meeting where they are leading a workshop to make a decision or review research data. Describe times you led your team.

Hiring managers need to know what kind of leadership skills you have. Without knowing this, they won't know how quickly you'll grow into a more senior role on their team.

They want to know if they can send you off with a client, or if you'll always need someone senior with you.

#4 No sense of challenges or learning.

In many portfolios, every case study is presented as if it didn't have any hitch or speed bumps.

Every project went perfectly.

There were no problems to overcome and no challenges to learn from.

We all know that never happens.

Yet, I rarely see any case study even hint at what the candidate learned from all that hard work. It seems they didn't learn a thing.

How has your previous work informed how you would tackle this project?

How did this project inform your future work?

What was challenging about the work? What process did you use to learn what you needed to overcome that challenge? What resources did you turn to? Where did you make wrong turns?

The best, most interesting stories are not ones where the protagonist sets out on an adventure where everything happens perfectly. That's boring.

The most interesting stories are those where the protagonist runs into a serious, unassailable challenge.

How did you finally assail your unassailable challenge?

Hiring managers want to see how truly resourceful you've been. They want to see that you didn't give up when you ran into something tricky.

They know your case study will have a happy ending. They want to see the journey.

That's the 4 big missing pieces I would like to see in every portfolio I review. I know other hiring managers would desperately like to see them too.

When crafting a portfolio, the hiring team members are your primary users. Are you thinking about what your users need from you?

Oh, a bonus item:

Don't password protect your entire portfolio. If you must, you can put individual cases (or assets) behind password walls. Just not the entire thing.

But ask yourself first, what can I show that nobody else has claim over? What can I say I've done?

You can alway talk about *something* from every project. You can say you worked there. You can describe the nature of the work, even if you must leave out certain specifics. You can describe your process and, in general, what the outcomes were.

In our field, every hiring manager runs into people under NDA and other protections. Smart ones don't actually care about the things you can't talk about.

They have one question you need to answer: Are you capable of doing the work for the hiring org? Answer that question.

When you do have to put something behind a password, don't assume everyone who gets your portfolio link will also get your password. Give them a way to request it from you.

OK. Let's summarize.

#1 What was your project timeline?
#2 What was your contribution to collaborative efforts?
#3 What leadership skills have you employed?
#4 What has challenged you and what have you learned from those challenges?

That's what I want to see in your portfolio.

Thank you to the many UX designers whose portfolios I’ve had a chance to review.

I’ve seen a ton of great work. I think y’all have real talent.

I won’t mention names, because it’s not my place to do so. Just know you’ve done well.

Good luck with your job searches.

This is a great question.

How do you balance “we” versus “I” appropriately?

https://twitter.com/michal_subel/status/1122758382828572672

“I was part of a team of 4. I mostly handled the UX related tasks, yet we worked closely as a team.

For the user research, we collaboratively arrived at research questions. I ran the sessions while my coworker observed…”

Not that hard to accurately show collaboration.

The candidate will need to do it in the interview. Why not get the language right in the portfolio first?

Another excellent question.

Really deserves its own tweet storm or article.

But I’ll take a stab at a quick answer.

https://twitter.com/esamek/status/1122843120335556608

For more senior folks, there’s still work to show. The work is the work of the people you lead.

You can’t take direct credit for the work. But you can take credit for the leadership.

You can show and discuss what you did to enable effective design in your teams.

What was your approach? How did that approach vary based on who you were leading?

What challenges did you face? How did you overcome them?

There’s lots to talk about.

Excellent question.

How much do we talk about challenges we had within the organization?

How do we do that without looking like we’re blaming co-workers?

https://twitter.com/tyfairclough/status/1122753662265196544

Dealing with challenging situations is a facet of design work. There are ways to express those challenges without bashing any person or people.

This will likely come up in interviews. Portfolio is a good place to get the story the way you want to tell it.

Another excellent question.

How do we optimize our portfolio for hiring managers who don’t have a lot of time to read through detail?

https://twitter.com/mattopsahl/status/1122822811402350597

This is the ultimate design question, right? What’s the ideal design for our users?

It’s true. Hiring managers and their teams don’t have time for everyone. They only have time for the most interesting and viable candidates.

Your job, as a candidate is to quickly prove you are the candidate worth spending time with. (Or not, if it’s not the right job for you.)

So, how would you design your portfolio to ensure the right hiring managers with ideal jobs immediately realize you’re the right candidate?