1 What is a UX portfolio?

Portfolios are a bozo filter, not proof.
Kim Goodwin

Portfolios are a critical part of the recruitment process for those who work in user experience. Whether you’re a UX designer, a UX researcher, a content strategist or native app developer, you’re likely to get better work with one rather than without.

How they became so vital is lost in time. As David Travis says in a 2013 article on UX research portfolios:¹

Portfolios are common in visual arts, like design and photography. Picasso, I’m fairly sure, had a portfolio. But they are uncommon to the point of being unheard of in scientific fields, like research and technology. Einstein, I’m fairly sure, didn’t have a portfolio.

But at some point over the last decade, a clueless recruiter or employer asked a user experience researcher for their portfolio. In a panic, the job candidate pulled something together and now it’s just seen as a given that a UX practitioner will have a portfolio that illustrates their work — even if they don’t create visual designs.

I noticed prospective employer and client requests for portfolios increase around 2010. Talking to hiring managers and recruiters at the time, they had grown frustrated by a growing number of applicants who looked good on paper but failed to live up to expectations in an interview. “Clients are complaining,” one recruiter told me. “They say we’re giving them people who talk the talk and can’t walk the walk. Reviewing portfolios may work where the reviewing of CVs (or resumes) fails.”

As Luke Chambers and Matt Magain write in their ebook ‘Get Started in UX’:²

There is a trend, especially in web design, for people to re-badge themselves as UX designers in order to exploit the title and get more work or additional profit without embracing the fundamentals of a UX approach.

So, in around 2010 hiring managers decided that asking UXers for portfolios was the answer.

The introduction of UX portfolios concerned me at first. Examples borrowed heavily from graphic design portfolios by showing only the end result - screengrabs or mock-ups of pretty user interfaces. I didn’t feel this adequately conveyed my work as a user experience designer. I couldn’t see how portfolios like this assisted the recruitment process.

I was also concerned that reviewers would dismiss me if they didn’t see work in my portfolio that was identical to what they were looking for. (I still have that concern, and we’ll look at ways to mitigate the problem later in this book.)

Today I think more fondly of the UX portfolio. Coming up with a portfolio format that meets user needs has opened doors to exciting work and opportunities for me. There are other benefits too.

Before we get to those, let’s deal with a few common misconceptions:

Misconception #1: A collection of screengrabs will do

Figure 1-1
A collection of screengrabs like this is not a UX portfolio

A portfolio of screengrabs may have worked a decade ago when there was a scarcity of UX talent, but it’s insufficient now. We viewed design largely as a solo activity back then. Companies hired talented individuals who would collect requirements, scratch their head then deliver a plausible design to applause. At least, that’s how it seemed.

Today the situation is different. In 2007, Jared M. Spool argued that the best designs are the result of a team effort. His research revealed that teams need a number of skills to be effective:³

• interaction design,

• information architecture,

• user research,

• visual design,

• information design,

• fast iteration management,

• copywriting, and

• editing.

He also referenced what he called ‘enterprise skills’:

• analytics,

• development methods,

• design-to-development documentation,

• ethnography,

• social networks,

• marketing,

• technology,

• business knowledge, and

• domain knowledge.

It’s rare to find an individual designer with all of these skills. Jared’s research and my personal experience bear out that successful designs are normally the result of a team effort. That’s why UX designers today often find themselves acting as facilitators and mentors. The UX designers of today help their team identify problems and work together towards a solution.

In a more recent article⁴, Jared reports there have been similar changes to the user researcher’s role too. A decade ago it used to involve running usability tests and other studies. Now it’s about understanding how a team thinks about their users and guiding them to a more accurate understanding. Again, facilitation and mentoring are key.

In both of these cases, the design delivered is the work of more than one person. So, presenting a portfolio showing only the end result is rarely enough. Too many questions lie unanswered, including one key one — ’These designs are lovely, but what did you actually do?’

UX/UI portfolios

Over the last few years, we have seen the proliferation of the UX/UI portfolio. These are typically online, hosted as a personal website or on a UI beauty parade website such as Dribble or Behance. Often the content is unsolicited redesigns of existing user interfaces. Owners of these portfolios frequently claim they are creating user experiences as they are creating user interfaces that participate in a user experience.

Whether this is true or not, few creators of these portfolios carry out research into user or even business needs. Often their goal is to impress peers with something pretty rather than identify and solve a real problem. Even if they did, it’s impossible to tell if the portfolio contains only images, as they often do.

Only users can judge the user experience. Even UX portfolios don’t show the user experience. UX portfolios explain the conscientious work that went into producing the right product. If you have a UX/UI portfolio containing only pretty visual designs, then you may have a very fine UI design portfolio but an ineffective UX one.

Misconception #2: A collection of annotated screengrabs will do

Figure 1-2
Adding annotation to your collection of screengrabs like this doesn’t help either.

This portfolio format borrows heavily from the traditional industrial design portfolio where beautiful sketches and 3D renders accompany short annotations that describe the designer’s thinking or a product attribute they wish to highlight.

In practice, industrial designers often have more control over the final product delivered. This portfolio format, drummed into industrial designers at university, can be an effective showcase for them.

But that’s also a situation that may be changing. There are signs that employers and clients of industrial designers are becoming more interested in how a designer worked rather than just the outcome, perhaps because of the growing awareness and influence of UX design.

Director of Industrial Design and Usability at Dell, Ken Musgrave, said in an interview for the book ‘Breaking In’:⁵

“I think that the concept of a portfolio has to change to a certain extent. Portfolios have historically been about a collection of cool things they’ve done in history, and about the object and the artefact. I think the portfolio needs to be unburdened and be more of an inventory of capabilities, proved with artefacts, insights or communication, and a demonstration of skills and reasoning. I’ve just begun to see portfolios that are doing that. Instead of having the collection of all the things they’ve worked on, they’re actually talking about what these combined experiences have done for them professionally. As such, they are creating a collection of capabilities and new tools in their own toolbox.”

UX designers are not industrial designers. We typically have less control over the final result. If we lead, it’s through facilitation. The products and services we contribute to reflect our team’s collective vision rather than ours alone. As with the collection of screengrabs discussed in misconception #1, this portfolio format also fails to tell our whole story, unless you’re an interaction designer spending every hour of every day churning out user interface designs. For those who do this, a collection of annotated screengrabs may adequately reflect the scope of their work. For now.

Misconception #3: A collection of UX deliverables will work

Figure 1-3
A collection of key deliverables does not make a good UX portfolio.

To address the complaints of hiring managers and recruiters that portfolios of final designs weren’t enough, many UX designers started offering collections of previous project deliverables such as wireframes, site maps and personas instead. Unfortunately, there are multiple issues with this approach.

Browsing the web for portfolio examples for this book, I found a PowerPoint deck packed full of deliverables. 62 slides with sometimes as many as four deliverable pages embedded per slide. I flicked through the deck and was completely confused. I didn’t know what I was looking at.

The portfolio deck in question had far too many slides but the biggest problem was a lack of context, and this is often the issue with a deliverable-only portfolio. Context is completely absent. There is nothing to explain how the documents assisted with the author’s design process or why they created them.

I’ve yet to meet a UX designer that loves creating documents. We write them for team members or stakeholders to use. Their purpose is to develop team insight or to communicate a solution. They answer our team’s questions. We rarely write them for outsiders with no knowledge of a project. So, delivered out of context, our deliverables can fail spectacularly as reviewers struggle to fill the gaps themselves.

A collection of deliverables, like a collection of final designs, tells only part of our story. Putting them front and centre directs a reviewer’s attention to the wrong place. Faced with deliverables alone, portfolio reviewers might also view the author simply as a ‘wireframe monkey’ somebody who just sits in front of Axure or OmniGraffle all day, churning out screen layouts that seem viable but may not be.

They may even conclude that the author lacks elementary design skills. In September 2014, Design Manager at Twitter, Cennydd Bowles, tweeted:^6,7,8

This won’t be a popular opinion, but whenever I see Axure / Balsamiq / Omnigraffle in a portfolio it’s a red flag for me. Reason being I’ve seen frequent correlation between use of those tools and lack of fundamental design skills. Yes, of course there are great designers who use those tools. But that’s my empirical observation, for what it’s worth.

Another reason to avoid focusing solely on deliverables is their growing unpopularity following the introduction of ’Lean UX’. This increasingly-adopted approach to interaction design eschews creating documentation for documentation’s sake and favours prototyping and testing hypothesis instead. Deliverables are informal in nature and often less polished as a result.

After reviewing the 62-slide PowerPoint portfolio, I explained to a wise colleague that I wanted to reach out to its creator and help them out but I didn’t know what to say. “C’mon, that’s easy.” she said, “Tell him ‘Delete 60 pages and re-write what’s left from scratch.’ ” Sometimes the truth, however helpful, sounds cruel.

Misconception #4: An illustrated UX lexicon will do

Figure 1-4
An illustrated UX lexicon like this is an ineffective UX portfolio.

Another portfolio format I’ve seen offers snapshots of UX deliverables with generic descriptions alongside. For example, a sample wireframe might be accompanied by short text summary explaining that a wireframe ’depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website’s content, including interface elements and navigational systems, and how they work together’.

Portfolios like this lack the storytelling element that make great UX portfolios a delight to read, but there’s a bigger problem. UXers who use this portfolio format may be trying to demonstrate knowledge of their tools. The difficulty is that portfolios like this are really easy to fake. All you need to know is how to cut and paste - I copied the text I quoted above from the Wikipedia entry on wireframes.

Inviting a designer with a portfolio like this in for an interview is similar to asking a carpenter to quote for a job because they show you a beautiful chisel.

Misconception #5: Just one portfolio will do

Figure 1-5
You’re going to need two forms of portfolio like this at least.

The most effective portfolios are those shaped around a prospective employer or client’s needs. In other words, you should personalise your portfolio on a per application basis. This may sound a lot of work, but there are ways of making the process easier which we’ll discuss in a later chapter.

There are two key points during the recruitment process that the UX portfolio comes into play. First, in advance of any interview. Secondly, you may be asked to present your portfolio during any interview you attend.

These two situations call for two different portfolios. First, an annotated portfolio that the reviewer can check out alone. Second, a portfolio presentation where you provide the commentary.

If you use the same portfolio for both, you are probably selling yourself short in one.

One portfolio is not enough.

So what is a UX portfolio?

There are two types of UX portfolio:

Case study

The most common is a collection of case studies sandwiched between broader information about the author’s skills and experience.

Figure 1-6
This is a real UX portfolio. What makes it real are the case studies.

This form of portfolio indicates how you can help solve a prospective client or employer’s problems by explaining how you previously helped solve the problems of others.

With storytelling at its core, a case study-based portfolio can be tremendously effective.

Functional

In the functional style of UX portfolio, the author describes a UX design process and breaks it into the tools and techniques they use. They then provide examples of where they used these tools and techniques in previous projects.

Figure 1-7
Functional portfolios like this are less common.

This format is similar to the UX lexicon, but with more meat on the bones. It’s considered less effective than a case study portfolio due to the lower emphasis on storytelling, but can be useful if you have a limited work history.

In this chapter

In this chapter we discovered:

• UX portfolios are central to the UX recruitment process.

• Hiring managers and recruiters brought UX portfolios in to try and screen out people who don’t meet their requirements.

• A UX portfolio will get you an interview if the role looks right for you.

• A collection of screengrabs, even if annotated, don’t tell the full story.

• A collection of UX deliverables similarly lacks context and may lead to you being considered lacking in fundament design skills.

• An illustrated UX lexicon is easy to cut and paste so doesn’t demonstrate your skills or knowledge.

• You will need more than one portfolio if you want to sell yourself effectively.

• There are two types of UX portfolio. One combines a collection of case studies with broader information about your skills and experience. The other focuses on process, tools and techniques and may be of use if you have a limited work history.