4 ways to improve your product design portfolio.

[product / interaction / UX design — depending on who you ask]

Manifesting the desk I’d like to be on next time I’m working on my portfolio. (Photo by Iewek Gnos on Unsplash)

Hi! I just wrapped up a grueling (and successful) recruiting season and want to share what I learned!

While I’ve had a portfolio for years, it went through a significant redesign as I got closer to sending out my resume. During this time, I spoke to product designers, directors, and hiring managers at Meta + Instagram, Google, Apple, Spotify, Uber, Doordash, Stripe (and a lot more, your girl was hyped about networking) to decipher the industry standard for a good product design portfolio.

I learned that there is no right answer. But, my conversations did teach me a lot about things to consider when designing a portfolio to get hired. My friend Roshan and I often talked into the night about our thoughts on portfolios and we think it only makes sense to share some important themes and trade-offs that we considered while reworking our portfolios.

Before we begin

We’re going to be addressing 4 themes that we’ve learned can be important to incorporate into portfolios. This is solely based on what our experiences have taught us and we are not endorsing any one right way. Your recruiting journey will be your own — it’s an exciting (and stressful) time!

Use motion to tell a story instead of static screens

Prototyping with an understanding of motion was something that came up a lot while speaking to designers in the industry. Moving things have the ability to hold the viewers ‘attention for a longer period of time and can look more visually appealing. If you have multiple case studies on your home page, Salonee’s portfolio is a great example of using motion to increase visual appeal and make content more engaging. Incorporating motion in designs also helps communicate character and functionality that otherwise may be lost on your audience, which is specifically helpful when showcasing feature design like Roshan’s case study. Moving prototypes in your case studies is a fast way for hiring managers and recruiters in a hurry to get a sense of your work.

Quick tips:

1. Specific features and/or interactions usually make for strong videos/gifs. In comparison, static images work well to showcase a breadth of screens.
2. Most designers can tell when an interaction is off within seconds, especially if they’ve worked on the same/similar product. Be intentional about the motion you incorporate in your prototypes. Learn from existing apps and websites that are similar to what you’re designing before you get into your own prototype.

Considerations:

1. Well-designed prototypes can be extremely time-consuming! Adding motion to your portfolio can be something you do after you’ve already published your portfolio with static images.
2. Practically speaking, motion takes more time to consume and load than static images. Be sure to consider the length of your gif or video, especially within its context. For example, gifs/videos on the home page should be incredibly brief versus a specific feature design within a case study could be longer.

Skip to the end instead of telling the whole process

Every design output begins with a process. The process can be a 2-day sprint or an 8-month capstone, but ultimately designers create solutions to user problems and users don’t care about the process. While recruiters and hiring managers do care about your process, for the purposes of your portfolio, they’ll evaluate you on what you designed versus the specifics of how you did it. As Garron Engstrom puts it–” good process doesn’t always lead to good design.”

Quick tips:

1. Focusing on showing your final screens/prototype and brief context–problem and solution are enough.
2. Try to minimize scrolling for the user to make the content incredibly consumable.
3. Add links to process decks or a detailed case study if needed! Angela’s portfolio is a good example.

(This is also a great way to put up portfolio pieces quickly since you don’t need a full write-up to add a project to your portfolio.)

Considerations:

1. Recruiters still may want to see more than a final prototype and problem/solution so do consider how little to show.
2. There’s an argument to be made that it’s better to include too much than leave out something important. Depending on the role you are applying to, it may be critical to show a specific UX method as part of your design process.
3. Some projects can be incredibly difficult to show without context. I’ve found that consumer products are often easier to understand with a prototype and problem/solution, whereas designing for autonomous vehicles, for example, might require more explanation to make sense.

Intentionally curate the number of case studies

Deciding which projects to show can be tricky. Especially if you’re applying across different industries/domains or have a breadth of experience across different design disciplines. I (Salonee) have most often been told to select 3–4 of my projects that show my strengths as a product designer but as I was re-designing my portfolio I was torn — I believed my diverse design experience tells an interesting story about me and I wanted to share that.

I came across portfolios like Brie’s (it’s beautiful) that struck a graceful balance between highlighting key projects and including other work she’s done in an interesting way. This works especially well if you want to showcase work that you didn’t have a big role in.

Including more than your top 2–4 projects shows recruiters and managers that you have a diverse skill set. Also, visually seeing all the work you’ve done can implicitly remind the viewer that you’ve been honing your skills for a long time.

Quick Tips:

1. Focus on 2–4 key projects with case studies and consider a separate section for smaller projects that don’t need full case studies.
2. No one will read all your case studies. As Jessica Ko points out: you need to grab the viewer’s attention in the first 6 seconds. Make your first 1 to 2 case studies your best ones since it’s likely only these are seen.
3. It’s important to know what makes each of your projects special and to surface that as soon as you can. This lets your audience know why you chose that project without figuring it out for themselves. For example, adding tags like “Prototyping” or “0 to 1” can indicate why a case study is important.
4. Explaining what a project is about is more useful than the company associated with it. For example, “Helping influencers get paid” is a more compelling and informative project title than “Instagram Create”.

Considerations:

1. Showcasing a variety of projects can create the perception that you are not able to prioritize the importance of your work.
2. If you have too many projects across domains, it can give the impression that you are too much of a generalist and doesn’t craft a narrative around how your experiences build off each other.

Use actionable instead of generic headlines

This small fix can be a huge game-changer. Using your headlines to convey what the paragraph below reads is a great way to increase readability for managers and recruiters quickly scrolling through your work. For example, “A neobank with features young adults care about” says so much more than “Introduction”.

Quick tips:

1. Write out your headlines in a way that you can skim through your case study reading only the headlines and learn all you need to about the project. Julia and Karolis’s portfolios are great examples!
2. Consider adding navigation to help viewers keep a track of where they are. This could simply be a tag (for example, “process”) or a fancier sticky navbar.

Thank you for reading! Do comment below letting me know what you’d like to read about next :)