How personal projects can help get you hired and boost UX skills
Break the experience paradox and grow design skills
A job description for a junior designer role went viral for requesting 5 years of experience in Figma and Adobe XD. It’s a reflection of how high the standards are for entry level design positions and was a particularly difficult ask considering Figma and XD hadn’t even existed for 5 years at the time of the posting.
It begs the age old question, how do you gain the experience necessary to get entry level positions if you need experience to get them in the first place? This phenomenon is called the Experience Paradox.
Benefit 1: Helping to Break the Experience Paradox
Personal projects can help break this paradox and serve as an opportunity to sharpen design skills even after securing full-time roles.
It’s an opportunity to show off your understanding of the design thinking process, product thinking skills, and capabilities with the foundational design tools. It’s not the same as industry experience, but it can help get your foot in the door at your first role.
Benefit 2: The lack of constraints
Personal projects give you the freedom to pick your project…
- Scope: The scope of projects in industry work is often dictated by constraints and business goals. With personal projects, you can choose just how wide or narrow you want the project scope to be.
- Tools: you can gain experience practicing tools and use your project to show mastery
- Industry/problem: You can pick industries that excite you and select the type of problems your dream companies might be working on. I’ve found that higher intrinsic motivation leads to better outcomes.
Different Types of Personal Projects
There’s several different types of personal projects, but I’m going to focus on these main three
Purely UI projects
New designers usually have a little bit of a visual design skill gap because it takes months of practice to gain a mental library of ui patterns and best practices. Practicing with just designing UI are a great way to achieve this. But, it can also add to the “dribbbilization” of design, the trend of designers posting UI that are often unrealistic, fail accessibility guidelines, and are unlikely to get developed.
I’ve found posting to instagram and dribbble as great ways to stay accountable. However, note that on these platforms, flashy dribbbilized designs usually get more likes and engagement over realistic, quality UI. It’s easy to get caught up in optimizing for likes over skill growth.
Because they take the least amount of time to do, developing a habit of designing interfaces at a regular cadence (for example daily UI challenges) can help keep yourself accountable for practicing them.
Note that these should not be your main portfolio pieces since they don’t explain your design decisions and rationale
Redesign projects
This can be in the form of a purely UI exercise or a full UX Case study. The premise of these projects is to take an existing interface, critique/find issues, and propose a better solution
The fact that you’re redesigning an existing interface gives you a starting point which can be easier than coming up with a full case study from scratch
There are success stories of people getting hired with redesign case studies, but it can also be risky if you’re applying to the company who made the original design.
Check out this article on fast redesign exercises
UX Case study from scratch
This is often the best type of personal project for a case study but also takes the longest. You can demonstrate that you’ve gone through a design process from project conception to testing
Generally, your overarching design process narrative should follow a sequence of doing research, defining your project goal, ideating/prototyping, and testing, but don’t feel restricted if it doesn’t follow a linear path.
Check out this article about how to craft compelling UX Case studies for a personal project.
Where they go on your portfolio
For purely UI projects
You don’t want to show these as main projects on your portfolio. Having portfolio pieces that are only mockups aren’t enough to show mastery of the design thinking process and your decision making. But, you can include them in a “visual design experiments” section of your portfolio to show recruiters your skills.
If it has a case study
If you’ve included an accompanying case study and you either 1. don’t have corporate work or 2. think it better showcasing skills relevant to positions you’re applying to compared to your corporate work, you can show them prominently on your portfolio. For redesign projects, you want to highlight the before and after and call out the changes you’ve made and note that it’s a personal project. The case study goes into detail about why you made those changes.
In interviews
Definitely call out that your project is a personal project. You don’t want to exaggerate or hide the nature of the project.
While this might feel like a drawback, hopefully you’ve leveraged your freedom to choose any scope, tools, and skills and matched it to the company and team you’re applying for. If so, point them out as you present.
For example, if a team works closely with data, call out how your project worked with data related tools and processes. Make it obvious that you’d fit right in.
If you felt limited by the resources you had working on the project alone, you can call it out. For example, “I conducted user research to get feedback on x, but if I were working in a company, I would have a run usability tests on y and z features as well”
How to create personal UX projects
Now that you understand why personal UX projects are useful and how to best leverage them, check out this article on frameworks and resources to start your own!
