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How to fix your long a*s UX case studies
Lack of visual storytelling is sending piles of UX portfolios to hiring manager’s trash
The UX design industry has a case study problem.
Many designers “vomit” thousands of words all over their case study pages, detailing every single thing they did for the project.
The result is the exact opposite of what they hoped for — no one wants to read them.
Storytelling Skills Have Been Ignored In Design Schools
As a design educator with a strong background in storytelling thanks to my undergraduate training in broadcast journalism, I have reaped the benefits of knowing how to tell a good story throughout my career.
Before becoming an educator and entrepreneur, I was working for different companies as a designer.
When I was designing for financial services, we often had to visualize extremely long reports with complex topics.
The text was usually not formatted for design, which means we had to rearrange and “pull out” information to visualize on our own.
For example, if we see a couple of statistics that look interesting, we visualize them into infographics and insert them in between paragraphs to break up the long text.
If we see a quote that sounds insightful, we design quote treatments to make sure it doesn’t get missed.
If some content is of secondary importance, we pull them into collapsible “accordions” so that the page doesn’t become overly long while still containing the same amount of information.
If we see a few key takeaways, we visualize them into a highlighted section with prominent graphical elements or background colors.
At the time, I didn’t realize this was “visual storytelling”.
For some reason, most design schools didn’t seem to even mention storytelling as part of a designer’s skill sets to develop, which is why I added it to the curriculum of my design school.
Even though we are not journalists, filmmakers or broadcast producers, we still have to know how to tell stories.
