What I (don’t) want from your design portfolio
A colleague asked me this question recently:
Any suggestions for students asking about a folio site they should be using to show their work?
I have some thoughts about the usefulness of portfolios for UX designers (I also read this piece), so I gave him an answer.
tl;dr? Don’t have a portfolio. Instead, be able to talk to me cogently about what you did and why. In detail.
Now, if you really want an online (or even physical) portfolio, you could use something like Behance, Dribbble, or even The Loop. And having an online portfolio isn’t a bad thing by any means. Hey, we have one for our work here at acidlabs.
But to be honest for a UXer of any sort, IMO they’re just not especially useful. So, you need to judge just exactly what you’re going to put up there, and how you’ll narrate it.
I should explain why.
A portfolio of finished work, even accompanied by good narrative, doesn’t explain the why of what you made, how you got there, the kinds of primary and secondary research you chose and how those went, the synthesis you went through and whether you did that solo (not good) or with the client or other designers (good).
It doesn’t begin to show off the kinds of rough or interim artefacts you produced with pen, paper and other tactile materials (journeys, prototypes, sketches, empathy maps, affinity maps, etc.) and whether they solved the problem well enough and if the client was convinced by them (and whether the client was mature enough in their understanding of design to know that these raw artefacts are good enough in >90% of cases) and what you did to convince them that they are good enough.
A portfolio doesn’t show me the tools you used (digital or otherwise) or the kinds of collaboration you did with others. Or if you can turn on a dime and use a tool that isn’t part of the usual path taken because it just might add something in the here and now:
Client: “Aren’t we supposed to do journey mapping now? That’s what the process says.”
Designer: “Sure. But if we do this other thing right now, even though the process doesn’t say so, I am sure it will make what we do when we do journey mapping better, because it’ll give you deeper understanding and context.”
That ability to do something unexpected and off-piste to make the project better is incredibly valuable.
I can’t see from your portfolio whether you focussed tightly on solving a point problem, or whether you went to 40,000' first to understand the whole of the service before you dove in to resolve point problems with that additional context in hand.
I don’t know whether you wrote reams of words in a black box report delivered triumphantly at the end of the project or spent days actively working with the client to bring them on the journey. Nor if you insisted that others from the project accompany you on research or if you went out like the hero designer and returned bearing mysterious wisdom.
Your online portfolio doesn’t tell me whether you’re actively engaged in the design community somehow or if you’ve appeared out of nowhere. There’s trust to be built and gained if you’re a mystery, but if you’re a known quantity, there’s some implicit trust you could already have.
It doesn’t show me whether you can (and do) engage in big-S systems thinking and have T-shaped skills or whether you’re narrowly focussed on one particular aspect of design (both of those are good in the right context).
Overall, I just don’t care whether you have a portfolio. Or if you can pass a whiteboard challenge in a pressure situation. Or if you can use one tool, or another.
What I care about as a potential employer is that you are well-rounded, curious, creative in your thinking and doing, empathetic, adaptable, and willing to learn (and teach), and can work really well with others as well as on your own.
And that you’ve got some good design skills and can describe to me how you use them and why.
