The Reasons To Have Proper UX Design Portfolio
If you are not new to the UX field, you most probably have heard about the term ‘UX design portfolio.’ This is a bait, and only bait! This will help you to:
- Get through the first stage of the application process
- Summarize yourself as a UX designer
- Introduce yourself
- Showcase some case studies of your previous projects
- Highlight what you are capable of and your design ability
- Show how you approach and deal with different problems and
- Show your work process, along with some results.
Ideally, it is your UX design portfolio that the recruiters will look into and use it as a reference to determine whether or not you are good enough to be called for a one-on-one interview or have it on Skype.
It is your portfolio that will enable the recruiters to judge your abilities in a matter of a few minutes. If not, they will move on to the next candidate. Therefore, you need to get your UX design portfolio right.
For this, you will need to take a step back and what this is and what it can do to your career. Typically, there are lots of misconceptions regarding a UX design portfolio, which is why you need to be careful while creating it so that you present yourself to the recruiters in the best possible shape.
Reasons to create a UX design portfolio
There are three good reasons why you should have a well-crafted and updated UX design portfolio. This will show you where you are precisely in your career path. In addition to that, it will:
- Help you to get through your first interview, and the recruiters will get a rough idea of your skills as a UX designer.
- If you already have a job, it will help you to improve your skills and show new ones in your present position.
- The case studies involved in it will help you in career advancement in a much better way than the passive UX designers.
- It will also help you to get more freelance jobs as this will be the best advertisement for your design skills, processes, and your abilities.
- It will also help you to create more case studies that are of higher quality.
- You will get a learning experience even outside your present job, and that too, from a fresh perspective.
In short, your UX design portfolio will help you to stay relevant and competitive in your career, whether it is freelance or professional.
The UI design guidelines
There are a few specific guidelines that you need to follow to create your UX design portfolio to get the best UX jobs. The rules of thumbs to follow are:
- Focus on the visibility of your system status so that you can inform the users about the system operations.
- Match between the real world and system regarding the language and concepts to present the information in a more logical way.
- Focus on freedom and user control in the digital space, including taking backward steps to redo or undo your previous actions.
- Make sure that it is consistent and according to the standards when you include terminologies and graphic elements in your UX design portfolio.
- Prevent making any errors while creating your design systems, or at least keep it to a minimum, making sure that there is no elimination or flagging actions.
- Focus on recognition instead of recall to minimize the cognitive load and provide task-relevant information.
- Flexibility and efficiency are two other vital aspects that you should look into and ensure using abbreviations, hidden commands, function keys, and macro facilities.
- Also, focus on aesthetic and minimalist design that will help your recruiters in the retrieval of relevant information.
Therefore, make sure that your UX design portfolio is helpful to the recruiters so that it helps them in diagnosing your talents and issues and also facilitate in proper documentation.
Focus on UX design process
You should focus on UX design primarily when you create your portfolio. UX design is essentially a process, more so an iterative process. It starts with UX research that will help you to find out the problems in your design that you need to fix. More the research, better will be your design making it more useful and usable in a desirable manner.
In addition to that, you must also focus on different other aspects, such as:
- User testing which will help you to know whether or not your design can live up to the expectations of your users
- Focusing on the user feedback and input that will help you in future iterations of your product as well as improve it to give it a market longevity
- Ensuring cross-disciplinary working connecting different areas, departments and science of UX design, including production, marketing, finance, and legal aspects.
This means that you will need to make qualitative and quantitative measurements that will ensure that you get a measurable ROI. Always keep your users at the front as that will help you a great deal in persuasion decision making.
Summing it up
Not only your users, but your recruiters are also complex. It is human nature, and there is nothing wrong with it. Therefore, when you design your UX portfolio, you should consider:
- Managing the limitations
- Not assuming that your product understands the user context
- Making different options and suggestions available easily to your users and
- Going to limited scenarios if you are in doubt.
You must accredit social skills and intelligence in your design so that you can adapt to the context or behavior. This will ensure that you are clear in your communication regarding what your design can or cannot do.
This approach should be followed, even if your product is sophisticated. This will make it look much more intelligent and social in different ways. Other people will understand you and your design a lot better. This is even more necessary if you are into designing smart products, and it is a lot more difficult. All this will help your recruiters to know your creation limitations and specializations.