Leonard Reese, Author at General Assembly Blog

8 Best UX Design Portfolio Examples

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The UX portfolio website has superseded the business card as a UX designer’s most essential professional networking tool. Especially these days, as the UX design industry pivots abruptly to a predominantly remote professio­­­n, UX designers communicate their professional identities virtually through their online presence to navigate the constricted job market successfully. 

In my middling work experience as a UX designer over the years, I’ve been involved in countless UX designer portfolio reviews on both sides of the hiring process. Having personally benefited from industry mentorship in my own career, I’m excited to share what inside intelligence I can back with the design community, to encourage emerging UX designers to represent themselves more effectively to hiring managers and potential clients.

As with any other good user experience, a UX portfolio website should consider the user’s mindset during a visit. Bear in mind, companies typically automate their hiring processes using HR software, with workflows designed to evaluate as many qualified applicants as quickly as possible. Conciseness is merciful to reviewers digging through a pile of applications. The reviewer expects immediate access to all the information they need within the online portfolio to accomplish their evaluation. Within twenty seconds, the UX recruiter should understand your pitch, get a sense for your work, and have your contact information at their fingertips, ready to take the next step in their hiring workflow.

For full disclosure, I’ve pulled all of these examples from my own personal orbit, and included friends and colleagues who I respect and want to uplift. Let’s explore my thought process when looking at how each designer’s site uniquely succeeds and looking for patterns to model a great UX design portfolio.

1. Total class: Liya Xu

Liya Xu is an accomplished UX designer and Amazon alum, now returning to graduate school to study design management at Pratt. She leverages her technical know-how combined with her visual sensibility to craft excellent applications. Really, check out her work.

This online portfolio example has the character of a fashion spread, with well-selected attributes and succinctly written content. She allows the viewer plenty of breathing room in the empty space of the layout, to process the impact of her UX portfolio content. The case studies fall in reverse chronological order, most recent and impressive work at the top. A visitor gains immediate access to an example of work “above the fold,” peeking up from the bottom of the home screen. The experience conveys an overall modern, professional effect.

2. Authenticity: Seka Sekanwagi

Seka Sekanwagi works at Cash App as a UX researcher and has a well-rounded background in product design, interaction design, UX, and UI. His degree is actually in industrial design, crafting objects and tools, and bringing that same human-centered mindset to his design work. A genuine empathetic interest in other people drives his user research, questioning the meaning behind core user needs and translating them into tangible quality improvements.

The imagery and copywriting of Seka’s design portfolio establish his credibility while expressing his individuality. Selectively-edited messaging demonstrates the level of thoughtfulness that goes into his work output. He formats his work qualifications in simple typesetting, reducing the cognitive load on the visitor, and inviting them to review his qualifications at their leisure.

3. Perfect Pitch: Roochita Chachra

Roochita Chachra is an Austin-based UX designer and recent General Assembly immersive graduate who is highly active in the local creative community. Roochita enters UX design from the adjacent worlds of graphic design and digital marketing and is transitioning her career focus to allow her more opportunities to conduct user research, prototype, and problem-solve.

Whenever repositioning for a new avenue of design work, it takes self-restraint to hide old projects  and work samples that don’t reflect your updated professional image. A UX design portfolio needs to represent the type of work you’re looking for, not just what you’ve done. Roochita focuses hers on the UX design process, and supports it with plenty of explanations and artifacts to show the output.

4. Pure Enthusiasm: Ljupcho Sulev

Ljupcho Sulev approaches his UX projects with a passion and a positive attitude. Originally from Macedonia, he works for SoftServe out of Sofia, Bulgaria. I had the opportunity to collaborate with Ljupcho on a project, conducting user interviews and analyzing research side-by-side for weeks. His sunny disposition brightens the spirits of his team members and elevates the work.

Ljupcho’s profile is sparse and direct. He highlights his career achievements by pairing photography with bold infographics, letting his enthusiasm pop off the screen. The minimal digital portfolio design aesthetic allows the content to take priority over the visuals. 

5. Scannability: Aimen Awan

Aimen Awan is a UX designer with a background in software engineering and information experience design. Aimen optimizes her case studies for the viewer to scan quickly, with summaries at the top denoting her role and responsibilities on the project. Scrolling down the page, project artifacts illustrate the design process, increasing the fidelity successively up to the final product.

When developing a UX portfolio for a job search, take a lean approach like Aimen — gather feedback and iterate on your design. We designers are all susceptible to over-designing our work, nitpicking well past diminishing returns.

The most useful digital portfolio feedback comes from submitting actual job applications and gauging the response, so the earlier you have something ready to share, the better. Think of it as a user test — submitting a batch of applications and fishing for feedback from hiring leads or a potential client. Every response is a valuable piece of data and should help you refine your messaging and presentation.

6. Approachability: Ke Wang

Ke Wang writes his UX portfolio with a tone of casual levity (with bonus points for rhyming) while his About section reads like a social media status update. He pulls it off because his case studies scroll through examples of his overwhelming talent and work.

Website design covers some crucially important goals which require some entirely human skills. Relating to the website visitor in an approachable way is the hallmark of intuitive user experience and a good heuristic of success.

7. Clear Storytelling: Phill Abraham

Phill Abraham is a graduate of General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive course. Like many other UX designers, Phill arrived through a circuitous career path, with a background in psychology and experience in documentary film. He is actively involved in the local design scene, building out his book of projects.

Each case study shapes a compelling narrative of Phill’s design process. A project from his experience as a documentary filmmaker bolsters his UX portfolio and speaks to his capability to perform as a professional. Documentary is, after all, a quintessential form of user research. Phill applies his storytelling sensibility in presenting the case studies, outlining his thorough process step-by-step. As the website visitor scrolls down the page, they experience a neat narrative arch outlining the scenario, the design process, and the final product.

8. The Resume Homepage: Samantha Li

Samantha is a design manager at Capital One and an all-around UX champion. An active organizer within the design community, she mentors students and early-career UX designers working to break into the industry. Her own UX portfolio website outlines her career journey in the form of an extended resume and is as dense as a novel. An evaluator doesn’t even have to click to find all of the relevant information.

The resume homepage is a great design pattern for more established professionals with a long list of accomplishments. As a best practice, scrutinize what you publish diligently. Password-protecting case studies helps avoid any disputes over showing sensitive client work, and you may need to censor any personal data that may appear in your photographs and artifacts.

Conclusion

Job hunting poses challenges even for design professionals with advanced experience. Candidates need to squeeze their credentials into a digestible size to communicate their entire work history to reviewers in a short window of attention. The importance of every element of the online UX design portfolio becomes amplified, and dialing in the nuances of messaging makes a difference in getting noticed. Emerging UX designers face an uphill challenge as they’re fleshing out their portfolio projects. UX professionals in the job market are judged by their list of accomplished projects, which is frustrating for early-career UX designers who may be struggling to get their foot in the door with shorter resumes. The only course of action is bootstrapping through some initial projects — side projects, student projects, volunteer work, and ultimately paid UX design jobs — to demonstrate applied skills. A great UX portfolio effectively communicates your ability and value to potential clients.

How to Become a UX Designer

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A career in UX design stands out as a forward-thinking prospect. The role’s compatibility with remote work has enabled many designers to sustain their practice in a world maintaining its distance. We are seeing demand for UX skills persist even through our current sluggish global economy, due to accelerated digital transformation in response to unforeseen challenges across every industry. The tech workforce is coming out ahead overall — though many businesses and startups are faltering, companies that survive are leaning on tech innovations to adapt intelligently to the new normal, with experience design leading the charge.

Forecasting into the upcoming decade, the nature of UX design work will likely continue to evolve along with technological advancements. The experiences we design for will also change, from today’s ubiquitous smartphone apps and websites to more hybrid touchscreen and voice interactions, video inputs, and augmented reality.

As exciting as the UX design field can be at its best, I encourage anyone serious about becoming a UX designer to also consider potentially negative aspects of a UX career path. Working conditions vary wildly in tech; research common complaints from tech industry workers by checking out online employee reviews of some prominent tech companies, and judge for yourself if it’s for you. In real-world situations, people in UX roles in particular may encounter ethical issues related to their profession, in terms of driving user behavior to meet business goals. As you learn more about entering into a design practice, consider what principles you believe should guide good UX design.

Dive In

So, still curious how to become a UX designer? Start by finding and immersing yourself in example designs that inspire you. Diving into a new subject matter is, in many ways, what UX designers do best. When you’re beginning to research an unfamiliar domain, it’s best to cast a wide net and gather all the resources you can. A bit of light reading and video viewing will go a long way, and designers are notorious content producers — don’t take my word for it, just browse by topic on Medium or YouTube. When you’re just starting out, a steady stream of design inspiration can capture your imagination in a way that will sustain you through the hard work to come. Discover the amazing work of user experience designers in the community, the tinkering and creative hacking, the impactful research, beautiful UI design, and the world-changing achievements in the field.

Socialize

Committing to a new career path requires a leap of faith. As you consider your options, the quickest way to get a realistic sense for what it will be like for you to be a UX designer is to ask some real UX designers. Get out there and network, if not in a physical space, then virtually. With so many active design nerds in the community, a quick search will reveal plenty of results for design events, meetups, and knowledge shares to attend. In my own personal journey, I’ve found industry seniors quite welcoming to early-stage UX designers, and generous with their willingness to mentor — remember, these are professional empathizers we’re talking about. For your unanswered questions, online communities often have Slack channels or message boards to crowd-source answers and support. Find one in your local region, look into groups that share your interests, and be sure to connect with UX practitioners globally to follow trends and innovations.

Introductory Study

User experience is a field of applied design with rich literature. Start off your academic investigation with the things that excite you the most. Check out some books from a reputable UX design reading list, and seek out lectures and webinars from established designers.

While there is no industry-wide definitive education background requirement for UX design, employers do often expect an undergraduate degree in design or a “related field”. Since so many fields are related to UX design, hiring evaluations often weigh professional experience more than education credentials. Schools have only started to offer programs focused explicitly on user experience design in recent years. Related fields might include human-computer interaction, communication design, information architecture, and product design. I’ve seen successful designers that come from backgrounds in anthropology, psychology, language arts, engineering, business, or even music.

If you’re new to the field, look for the right timing in your development to enroll in an actual UX design course. Everyone’s career journey is unique, and a course load can be a big investment of time and energy. To test the waters, you can find a lot of free intro classes, and plenty of remote learning options. An instructor-led class provides the opportunity to interact with a knowledgeable professional to answer your questions in a safe setting. The (virtual) classroom environment also exposes you to other learners who may be experiencing similar struggles. If your strategy is to learn and practice as much as possible in a condensed timeframe, a UX design bootcamp will guide you through the fundamental skills and knowledge, and help outline next steps for expanding that foundation.

If you’re already in a role related to UX design, see if your employer will sponsor coursework fees. If you’re an employer, make sure your employees have an education budget to apply toward new skills and career growth. The job market may be daunting for nascent design applicants, but the first few years of experience can really open up the doors to a more senior tier of opportunities.

Gut Check

Is UX design for you? Try to articulate what it is about UX design that attracts you the most. For some people, it’s the joy of crafting things. For others, it’s a passion for empathizing with human needs. For others still, it’s a fascination with complex systems. 

Find the right role that matches your interests. Within the field of UX design, there are multiple areas of specialization including user research, strategy, interaction design, UI design, product design, service design, and usability testing. While considering the best fit for your aptitude, be sure to also consider all the other fields related to UX design that are perhaps less well known but just as cool. Look into roles like Product Manager, Business Analyst, Prototype Engineer, Copywriter, Visual or UI Designer, and Data Scientist, to name a few. 

Building a Portfolio

The designer’s UX portfolio is their passport to navigating job applications. When creating your portfolio, be sure to follow best practices and let inspiring examples guide you. If you’re just starting out, you might think about achievable starter projects to take on that will turn into featured case studies. Many designers build their first portfolio projects with independent work, unsolicited redesigns, and favors for friends. Set clear design challenges for yourself, and document the experience of solving them. For a bit more structure, enrolling in a project-based course will help you produce a tangible portfolio piece that follows a typical design process.

There’s a natural life cycle to any design project, from its germination to fruition. The job of a UX design professional is inherently project-based, and a designer’s portfolio is living documentation of the best of their accomplishments.

Learning on the Job

Budding UX designers reach a real milestone when they land their first professional UX job. This could take the form of an entry-level or internship position, and the work might not exactly resemble the glamourous, world-impacting projects that inspired you to become a designer in the first place. While still standing up for your principles, use early job opportunities to study the UX design process in action, to study how the entire creative process works, and understand how organizational roles relate to each other.

You may also find more early success, and potentially long-term fulfillment, working as a UX consultant or freelancer. Part-time self-employment may be the right choice for someone holding down an existing job while building their portfolio of work. As with any applied field, only so much can be learned in an academic context; real-world experience completes the UX designer’s professional development. Today’s aspiring UX designers must gain a business sense to guide their career moves. Invest energy in the areas you need to cultivate most. Listen for credible feedback from the people you work with, and target those areas to improve.

Ongoing Education

As a UX designer, resign yourself to a lifetime of study. The technology we design for will continue to advance, along with design tools, methodology, and theory. As designers and technologists we have to hustle to keep up — learning periodically, staying up-to-date with relevant professional skills and new concepts. It may help to define clear education goals that relate directly to your professional aspirations, and track regular progress.

As you cover more ground in your career, continually demand more for yourself as you work toward your long-term professional goals. When negotiating or renegotiating contracts, research employment statistics on fair compensation and benefits, and reach out with your burning questions to other professionals who you respect. Knowing your worth is leverage for achieving the conditions you deserve.

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UX Principles Every Designer Should Know

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I am an experience design lead for a technology company. Every day, I talk about theories and projections of how other people will experience something, which is ultimately impossible to know. Human behavior is unpredictable and ever-changing, nowhere more rapidly than in tech. Confounding variables affect how individual users might react to a planned experience. The best user experience designers I know are great at guessing educated guesses based on research, which then inform crucial decisions in the technology development process. An experience designer’s job involves predicting how interactions will unfold, and how users will perceive them psychologically and emotionally. 

Designers do their jobs by challenging project ideas, providing counsel to stakeholders, and advocating for users’ best interests. Along with the role comes an obligation to serve the user through principled action. Bad interaction design can have consequences ranging from slightly frustrating to severely harmful. The UX design space is rapidly evolving, and designers must take a holistic view of all the various touchpoints, interactions, and environments—real and virtual—that the user navigates on their journey. Design artifacts, such as wireframes, personas, and all the other UX deliverables you commonly find listed, are just expressions of the user journey. They’re all different ways of answering the same question: “What will it be like for the user?”

With so many resources available on UX technical skills, it’s important to direct more attention toward essential human-centric concerns. Every successful UX designer needs to grasp the foundational UX design principles of empathy, clarity, feedback, and inclusivity.

Empathy

If you’ve spent time with UX teams, you’ve likely broached the subject of empathy. Particularly in tech, with all its innovations and disruptions, project contributors are accountable for the impact of their work. Empathy simply describes the act of considering that impact on people’s feelings, situations, lives, communities, and on society as a whole. It’s about seeing things from someone else’s perspective.

The field of user experience design contains common methodologies for building empathy with users. Based on research, user personas serve to focus project contributors’ attention on realistic user traits, so they can understand whose needs to meet. Those personas play central roles in user journey maps and problem statements, ecologies, blueprints, and storyboards. Design thinking activities and workshops bring subject matter experts together with stakeholders to focus on the user journey. All of the methods primarily serve as empathy-building tools for the contributors to better understand the user. The technology community, through decades of collective trial-and-error has largely conceded that projects tend to fail when they don’t prioritize user needs. Empathy helps to divert the team from complacently executing software requirement specifications to instead focus on doing the right thing from the user’s perspective. 

Misunderstanding the design principle of empathy can curtail a design process. Anyone who has ever scuffled with a frustrating product can attest that the creators should have spent more time talking to users. Building empathy isn’t just a box to check off in an early phase; it’s a principle that ensures meaningful impact through the development lifecycle.

Clarity

User experience design problems often revolve around the clarity of information and instruction. Successful designs make information as intelligible as possible with a clear indication of how to perform the actions you need to take. Designers make sure people can access and understand the interaction as it’s happening and remain sensitive to its effect on the user’s cognitive load. Lack of clarity could have serious repercussions, as in the case of a healthcare application being used by a patient to access their treatment. 

Working knowledge of visual communication goes a long way. Design artifacts, even reports, benefit from a clear visual hierarchy. Even if the visual design of a user interface is a separate concern from the UX, in practice, great UX designers have to collaborate with their counterparts in user interface design to ensure that the interface communicates the right effect. To engage effectively on a cross-functional project with multiple team members, UX designers need to at least wield a practical knowledge of typography, color, and composition. Thinking in terms of these visual communication fundamentals allows contributors to establish a shared design language.

Clarity of communication can’t be underestimated. My company, like many global tech organizations, uses English as a primary language for everything from a business discussion to code documentation to design critique. My international colleagues exhibit remarkable communication skills, especially considering English may be a second, third, or even eighth language. In today’s climate of remote work, it’s more important than ever to use video to enhance real-time communication—employing body language, and facial expressions to underscore our words.

UX design is wrapped in written communication. The extent to which hiring managers weigh writing skills when evaluating UX candidates may surprise job seekers. It makes sense that client-facing discussions frequently focus on UX artifacts, and only astute writing can successfully document good design ideas. For UX research specialists, as well as generalists with user research among their responsibilities, UX writing is even more of a daily requirement. They design through the medium of research reports, interview takeaways, and executive summaries. Clear writing permeates the work, all the way down to the microcopy—the small bits of guiding UI text used in forms, prompts, buttons, and messages throughout an application. 

Feedback

Great user experience designers are still wrong all the time; they just use more feedback. Everything is a prototype, even early notes, and doodles, that can evoke enough reaction from helpful sources such as usability test participants to inform improvements. All design fields solve problems through making things, actively creating new ideas to fill an existing void, and ample helpful feedback guides the solution in the right direction. Seasoned UX designers learn to apply this principle throughout their process, always scanning for meaningful feedback on everything they contribute.

Everywhere you look, there are products with design flaws that could have been improved through more user testing, not just apps and websites, but also physical experiences like vehicles, household items, or specialty equipment. Whenever a project is fast-tracked past user testing too hastily, the consumer has to deal with the resulting deficiencies. Successful projects take a structured approach, testing prototypes methodically to identify problem areas. Product teams establish a feedback loop by observing user reactions, hypothesizing improvements based on those reactions, and rebuilding prototypes with new ideas to introduce into the testing cycle.

Accepting product design feedback and applying its learnings to a prototype may be a skill that takes time to develop; it’s easy to get emotionally attached to work we create as if it were some precious thing to defend. When we ignore valid design criticism, it’s the user who loses. Designers learn to separate themselves from their ideas, gathering feedback early and often, and become skilled in objectively discerning how to improve the work to make it even more clear and useful for others.

Inclusivity

People often base their first understandings of users on the lowest common denominator—mapping out an ideal “happy path” experience for a generic user. That ideal rarely reflects the multifaceted reality of human life, and that generic user is too often a reflection of the designer’s own personal traits or their company’s business goals. To design excellent user experiences, we need to step outside our own biases and recognize the diversity of human experience.

Including a broad radius of users in the design process isn’t only the right thing to do; it also makes good business sense. When a service makes the effort to consider its customers with special needs, it tends to benefit a wider swath of customers. Wheelchair-accessible spaces provide a great example of this principle: the same rampways and automatic door openers which allow people in wheelchairs to navigate also make it easier for people pushing strollers, carrying armloads, and with other momentary physical restrictions.

Website design similarly recognizes the range of users navigating the virtual space. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provide a standard for designing interfaces that can be understood and used effectively by people with disabilities. Web and app designers rely on that guidance to ensure the display can be understood by users with a spectrum of visual impairments and blindness and who may access the information using screen reader programs to synthesize speech or output to a braille display. Users with motoric impairments benefit from various assistive technologies such as a trackball mouse or voice recognition software. Across both physical and digital spaces, there are ample opportunities to design a better, more inclusive user experience that considers all possible customer scenarios.

The aim of inclusive design is to demonstrate respect for users by allowing them a dignified interaction with your service. Project teams would do better by incorporating the principle of inclusivity throughout their process. Upfront research and cooperative design with target users will help to avoid the pitfalls that lead to inaccessible products. Designers, engineers, and managers are all responsible for adhering to accessibility guidelines in the creation of usefultools, displays, and controls. Rigorous usability testing and user testing continuously refine the experience and helps produce genuinely positive, inclusive interactions. 

Conclusion

The practice of user experience design challenges abstract notions and raises important ethical concerns. As UX designers, we essentially design actions, and all actions have consequences. Multiply that by the masses of users touched by scaling technology, and our design decisions become exponentially magnified. All designers should consider that gravity whenever approaching their work and take conscientious actions based on human-centered design principles.