Hey, everyone, and welcome back.
So we just spoke briefly about, like, you know, exporting our designs, showing off our beautiful
design work and, you know, stuff like that.
But really, that's not what's going to get you a job.
People are going to hire you as a UX, UI designer, programmer, whatever you want to call that position.
They want to hire you for your brain, not just because you can create beautiful designs, but because
you can think through different types of problems and come up with great solutions.
Now, what's the best way to show that it's through an actual website or a portfolio site that you can
hand off after an interview or before an interview or during an interview?
It's the best way for you to get yourself a position.
And when you show off your work on your website or your portfolio, you don't want to just show imagery.
You want to talk about what you did on that specific project.
What was the problem, maybe the type of research that you conducted your process?
I can't stress how important process is if you just showed how you got to the end.
Nobody is going to hire you for a good position.
People really want to know what you did in order to get to the end.
So let's take a look at a bunch of different portfolio sites that I have here that are actually done
really well.
I mean, you'll notice that this one over here by Ventana Pi is very, very simple.
She's a senior product designer at Spotify and literally only three projects she's chosen.
And if you look at them, they're not flashy, really.
I mean, there's nothing really crazy going on here.
But you can tell there's different types of interactions that she wants to talk about, different types
of problems she wants to talk about.
And she's kind of broken them up into these things that we call a case studies.
And that is the approach that I definitely would take and I've taken in the past.
And it's been incredibly successful for me and it's been incredibly successful for colleagues I've worked
with in the past.
So let's jump right in.
So as you can tell, it's very simple.
Portfolio website only work and about we have up here.
If we go into like reading this case study, a jump right in, we can see like what data was the name
of the case study.
We see how they've kind of like laid out all the different types of kind of components that they've
designed over here.
I don't know what this means yet, but it's very kind of visually interesting.
So they have this big statement over here providing feedback like markups and commenting is a key use
case for collaboration.
But this functionality was limited in box.
How could we increase engagement and promote the feedback loop inbox?
I led the redesign to extend our feature set to allow users to create annotations.
So already, right off the bat, she's told us what the problem is.
What she's plan to do with her kind of role is so she's the lead and solo designer for discovery research,
design, animation and testing.
She's also listed the entire team.
So if people want to kind of maybe reach out to these people afterwards, but it also gives credit.
It shows that, you know, projects we rarely kind of work on them alone, even though you may be the
sole designer.
There's so many other people on that project that kind of lend their hand.
And it's good to give credit where credit is due.
If a developer came up with a solution and you helped them get there, that's perfect.
Or maybe you want to mention that you and the developer really worked closely to build empathy across
the team for your user base.
So, I mean, this really kind of lets the person know who's viewing this, that you're a team player,
you have a certain role within that product team and they know exactly what you've done on this project,
not just showing them like a screenshot like this and expecting one of us or the viewer to kind of come
up with that.
So we have a little quick animation here, just showcasing the interactions that are happening, which
is really nice.
So you can do that with any type of screen recorder like screen flow.
You can even use like a figure to help record this and you can cut that down with something like stream
flow.
So once again, you have like the problem statement and then she starts to write about it a little bit
more in depth and she's showing different portions of her solution and with a little annotations on
the bottom, just explaining the actual annotation that she came up with.
So here we go once again, just talking about green annotation, we have different types of annotations.
So this is a really, really good way to show off a case study, once again, we also have research
exploring all that kind of stuff.
Process, we dive deep into her general way that she iterated and got from point A all the way to like
maybe point B.
Over here.
So this is really a great way to show that, you know, you didn't just jump straight to high fidelity
or just settle on one solution, you had a solution.
And you kind of worked on it.
This is another perfect example of that.
You have your V1 and the reasons they didn't work and then you got eventually to an MVP that you're
happy with.
If you could see, like, look at this one all the way to the MVP, lots has changed.
And she showed me what exactly went wrong with each type of prototype and how she kept on iterating
in order to get to the MVP and then eventually over time to the final.
So this is definitely an amazing, amazing way to show off your work.
It's really in depth.
It shows me that you were thinking about a lot of different things here and not just about like beautiful
designs.
So here's Kos's Corelli's in.
She's a product designer or I'm not sure if it's Shiraki, but they're a product designer currently
working on a developer experience at Stripe.
So another big company, once again, not a lot of projects.
There's several projects here.
They have an archive, but their big projects are at the top.
So let's go into.
I think it's pronounced Kujo, the Internet security.
I like this nice little gift going on over here.
So let's go round here.
And one thing you'll notice with these websites, they're very simple.
So, once again, like the role, maybe a little bit of the problem use case around this, the results.
So this person is an actual product designer where they're also developing possibly physical products.
So this is for the Kujo AB.
And once again, just going through what is happening with this application, what they plan to do with
it, they have these screenshots using just the mock ups just to kind of help represent and better display
their work.
And once again, like sometimes some things are out of markups.
I mean, it doesn't really matter what you choose, but what thing I really like is there's kind of
taking me through their process.
They're taking me through the flow here.
So also bringing out their design system a bit more in explaining the reasoning behind that.
An easy way to get through another project will go through one more.
This is Ryan Scott.
So Ryan Scott is another designer who worked for some pretty big companies here.
We have Airbnb, Jordache like look, once again, they're just giving you a really quick understanding
of the project.
It doesn't have to be, like, crazy with their interactions.
As you can tell, these people are really established, are really good in their field.
They don't need to sell you on crazy interactions on their website.
Nobody really does.
Your work should really do the talking for you.
So.
They have something simple here, and if you're really into writing on something like medium, people
often kind of poster articles and what they're doing.
If you have talks that you want to kind of showcase, you can do that here as well.
So we'll just pick on one project here.
So big statement over here, setting Airbnb up for its next decade of growth.
So it just said something like mobile experience for Airbnb, like, that's cool.
I mean, that's a big name.
But tell me a little bit more.
Get me excited about what I'm able to see.
So nice placement of an image.
We have a challenge statement, his approach, so like this one's even broken down to the way he specifically
approached everything and we have some solutions here.
So a simpler, unified Checo flow.
And like I said, designers don't need to be crazy flashy, they don't need to be like, oh, this world.
I mean, at the end of the day, designs need to be functional.
They need to solve a problem.
And there's a reason why so many people use certain types of apps, because it's just that they make
their interactions in their micro interactions really, really delightful.
They make the designs really easy to use.
They aren't bogged down by certain things.
So this is an example of that.
So we have the old iOS approach, the old mobile web approach, and then this is the new approach entirely.
So really simple.
And that's what I really want to showcase here, is that all these people, they have all these different
types of projects they want to showcase and they aren't necessarily showing like 40 different projects.
They're showing one, two or three.
And they're showing like real work, not glorified work or anything like that.
That's kind of like propped up.
And like just for visual aesthetics, they're actually showing you their entire process, what was before
and what you replaced it with or even showing their figure, the components here that they've created
for like a design system.
So, I mean, they're actually showing you their their process.
And what I really liked over here, especially with this one, is like just showing the versions and
the building up of that, showing you that they had something before and over time, over the course
of a project, through feedback and iteration, they finally got to like an MVP that they launch and
then iterated on to get their final.
So when you approach a case study, don't think about it as just showing off like beautiful work, show
off your process.
Tell me the challenge of the project.
Tell me your role in the project.
Tell me your approach, your process.
Tell me how you got to certain solutions and maybe tell me what the old solutions look like, why this
one's better.
Show me the research.
I want to know everything.
I want to know what you did.
Now, give me a good understanding that, hey, this person is very thoughtful.
They're incredibly thoughtful designer.
They're thinking about everything.
They're showing me everything.
They are thinking about all the different types of ways that this solution can be successful.
So go out there, create great content for your portfolio website and just be very mindful of the type
of things you put on there, because this kind of stuff is incredibly powerful for somebody who comes
in for like a design position.
I would definitely hire somebody like this, even if the design is not necessarily beautiful because
you can teach that kind of stuff.
That's all very trendy and it's all trend based.
But you can't really, like, teach somebody to be really passionate about a very successful solution.
You can teach somebody that, but it takes a long time.
And this is just very, very, very thorough work.
So be very thoughtful as a designer.