No Experience? No Problem! 3 Ways to Find Projects for Your UX/UI Design Portfolio Case Studies

Your portfolio is like a friend who can speak  highly of you to any potential employers or   clients. I want to fall in love with how you  present your stuff. These are your technical   tasks. I'm not just looking at your technical  expertise; I'm interested in your journey. The   one thing, in my opinion, that beats empathy is  experience. I want to see the thinking. I'd look   for evidence of them having built components, them  having an understanding of what components are,   and if you can do that, then the world's your  oyster. That's really kind of what I look for. I want to see the thinking process. I want  to see why some decisions were abandoned or  

why some directions were abandoned and what was  chosen instead. I would say, for me, it's not that   important what methodology exactly you're using,  but I would still love to see that, of course. But   the more important part is that you can argue why  you decided to move in that way, and that "why"   should not be based on assumptions, not "because  I felt like" or "because I had a feeling that."

That doesn't go in my book. You need to have some  objective language in use that clearly explains   that this is objectively better. And again, you  can always say, "Well, drop-downs are faster," or   "This is faster." Well, ideally, you would need  to have data to prove that. The more thinking,   the better. I mean, personally, I have sometimes  situations where somebody would just draw a   solution on paper and give it to me, and as long  as I can follow and understand what the process  

was like and why this thing has been chosen,  that's all I need. That's fine; that works for me. If you're looking for a job, most of the time  what you want to convey through your portfolio   is that you've reached the competency levels. To  do that, I would say any kind of project or any   kind of format to show that you've done the work  will work. It could be a fake project; it could be  

a real project. Sometimes it doesn't even have to  be linked to a Figma prototype, because I know we   tend to be very, very obsessed with tooling. For  example, I have someone that I've been mentoring   who had a past experience in video editing.  Something they've been doing is actually working   in a clinical office to enhance the engagement  with patients. To do this, they actually made  

a bunch of videos of the doctors just to feel a  bit more approachable, so it's not just a screen   between the patients and the doctor. To me, that  is user research. This is also understanding the   problem, the creative ideas, and yes, maybe the  outcome is a video and it's not a screen design.   But if he has this project and some UI exercise,  then yes, for me, he'll be able to do UX work. A few things, and I'm trying to answer  this fast, okay. Work on some components,  

even if it's just for your own products. Show  that you have an understanding of what component   design is. Then I would work quite hard on a  couple of aspects, and these are hard skills,   by the way. I'd focus on learning about  typography, spacing, all that good visual   design stuff because it is important in  design systems. And then finally, work   on your writing skills. Being able to communicate  well, especially written communication, is really  

valuable. I'd look for evidence of them having  built components, them having an understanding   of what components are, of what a design system  is. And yeah, just try and read about it. I'm not looking for anything polished; that  is just the end product. I'm interested in   your journey. So it doesn't matter if you're  junior or senior, I want to see your process:   how to go from one step to the other, what is the  problem, how do you approach presenting it in a  

way which is user-facing, how do you write feature  specs, how do you take it to a wireframing state,   how do you create low-fidelity, high-fidelity  user interfaces. Anything you are building   should not be based on an opinion. You  should give me data. You should say,   "I did this because I did competitor benchmarking.  This is what worked in other games. People connect   better with characters, so it was a good way  to introduce that meta feature." But also,   what did you do? Even if you are just a  student, did you build that prototype,   and did you do some kind of mock testing with  another player just to say, "I also tested it  

with somebody who's never used this feature.  This is the feedback I've got." Show me your   process, show me your journey, show me your  objectivity. That is what I want to look at. On a junior level, if you are applying for  mid or senior level, I'm not just looking at   your technical expertise, which I know you  will have. I also want to see soft skills:   how good are you at collaborating, how good  you are at taking criticism and feedback,   how good you are at defending your decisions,  how good you are at taking initiative,   how good you are at aligning your stakeholders.  So my general rule of thumb is everybody who's  

hired needs to be good, including a director,  because I have to get hands-on also many times.   They should have solid or technical skills  with potential, but the higher up you go,   I want to also see more of your soft skills:  leadership, collaboration, and all that stuff. I think the biggest thing is storytelling.  To me, basic skill. That's the beauty of it.  

I think a lot of this stuff is sketching, it's  whiteboarding, it's customer interviewing, it's   being able to speak with a variety of team members  and get them all to a single story that actually   makes sense to the customer. Really being able  to balance opposing viewpoints and say, "Well,   let's make two prototypes. Great, it seems like  we can't come to an agreement. Let's make one like   this and one like this and test it." I've done it  many times in my life, but if you've ever done any  

prototyping or any kind of sketching or ideation,  that is just kind of your basic technique,   just taken to the next level. And with AI, there  are so many Legos for you to play with and so much   opportunity. And if you can do that, then the  world's your oyster. That's really kind of what   I look for: being able to do all these things, but  also facilitate this discussion about how far you   can take it. And of course, everyone's got some  Figma skills. I don't think you need to be a huge  

Figma jockey for this thing. Once you've come up  with the idea, it's just a matter of documenting   using your design system components. Hopefully,  you do have a design system; I hope you do, all right. My advice for portfolios,  whether it's design systems or not,  

is the same. You should tell the story of  the project. So don't think that a design   system project versus a different type of  project has to be structured differently   or has to be structured in a specific way. Focus  on the milestones that happened in that project,   the challenges that you overcame, and what you  delivered, and tell that story. That should help   you to just have a consistent story arc and really  focus on the project dictating the case study,  

not you having to fit every project  into a very cookie-cutter format. In portfolios, if I were to apply for  a job, I would not just be like, "Oh,   I've done this little AR app and I've done  this little VR project," but I would make sure   how it connects to the users and who this was  designed for. One of my projects that I would  

personally lead with if I were to apply for a job  is probably this inclusive gym that I've created.   It was a smaller project for me. It's not in my  main research portfolio, but it allows children   in wheelchairs to exercise and play games with  each other. Actually, from an AR perspective,   it's not particularly technically challenging  or hard, but at least it would demonstrate how   I think about this space and what kinds  of AR and VR solutions I want to create.

Where I see my responsibility. In a design portfolio, I'm a very visual person,  so I want to fall in love with how you present your stuff and with the style,   with your typography. Typography, that's the first thing I see  in the portfolio. If you're not taking good care   of your typography with your character length,  your line height, hierarchy, all that stuff,  

that's already like I'm done with you. I don't  want to see you; I don't want to know anything   about you. Get out of here. No, it's just like,  in the web, everything we do as designers,   a lot of it is text. Most of it is text. So I  look for that care and attention to detail in   a portfolio. That's the first thing I notice,  and actually, it's not because I'm looking for   it. It just instantly pops for me. I see it's  like, "Ooh, ah." It's like, "Ah, you tried. You  

tried. Close." I know it's cruel, but sometimes  if you have a lot of portfolios you're seeing and   you don't have a lot of time, you're just looking  for excuses to close that window. You're looking   for excuses to filter out people. That sounds  cruel, I know, but that's how recruiters work.   They have to filter out people because they may  have a lot of options, and they're just looking  

for excuses. So don't give them that excuse. I'm  going to say something a little bit controversial:   don't write the whole design process, all  that thing like that cookie-cutter template   design process that I'm pretty sure you didn't  even follow. You just reverse-engineered it   and put it there in your portfolio. Tell  me a story. I want to be entertained. I know that sounds now even cliché. It's all about  storytelling, but it really is. We're humans,  

and we just want to gather around the fire and  be told a story before we go to sleep. And in these stories, you can be the hero. All the  challenges that you went through, "Oh man, we   tried this and it didn't work, but that allowed me  to learn, and then I overcame my challenges, and   I became the hero of this story." You can be the  hero of that story. It can be your user. When you  

were doing user testing, you found out something.  Tell that story of that person. It could be maybe   it is actually the company. They were struggling  and they were trying to get to a new market or   something. Tell me that story. I want to be  entertained. We all want to be entertained. If   I'm going to be looking at your portfolio, you  better have good typography and a nice story. Empathy is really, really important, right?  We talk about empathy a lot as user-centered  

designers, as human-centered designers. But the  one thing, in my opinion, that beats empathy is   experience. Portfolio-wise, specifically, I  really want to see a breadth of experience   there. The reason why is that I think more than  anything, if you have worked for startups and also   larger enterprise companies, if you've worked  on mobile products and you've also worked on   desktop products, if you worked for enterprise  systems and consumer-facing products, B2B, B2C,  

that means that you've seen a range of different  needs of the user. And that also means that in   entirety, when you're working on these different  projects and you're consuming the research that   it takes to build these products, you're in a  place where you really understand what the user   needs. So if you have actually experienced what  the business needs and also what the user needs,  

if you've experienced how to toggle between the  two, then I can look at that and I can be like,   "Well, you look like you can learn a  lot." With AI, especially for ethical AI,   what I think needs to be done is that there  needs to be a lot more assessment and quality   on designers that showcase a breadth of learning  and a breadth of implementation of that learning. When I'm interviewing people, or especially  when I'm teaching, what I typically like to  

do is I like to really, really encourage  my students to go in and just explore the   world and explore the ways that they can  implement strategies in different ways,   and also fail. That's a really big part of  being a designer. I don't even consider the   vocabulary of failure as something that I  have in my book because I don't consider   it failure. I just consider it, "Oh, it's a  learning lesson. We just learned something."