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."

How can you take something you've already designed, draw out your thinking and capture it in a sketch? That's one way to approach it. Ideally, when you would begin the design process, you would actually use the sketching as part of your process and then keep those sketches. That would be the ideal state. But I know that's not you know, if it's not something you're exposed to that you're doing already and you've got a portfolio and you need a job, this is a solution for explaining your thinking.

But again, ideally visualizing with sketches is so it's so cheap and fast is why it's beautiful. One of the things that that I talk a lot about with younger designers, especially is there is a danger to jumping right to figma or actually whatever the tool is that you use because you suddenly become bound by what the tool will let you do. I think a lot of times we're bound by that or by what you always do. Like you fall into a rut and you start doing

the same things you always do in design solutions, and then you sort of get in this rut and you're not sure how to get out of it. So by stepping away, maybe going to your favorite coffee shop or working with colleagues, whatever it is, and getting some pen and paper out and and collaboratively or individually drawing, you're thinking, even if it's rough using these same five shapes just to get your thinking on paper is so helpful. You can also use an iPad. Of course I use an iPad to do the same thing. So it's almost not even dependent on the tool.

But I mean, paper and pen is so cheap. I mean, you can buy loads of paper and pens for the price of an iPad. So the barrier to entry is very low. You can do this on whiteboards as well, or get a big butcher sheet of paper and think through the process. If you like, having space and letting your ideas bounce off and move across through a thinking process. But I think it's really important to not lock it all up in your head, but put it on some kind of a document on paper and then you can go back if you need to like a question like, why did we make that decision?

Let's say, okay, we'll go back to the sketches back here. We realized that that was that was a limitation that we couldn't overcome. And because of that, we made this choice and we went this other direction. And all that stuff will be documented in some way in a visual form that is now not only good for you as a designer to see your process, but then you can take snapshots of that and make that part of your documentation of your thinking process. In addition to maybe doing like when you get done with it,

maybe you can map out the end state and sort of show the whole process all the way through the rough stuff to the final. And then the indication of how you came up with those solutions and what it means. Maybe this thing that we just talked about is your emphasis is maybe a month after you're finished with the design project, you talk with the client, say how are things working? Did that 45 day trial work? What's what's your percentage of improved downloads? Because of that, you could start putting in stats and other things

that sort of show like can we thought this would work, We did our user research, we did all this work. Now here's the here's the results of it in a really clear way. So it's easy to describe that solution.

Most people are really excited about this stage of making their portfolio and indeed it's time to work on the visual identity of your portfolio. I'll introduce here the main visual elements that you need to define and although those elements need to reflect you and your identity, I will also cover the good practices of making your portfolio easy to navigate for your visitors. Fonts and typographic scale are usually made of the following: a heading for your page titles, subheadings for your section titles,

lead text for bigger text sizes like in hero areas, your intros or quotes, body text to use for most of your content, and caption text to use as captions for your images or embedded elements. I'd like to mention that it's usually okay to choose one font that is different for your headings compared

to your body text, but I would recommend using a standard font for your body text. These fonts are standard for a reason: they are easy to read and you actually don't want to strain the eyes of your reader, especially if they've been looking at portfolios all day long. Colors I use for the following elements: text color, usually black or dark gray, don't go too light as it may make your text difficult to read and not accessible. The reverse applies if you want a portfolio in a dark

theme. A dominant color for your main call to actions like buttons and links, a supporting color for your secondary actions, usually less vibrant and less saturated than the dominant color. An accent color, if you're including illustrations or pictures, you can be intentional and choose an accent color and use touches of it for your portfolio. Some background colors, usually a combination of white and grays, to organize your content sections. Again, if you're doing a dark theme, they will

be a combination of black and dark grays. And unless you're an expert in visual design, don't go crazy with colors. Use online palette editors to help you choose and calibrate your colors. A grid system. If you're designing your portfolio for the web, you will also need to define your grid system, similar to when you do it for your digital projects. Things to consider are, for example, what's your maximum width? Do you want to center your content on one main column or use

layouts and organize content into two or three columns? You can also play with grid offsets to structure your content as long as it's consistent across your portfolio. Responsiveness, again, here for the web, you need to care about how your content is displayed on various screen sizes, usually desktop, tablet, and mobile. You can rely here on the web builder tools that you choose to use and their behaviors, or if you have code knowledge, you can do it with media queries and flex boxes.

Accessibility. Your website must be accessible. If your case studies showcase your work on accessibility but your portfolio is not, well, it may constitute a red flag for hiring managers. And finally, a logo. A well-crafted logo can be a big plus for your portfolio's visual identity. However, it is not mandatory at all. If you don't have a strong background in visual design, I would even recommend not to have any logo at all as it can be badly designed and play against you.

If you are a UX designer with no visual background at all or maybe a UX researcher with no visual background, then I would actually recommend you to use templates online. Choose one that you can customize, again using palette editors to make sure that your colors are consistent. But you can play around with that and also, as usual, get feedback on your work and iterate from there.