UX/UI Tools vs. Design Principles: What Are Hiring Managers Eager to See in Your Portfolio?

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."

Let's talk a little bit about the *benefits of  sketchnoting*. There's this ability to *retain information that you learn*; so, that's a real benefit. And then, of course, it allows you to *use your whole self for note-taking*. Instead of just writing text or typing, you're using your whole body, you're using your visualization and your thinking and analytical skills, and your listening skills, most importantly, to capture information

about what you're learning and what you're understanding. So, one of the things that I want to touch on a little bit is the reason why we talk a little bit about paper before pixels. I'm a big believer in this concept. And the reason I say that is because I think paper and pen is really *cheap* – like you can burn through lots of paper and pen, and then you can recycle the paper. And it's a really quick way to get ideas down without spending a lot of time investing in Photoshop or XD or Sketch or whatever tool you happen to be using.

I think the other thing that I feel like is software tools limit you to what they can do and not *what you can imagine*. So, when you start using software tools, you can sort of fall into a pattern of things you've done before, things you've seen before, and then you're sort of locked into what the  software allows you to do. Where I think paper and pen allows you to be a little more *free-form* and explore ideas. Two other things I like about paper before pixels is I think *rough sketches*,

when you share them with a group, *invite people into the discussion*. When you provide a finished,  beautiful mock-up that maybe is even interactive, sometimes people can feel like, 'I didn't  have any part of this. This is already done.' And that leads to the other part – people don't  feel like they can give you feedback about your idea when it's so finished that it looks like it could be real. There's sort of a hesitation like, 'I'm going to ruin Mike's work! He did all this work. I can't tell him feedback because he'll have to tear it apart and do it over again!'

When you use sketches, this isn't even on the table. We're all just exploring ideas. So, I think this is really important to think about, when you think about *ideation especially*, is to consider doing paper before you do the pixels, or, in the case of if you have an iPad Pro and a pencil, maybe using pixels in a unique way.

Let me talk about the issues in the 21st century – the issues that are faced by designers. I've talked a lot about human-centered  design, in which I've said there are four fundamental principles. One is – well, it's *human-centered*, so we focus on the people. Second, we make sure we're solving the  *right problem*, not just the symptoms. Third, it's a *system* – everything is a complex system.

Things are all related to one another. And fourth, we have to learn how to prototype, test, iterate, continually modifying what we're doing to make sure it really fits the needs and  capabilities of the people we're designing for. Well, let's take a look at how that plays  out in design. And what I want to do is I want to talk about four examples of what designers might be doing in the 21st century.

These come from a paper that I've written. Michael Meyer, who's a professor at the University of California Design Lab and also in the business school and before that actually a very senior executive in some of the major design companies in the world. He and I have written a paper called "Changing Design Education for the 21st Century" published in a journal called "She Ji", which is published at Tongji University in Shanghai. And I happen to be a professor there.

And we said, you know, there are basically four ways of  characterizing designers. That doesn't cover everything, but it shows you the broad range. And the first one is like today's designer. So, we talk about Li Na. Li Na was asked to design a new lighting system for the home market. It probably will have LEDs, so you can— first of all, they can be broad and they could be in different shapes. And, second, you can change the color of the light, and you can do all sorts of wonderful things with modern LEDs.

So, that's her design task – let's produce a whole line of products for lighting up the home. That takes advantage of all the new, exciting things that are happening in lighting devices. That's a kind of challenge that today's  industrial designers are capable of solving. It requires new materials and requires new thinking and thinking in out-of-the-box ways, if you will.

But it's very traditional because the way that  design education goes today is primarily one of craft – learning the skills and craftsmanship that makes for beautiful, wonderful, delightful products. And I personally believe that that education  today is really superb and excellent, and I see no need to change that. So, if you wish to design beautiful products that people will love and enjoy,

fine – the traditional design education works fine. You know, for example, I happen to love this pencil. It has a wooden barrel, has a very interesting shape, and it's just delightful; it's a very simple thing. But to me, it's delightful. And I keep losing my pencils. So, what I do is I buy several at a time and so I can replace them as I lose them. And I've been through, I don't know, 10 already. And one thing I like about the wood is as I use it,

it changes its color. The oils from the finger go into the wood, and it changes the coloration. And that makes it a personalized pencil – it's *mine*. The coloration of the wood is a function of me, so – but that's traditional design: no new things, no new education is required. So, let's take a second look. Let's talk about Jin. Jin is another designer.

And Jin has been asked to design a new radiological imaging system for the medical profession. So, radiologists like to  take images of inside the body. They sometimes use infrared; they sometimes use ultrasound. Sometimes, they do MRIs – magnetic resonance imaging. Sometimes they do X-rays; sometimes they do – well, there's a wide variety of imaging – imaging methods. And they like to look at it when  you do an MRI, you end up with slices of the body,

and they like to look at an image at a time, and they go back and forth, back and forth across the slices, trying to understand exactly what is happening. Now, suppose you're a surgeon, and, say, the radiologist has pointed out there's a tumor. And so, your job is to remove the tumor. Well, the radiologist looks at these individual two-dimensional slices and goes back and forth, back and forth and gets a really good

feeling, and they know what's going on. That isn't how a surgeon thinks. The surgeon thinks in three dimensions. And so, a surgeon wants that very same data in a very different format. Now, take the general practitioner; the general practitioner who actually is a  person who's a physician – the doctor of the patient. That person has to talk to the family, has to talk to the patient and explain what's going on. And neither the patient nor the family understands all of the technology

and all of the words, the technical terms that are used in medicine. And so, here, what the physician needs is a way of picturing – showing a picture of what is happening  but in a way that everybody can understand. And there are other people helping too during the operation, and they need different images to know what's going on, so *this* is the task. So, Jin has to prepare multiple ways of presenting

the information differently for the different people who are going to use it. This requires a different kind of expertise  because it's a combination of extreme knowledge of the technology and what's possible and what  modern imaging and modern graphics can do. But, second, they have to be *tailored for  the people* – so, the very same information has to come out in different ways. Now, Jin is usually not capable of doing the programming,

not capable of doing the technology, but *is* capable – and this is important – does understand exactly what the needs are of each of the individuals that is going to use the system. And so, it's Jin's job to bring together the technologists – all the people with the specialized knowledge, but have them make sure that what they're doing is  appropriate for the people who are going to use it. Most technologists don't do that, and if  you look at the fancy imaging that gets  

done and the fancy graphics and displays, oh, they're very pretty, but they may not match the needs of the people who use them. So, Jin's job is to understand how to make it match and remember, there's not a single answer – the answer is different for each of the population. So, if you're given that task to do,  what is it you would need to know? You would need really good skills in what we call  *design research* and understanding the tasks that

each of those different people are doing or the  questions that, say, the family and the patient is going to have, which means spending a lot of time observing, watching, understanding the kinds of people that you're designing for. Now, you also have to know the technology because you want to know – you might want to say, "Gee, can  we present this kind of an image?" And maybe the answer is, "Well, yeah, but that's kind of a virtual reality image and they'd have to put on a helmet in order to make  believe they would walk through the body.

Would that work? Actually, that might work very well for the surgeon. It might very well work for other people. It may not be the right thing, though, for the family. And it may not be the right thing for the patient. So, you're going to need a tremendous amount of modern knowledge, but, again as a generalist, you know what's possible  here, what's possible here, what's possible here, and – most important of all – you know who to call  upon for that knowledge

and then you have to supervise a team because they probably want to go  in their own direction and you have to say, "No, no, no. We're doing this for the surgeon, and we're doing this one for the family, and we're doing this one for the general practitioner, and we're doing  this one for the nurses and technical staff." And keep them focused on the different  requirements that they must meet. Now,

are you *ready* to do that? You have to not only know  a wide range of things, but you also have to be a good administrator, if you will, a good manager, because you'll be managing across a group of people, because radiology is a *system*. So, that's two scenarios. Now, let's look at a third one. Say, that Kim was asked to develop a  whole new sanitation system for a rural town in southern India:

No electricity, no pumps, but we need a sanitation system. How would you do that? Who would you have to bring in? And remember that the kind of technology that we are used to in building systems would not be available here. And, more importantly, the people would not necessarily accept it. They wouldn't understand it. And if something went wrong, they wouldn't know how to fix it and change it. And they themselves have to do it because they're in a rural community;

they're far from the big cities; they're far from established businesses and maintenance and repair people. They take care of things themselves, so you have to build something *with them* that they can handle. And the word "with them" – don't design *for* them, because if a foreigner comes into a location – and a foreigner can be somebody from the next city; it doesn't have to be somebody from a different country –

if a foreigner comes into a location and says, "Here's what I'm going to do for you and isn't this going to be wonderful?" people don't necessarily accept that. So, we have to do a version of co-design where we're working together with the people that we're designing for to make sure that they are very happy and they've had a major say in how it should be designed. So, that's a different kind of operation, different kind of working, where the skills of the designer become more and more skills of diplomacy,

skills of getting along with a wide variety of people, maybe kinds of people you don't normally interact with, because designers, on the whole, are well educated, and now we're going to work in a group, in an area where the people are *not* well educated. And, yes, we suggested that this is a problem in southern India, and you  yourself might be from southern India, but you're not from the same people that you're designing for,

because, again, you're well educated and you're from a different – you probably live in a big city with lots of facilities and these people do not. So, that's the second way. How will you address that? What would you do? So, let me go one step bigger to a fourth example. The fourth example is Erin. Erin is heading a United Nations team to  address one of the major societal issues of the world.

And the United Nations has a list now of  17 major societal issues that they feel have to be addressed. And one of them is hunger. And suppose  that's your task – you're going to address hunger. Well, what does that mean? What do you do? Where do you get the foods and supplies? So, you need to know about supply chains, you need to  know about what's available, you need to know about transportation. You also need to know about economics. You have to have a wide range of experts helping you.

You need politicians because this is  a political issue in the end. You're going to need financial people to understand the economics of doing this. You're going to need a whole bunch of engineers, and you need agricultural experts and food experts and supply chain experts because food is going to come from a variety of places. You might grow the food locally, and some might have to be imported. And to grow food, it isn't just enough to say, "We're going to grow food!"; you have to make sure that the soil is the right type; you have to make sure there's enough water;

you have to make sure there may be fertilizer and the right kinds of seeds are going to be used because food comes in many  different varieties and you have to plant the thing that's appropriate for the  geography and for the environment. So, in doing this, you know, Erin is really more of a *manager* than  a designer. And you might even wonder, "So, what's design got to do with this?"

Well, design is an interesting discipline because we always have to bring together people from a wide variety of areas, but *remember*: What designers bring is not only the fact that we actually do things  and build things, but we focus on the *people*. And we make sure we're solving the *right problem*,  and we treat everything as a *system*. And we also know we don't rush to a solution and say, "Here it is!" We do a little, small test and we test it out.

And we learn from that and we modify what we're  doing and we do this over and over and over again. And these four characteristics are very unique to design, and they make all the difference in the world and success. So, even though this seems like a managerial job and one that isn't at all design, it is design – and the best people in the world  to do this are designers. So, there you are – four different kinds of design problems,

each of them requiring different skills and different change from the traditional design of design as a craft. But all of those are going to be  critically important for the future. We don't want to lose any one of them; we want  to have all four of those different things going on, which means slightly different education  for those who wish to go into these areas. But you don't necessarily have to get the education at a design school. You can teach yourself. Just remember to: Think in *systems*.

Remember to always be *learning*. Remember to always be *observing*. Remember to always, *always* *focus upon the needs of the people you're designing for* – *use their creativity*. You don't have to have all the answers. Quite often the people you're designing for have the answers. They just don't know how to implement them properly. There you are – a great challenge, but that is the future of design.