UX Case Studies

A case study is a detailed presentation of  a specific project. It explains the initial   problem or challenges, the research that was done  to inform decisions, the iterations that were made   and why they were made, and also presents the  final solution and its impacts. A case study   doesn't have to cover the whole design process;  sometimes, a part of it is enough. For example,   building an experience map can be the  full case study in itself. Case studies  

also depend on your experience level. If,  for example, you've done an internship,   you will probably focus on something very  specific, like a feature. But if you led a design   vision as a design leader on a whole project,  your case study might be a bit more substantial. Here's a common structure you can reuse  and adapt for your own case studies. First,   we have the hook area; it gives a quick summary  of the project, why it happened, and what you've  

done. This area helps people decide if they  want to carry on reading the whole thing. The research area: this section shows that you  didn't start designing screens straight away, that   you actually spent time understanding the user,  the problem space, their context, and their needs. The sketching and wireframing area:  this is where you show your skills in   interface layout design and information hierarchy,   and how you are actually converting  your research into a digital product.

The prototyping and iteration area: not only can  you show your skills in using a design tool here,   but it is also where you can explain  how and why you iterated your design,   taking into account user or project feedback. Finally, the outcomes and lessons area: what was  the outcome of your work? Was it as expected?   If not, why? What have you learned during this  project, and what will you do differently next  

time? This is where you show your self-reflection  skills and what you learned from the project. And remember, each project doesn't have to include  all of these sections, so use your best judgment.   Maybe, for one, you will only show the market  research because it was more interesting and   relevant to assess the existing competition.  Maybe, for another one, you'll synthesize   your user interviews into personas and empathy  maps. All projects are different, so show it.

Desiging a portfolio is a case study unto itself, just like an interaction. An interaction tells a really good story on how to use a product. A portfolio tells a narrative on you as an individual and how you think. So if I see a portfolio that's filled with only finished product, then the story I'm being told is the person only cares about the final results and they didn't really enjoy the journey to get there.

So if I see a portfolio of a complete journey. Then I realized they really enjoyed the design process, they enjoyed the detail and the collaboration to get there. I look for a little things like does a person cover things like who was on the team? So they present themselves as sort of the lone hero that did the work of presenting themselves as a as a core contributor to get to a great outcome. So I'd like to see that level of thinking in terms of collaboration.

Having a content strategy is the opposite of  designing or writing something at random.    When you have a content strategy, you will study, plan, and  develop the content so that it aligns with your   goals and your target audience. For example, if  you want to be hired in the fintech industry, you   will want to show more of the dashboard work that  you've done or anything done on complex design.

NDA stands for Non-Disclosure Agreement. NDAs  are usually signed between you, as a designer,   and your employer. It's a legal contract that  defines the confidentiality of a project. Maybe   it's the details of the project, the work you've  done for the project, or any kind of information   around it. First, I can only advise you to  respect your confidential contract; after all,   it's the legal contract that you signed. But  you can try to get permission to show some of   the work you've done because there's always room  for negotiation. For example, in my company, if  

you've done an internship, we try to authorize a  few screens for you to use in your school report,   and most clients will allow that. If not,  you can always anonymize your projects and   maybe just talk about the things that you've  learned in general terms. You don't have to   disclose the project specificities, but you  can definitely talk about what you learned   while doing the job for the project. If you're not  sure about what is confidential and what is not,  

it's always best to ask your company or your  client. For some clients, maybe just the name   is confidential, but you can show the work.  For others, the name is not confidential,   but you cannot show the work. Again, the best is  to ask clients or employers, and if the person you   worked with is no longer there, you can always  ask the HR department and the legal department.

This year, I went through over 250 case studies on Twitter with five junior designers sharing their case studies and also sharing their problems. And many of them had the problem of having a case study or having a portfolio with a couple of case studies. And those case studies were very thorough because they changed some courses, they finished some classes or some university classes, and they had a pretty big case study. They had pretty much everything, you know, like give you a checking off a list,

personal check and party marks checked like everything was there, but they all had this problem of almost never getting any replies. And they weren't really they weren't really understanding what's the problem. They're like, it's really checking all the boxes. There's like a lot of content there. It shows thorough research, it shows, you know, data, it shows tables, graphs, charts, everything. So what is the problem? Well, the problem is and we started fixing that. I started giving feedback to those people.

The problem that we noticed is that a typical case study is like really, really academic, which means that it's pretty much boring. So that's like the whole thing. It's really, really long and it's really filled with like a lot of content. And those people, those recruiters have limited time to assess those case studies. So they go through a lot of those those case studies by just quickly scrolling through. And if there is nothing that catches their eye in there, it's really, really bad because they have seen probably similar

things in the dozens the same day and that results and that LDR effect, which basically means too long, didn't read. And this is something that really is happening even to people who are tasked to evaluate case studies, don't really read all of them. They check the boxes, but they don't really read all of them. And if there is a lot of those similar or similar case studies in a portfolio or in like a group of portfolios that they need to review on a day,

they're simply going to just browse through them. And a lot of those decisions. But at least from what I heard from the junior designers, is that those decisions are being made on hunches or individuals or just pure luck. So you can help your luck by a concept that I call the UI sandwich, which basically means that keep the whole case study and the entire thing. You don't really need to remove anything. It can be super long if you want, but at a very, very pretty visual on the top, like a key visual.

And one tip is to always rotate it a little bit diagonally. That's why probably you've seen this on dribble quite a lot that people rotate the screens a little bit and that's because if there is a rotation, our minds cannot really process the grid very well. So we assume that it's all even and properly aligned. So even if your design is not perfect, if you're rotated a little bit, it's going to be perceived as a lot better than it is. Of course, if it's horribly misaligned, that's not really going to help that much, but it definitely does help a little bit.

But the thing is that this key visual is very image heavy. It shows a couple of screens that shows some additional decorative elements. And this kind of brings the engagement way, way up and this keeps that person interested in finding out more what you did in the project so that you like kind of primes them to actually read the rest of the case study. And then once they get to the end of it, you add another visual, just not the same one, because some people actually started doing it this way.

So add a different one and it still has to be like a larger visual to kind of have like a nice sandwich of like all the TLDR stuff between the nice looking visuals and that has proven to actually work because those people that had problems with their case studies reported seeing that they are now getting responses, they're not getting invited to the interview, so they didn't really get them the job, but at least that got some more people interested.

And this overall approach of good visuals applies to everything that you do. So it's not just UI design. If you know those principles of grids, layouts, colors, typography, you can use it in everything you can using your portfolio creative, but it has to be obvious, but you can use it in your presentations. That's the one thing you can use it in your resumé, which is just primarily text, but if you use it well, then you'll be able to understand that you just don't need more than two font sizes in the resumé.

And it it's all about picking the right font as well, because some decorative font that people are adding to their CVS are often really, really difficult to read. But even in Excel sheets, because it's really like it's kind of like really hard to believe that, but you can make a data table in an Excel file look good. You can add a little bit of like an image header on top of it. You can add a little bit of like more whitespace in the data cells

and you can pick the right fonts and just find those things. That table is going to be more interesting and it's just going to work better and that's the whole thing. So as we all said, engaging visuals basically help you sell everything that you share with others. And I have one example that I've heard a couple of times before as well, that grids in terms of like writing anything, writing, you know, with a font on a screen, on a computer screen are one thing, but you can actually use those same techniques and same examples of hierarchy and grid

in things that you write with your pen and paper. So if you're writing a shopping list for somebody, just make sure that all the bulleted items are aligned to the same left side, that the text that you're writing is roughly the same size in every line. So it's not really different because that helps our brain process it faster and our brains really, really love that. And I'm really, really almost to the design tips, but we need to get through one more thing. First.

I want to talk to you about how the industry is currently changing and how it's really not like it was in 2009 because in 2009 there used to be multiple roles. So you could be like just a wireframe designer or like a flow diagram designer or a UI designer, and it's slowly becoming more of a trio of researcher, designer and frontend developer. And those three people should have the skills that are required in their kind of little category,

and they're a little bit of an overlapping skill with the next group. This started. The whole problem was this started with a lot of designers who don't design. I remember people like that were pretty rampant in companies. I actually knew. I knew a guy that was a senior designer for a couple of years, but he never actually created anything tangible to look at. And his only work was actually sitting at meetings and talking and having this kind of pose a lot.

And he tricked most people because when it came to actually designing, it clearly showed that he had no skills. He mixed categories with like standard menu items in navigation. So those people are going to be phased out of companies and they probably will be in some larger organizations still because they are slower to adapt. But most companies are looking for generalists and they are looking for people with that dreadful, you know, dry or dreaded UX slash UI a role.

That is because U.S. is UI and UI is UX. This is very, very strongly connected and we really need to think about it in terms of just design. So if a researcher knows a bit of design, they can communicate with the designer better. If the designer knows a little bit of front end and a little bit of research, they can communicate both ways better as well. And then the frontend developer needs to know enough design to deliver better quality work.

And this is actually a big problem out there because most frontend developers are not skilled in design. So if you're into frontend learn design because that's going to put you miles ahead. This is actually also why at our company we started doing development because we started as like a design agency initially and by seeing how other companies butchered our designs, it was really, really stressful and really frustrating and we couldn't write. We were ashamed of like half of our portfolio of the finished products for a while.

So we started hiring designers and hiring developers and teaching them design because we believe that communication needs to work both ways. And as a designer, if you want to know a little bit of coding, you don't need a lot, so you can just know a little bit of success and you'll be fine too to talk to the developers. So my bottom line is that designers should do both of the flows. If you really need to do the wireframes, you can do the wireframes, but then do the final UI, the High Fidelity one,

because also in the coming years one thing has changed. A lot of the users have now become very tech savvy. A lot of the people, you know, using apps and using websites have been using them for 15 or 20 years now and they are very skilled. So they understand the typical patterns. They know that check out icons should be in the top right corner. They know how a good logging and registration works. So all things like that are kind of pretty teramind and there's pretty little innovation here.

So you can do research to test the viability of the product. But in, in a couple of literally like patterned cases, there isn't really much way to innovate and user interface. The visuals can be the differentiator and of course we can use a design system like material design, but that would be a horrible world to live in because those apps would be all looking boring and soulless and people want that design. That's why people buy Apple products, among other things, because they look good

and they are different than everything else, at least sometimes. So people buy with their eyes and we really need to remember that. And also there is something called esthetic usability effect, which means that if something looks good, it's not really perceived by people as being more usable, even if it's not. So those visuals are important and we really, really need to keep that in mind.

Portfolios can be more important than any degrees  because they show the work. They show the skills.   In most hiring situations, your portfolio is  what gets you invited to the first rounds of   interviews. Employers and clients see if you  can do the work they want to hire for. As a   hiring manager myself, I spend more time on  portfolios than resumes. These days everyone   working in tech is expected to have an online  presence, whether it's on social media or with   a personal website. And your portfolio shows  that you belong to the group. It can even  

attract job offers and freelance opportunities  when you're not actively looking for a job. Creating a portfolio can be dreadful. You may be  wondering, "Where do I start?" This course is a   step-by-step guide to help you build a portfolio  that advocates for you and that you will be proud   of. You will learn how to make a portfolio from  scratch to showcase your projects and your work,   how to demonstrate your skills with case  studies, how to manage NDAs, and what to   do if you have limited work experience or are  reskilling into design from a different industry.

Hi, I'm Morgan. I'm a managing director and  head of design in the financial industry.   I'm also a hiring manager who has to go  through lots of portfolios every year. And   I'm a design mentor who helps students avoid  seeing a portfolio as a checklist exercise,   but as an investment that will  serve them throughout their   career. I'm really excited to be your  instructor for this course. Enroll now!