One of the best meetups for UX designers in New York is the UX Lab, whose events are consistently interesting and helpful to the community of professionals in the UX space.
Last night's gathering, titled Open Forum: Your UX Portfolio with Switch was organized by Sean Paul Echevarria, one of the founders of the UX Lab. The format of the meetup was structured as an open Q-and-A session with Switch's Tara Lynn Connelly (Senior UX Designer), and Benjamin Grohe (Product Manager). In case you haven't heard of Switch, it's a mobile job search app that works a bit like Tinder: you swipe left for jobs you're not interested in, and swipe right for jobs you are into. Check it out here:
Some of the questions that were asked during the session included:
- How to improve my UX portfolio?
- How many projects do hiring managers want to see in a portfolio?
- Should I target recruiters or product managers when applying to a job at a tech company?
- How much detail should I include in each portfolio case study?
- What kind of portfolio should a UX researcher have?
- Do recruiters and hiring managers dismiss a portfolio if it was built with a template like Squarespace?
I took a bunch of notes, and wanted to share some of the takeaways with anyone who couldn't make the event:
- If using a template like Squarespace, make sure to customize the styles so it doesn't look like all the other people's websites that use the same template. Presentation matters, and hiring managers/recruiters see so many portfolios that they recognize when templates are used. Create a custom brand for your site: change the colors, fonts, background images, logo. You get bonus points for originality, so anything you can do to set yourself apart visually will increase your odds of making it to the next round.
- Aim to include 3-4 UX projects. Each case study should be a story that follows this pattern:
- what was the problem you solved?
- what kind of information/research did you use to solve the problem?
- what was your solution to the problem?
- how did your design help deliver value?
- At the beginning of each case study, start out with a 2-3 sentence summary with bullet points, then give the reader the option to dive deeper for more details.
- When submitting a portfolio for a job, tailor what you send so that it's relevant to the specific company/job function.
- If you don't have a lot of UX projects under your belt, do a few hackathons or a case study on an existing product showing how you would make one of their features better.
One of my favorite ideas from the evening came from Sean, who works at Jet.com. The idea is to pick an existing product (for example Jet.com's web app), find one feature that you think could be better and propose a solution. Create a mockup design of the solution, test it on some people at a coffee shop, document your assumptions and findings, and put together a case study with all the artifacts and key insights. In the meantime, place an order on Jet.com, and save the shipping box. When you are done putting together the case study, mail it in the Jet.com box to the head of UX at Jet.com!
I love this idea of doing something different from the typical resume/portfolio submission. In a way, you have to empathize with the hiring manager who gets bombarded with dozens of portfolios and resumes, and think "how can I make my submission more surprising/ fun/ unexpected than the rest of them?"
It's another opportunity to practice UX: how to make the hiring manager's experience of looking at your material as pleasant and delightful as possible.
Thanks again to Sean and the UX Lab for organizing the meetup, and Tara and Ben of Switch for hosting us and sharing their insights.
For more inspiration on putting together a design portfolio, check out Rachel Berger's excellent Medium post The Myth of the Portfolio Piece.