What are the top three things you would say you look for in the portfolio's of an entry level designer?
Preciate it breh
How about 14?????????
This advice is a mix for people with no experience and for people with some experience.
1) Make sure you're solving an actual problem. Don't give me the 50th incarnation of a food delivery app. Unless yours has some wild crazy take on it like men in rocket suits. And youre designing the flow from the rocket suit deliverer. That let's you consider new problems to solve. How do we know he has enough fuel to complete a delivery? how do we get him to refill? how do we handle X?
2) Make sure it's stuff that you actually care about. I hate reading robot like narrations of the approach they took (spoiler: everyone uses the same UX cycle headings). Passion comes through in the writing and the amount of effort you put in to it. Plus, if you get to the panel interview where you have to present a project out of your portfolio....being passionate about the problem will come through and will also help with nerves.
3). numbers 1 and 2 also apply here. Don't do unsolicited entire product redesigns. i.e. don't redesign Facebook. The reason is, you have no insight into their metrics, internal conversations, constraints, scope etc. UX designers are constantly getting bombarded by "the why don't you just fix this one thing" by people who don't realize that there are probably 100 hurdles to fixing that one thing. A good example is Facebook learned that a more efficient (sorting algorithm, filtering, etc) newsfeed dramatically dropped time on site. It was so efficient that people got what they needed and bounced. It's the same thing they noticed when they tried to pull politics from people's newsfeed. Less engagement. And one of the reasons we got the fukkery that's Trump. Yet there are about 200000000 unsolicited Facebook redesigns out there that all address the Newsfeed.
If you do redesign an existing application do only one part of it. See My #1 when you do this. Like an inefficient flow of adding posts on instagram. Or why moving a button's placement will increase signups.
4) if you do design an entire app make it original. again, we don't nee another food delivery app. how about an app for first day of school kids that assigns cafeteria seats to all of them to take the anxiety off of making friends? get creative with it. solve a problem that no one else is addressing.
5) Make sure you stay within the realm of possibility. You dont need to be a developer to be a designer. But you should have a basic understanding of what's possible, not possible and what the concept of 'scope' is within the product context. Otherwise you risk a portfolio filled with projects that aren't possible to build. If you do want to realm into the far future make sure the impossible thing is not a feature in the product itself and has at least a little grounding. Example: Don't do mind reading as a way to use your app. Counter-Example: Do rocket suited men delivering your food.
6) go past friends and family. 99% of the portfolios I see of self driven products have friends and family as research participants. Use Amazon's MechanicalTurk with a SurveyMonkey survey instead with a targeted demographic. Use a free Maze account with MechanicalTurk (don't pay Maze for participants, they resell MechanicalTurk themselves, go straight to the source). That's much much more impressive.
7) jargon is sometimes a necessary evil. it gets you past HR screeners who have no clue what they are looking for since most companies can't afford design specific recruiters. BUT be light and not mechanical and not heavy with jargon. it looks like you're trying too hard. break the UX cycle heading mold. im tired of seeing DISCOVERY > DESIGNS > TEST > ITERATE as headings.
8) want to really impress? (related to the first part of #5) acknowledge and demonstrate things that most people ignore. demonstrate how you might split out your design into a design system and a set of guidelines . show us how these elements/components can be repeatable and reusable. tell us about accessibility and how it played into your design. this demonstrates product thinking / systems thinking. That you're thinking about the whole...and the future...and not just designing for that one specific thing.
9) this applies to brand new people and people with no experience. if you're looking to be a UX generalist then make sure your projects show that you can do a little of everything (interaction design, ui, IA, research etc) and take a project from A to Z. if you want to specialize and focus on UI and polish make sure you're demonstrating an understanding of color science and typography and space/structure. Interaction design (the ux part of product design) demonstrate that you understand human behavior, workflows, the impact of call to actions and primary action buttons. If you want to do IA then focus on hierarchy, site maps, navigation, taxonomy etc. UX researcher...same thing. Etc Etc.
10) if it's work that comes out of prior experience (i.e. an actual company) make sure that it's not of the web design marketing sites type UNLESS you're applying to a company where you'll be working on marketing sites and sales funnel and forms or something.
11). if you have actual B2C or B2B app stuff to show make sure that you explain your role and your actual involvement. AND the other involvement of others. A lot of people simply eliminate the participation of coworkers from their narrative and only talk about the project as a whole. Often insinuating that they did it all. If we know you weren't the sole UX practitioner at that company then THAT shyt IS SUSPECT! I once interviewed a designer from a pretty big company who I knew had a big UX research team filled with every discipline you could think of. But reading the project it looked like this guy did it all himself. He got exposed badly in his interview. Of course if you did actually do it all explain why....where you embedded in the team? where resources stretched thin? were you the only designer at the company?
Paint a clear picture of what you did, what you did not do, and what you helped others do. Name names or if you want to keep names out refer to 'the team' or a 'colleague' or 'team member'. Otherwise the conversation where going to have when looking at your portfolio is "This is an impressive project, but how much did he actually contribute to it and how much did the team do?" Don't leave people guessing.
12) you can just use Figma if you want. and that's fine. i've been impressed by people who just use Sketch or Figma etc. But I'm always impressed by people who will give me a gif/video/prototype built in Adobe After Effects, ProtoPie, Principle or one of the other dozen prototyping apps that let you really push the boundaries. This is never a requirement of course. And mostly a nice to have. I realize people have families and other responsibilities (other jobs for a lot of people trying to break in) and don't have the time or structure to learn this extra stuff. So not having it is not a ding.
13) dribble is good for eye candy ideas. but 99% of the stuff on there would never work, be way too big of a scope or are bad UX. make sure you're only using it for inspiration.
14) if you need ideas for problems to solve. go to Reddit and look at Today I Learned, ShowerThoughts, AskReddit and a few of the bad design/bad experience/things that irritate people subreddits. Go to the big brands subreddits (/r/starbucks /r/chipotle etc etc) that are filled with mostly employees and a few customers who hate this and that and are complaining about problems there.
that's all I can think of right now Breh. I really hope this helps you and anyone else who stumbles across this who wants to get into UX. UX is one the teams that report into me now and I have a director who runs that. so im not invovled in the day to day anymore. so no more portfolio reviews and only in interviews if i need to convince a candidate or feel someone out we're not sure about. so things aren't fresh. as i remember ill add more.
