Are you fresh out of school or looking for your first design gig after a career transition? Based on years of experience interviewing and mentoring UI/UX designers, web design designers, product design designers, and visual designers, these are the most common mistakes I see, and how to fix them.
Mistake #1: Your portfolio is hard to skim
Hiring managers are busy. For a recent job I listed, I had about 10 incoming applicants a week, but only have time to phone interview 3. And this is in addition to my day-to-day responsibilities, which is already taking all of my time (that’s why I’m hiring).
As the hiring manager, I spend about 5 minutes per portfolio — and I’m trying to see 2–3 projects in that time.
Hiring managers need to be able to skim:
- Final deliverable — bonus if you can state the impact of these deliverables
- Your team and role — which part of the deliverable was yours vs. your team’s
- Scope — expectations are different for a 2-week project vs. a 6-month project
- Realness — real stakeholders> solo case study, solo case study > nothing, but if you try to disguise case studies as real, it’ll leave a bad taste when the manager finds out
The Mistake
Reading. Like. A. Novel. Especially for the more lengthy projects — where they best demonstrate your range of skills, and it’s a huge loss of opportunity.
The Fix
Make sure your reader can get a general idea for these as they scroll through your project. You can summarize the project brief up top, highlight key points within a paragraph, or use good ol’ visual hierarchy of font treatments to achieve a more skimmable story.
Here’s an example of a good summary…
And here’s an example of good use of highlighting…
Then as all good designers do: get feedback. Try a variation of the 5-second test — give your friends 1 minute to skim through a project and ask them what they remember.
Mistake #2: You say what you did but not why
Hiring managers are looking for these things from junior designers:
- Basic skills — do you have a basic practical understanding of the tools and methods you’d encounter on the job
- Trainability — are you thoughtful and reflective, trying to improve after each experience
- Raw Talent — do you shine in a particular area that sets you apart from others with a similar level of experience
The Mistake
Many people focus on demonstrating basic skills and raw talent but forget the most important trait: trainability. Trainability is demonstrated through thoughtfulness beyond what is minimally required.
A lot of projects read like “Here’s our wireframes. Here’s the research we did. Here are the final designs.”
The problem with this is that there is no indication that you made thoughtful decisions, just that you were following prescribed steps. It communicates that when you start a job, you’ll follow what is given but not proactively seek out opportunities for improvement — both in your projects and in your career.
The Fix
The ideal design process involves multiple iterations between design and feedback/research, so you should clearly show the connection between each iteration and how one stage influenced the next stage.
Your project should read like “Here’s our wireframes. We tested these parts because we wanted to understand X. The results showed Y, which is why we did Z in our final design.”
But the world isn’t perfect. You had limited time and weren’t able to do 100% of the things you wanted. Turn limitations into opportunities to demonstrate your thoughtfulness:
- Didn’t have time to do user research → Due to the tight project timeline, I decided skip user testing in favor of speed. If I had time to conduct research… (outline what you would test)
- Inconclusive results → My hypothesis is that the mixed results due to X. If I was to conduct another round of research I would do Y.
- Didn’t have time to revise based on feedback → Due to limited time, I prioritized fixing A instead of B because XYZ.
Another way to show that you thought about the “why” — not just the “what” — is through a Lessons Learned section. Lessons Learned shows that you’re able to learn something that you can take beyond the project at hand — be it a personal skill or an understanding of this user audience.
Here are some examples…
Writing about the why of your decisions, and showing how you can bring your learnings to the next project shows hiring managers that you are communicative, reflective, and eager to learn — all traits of a highly trainable designer.
Mistake #3: Not polishing your portfolio like a design
Everything you show a prospective employer is a design artifact you delivered — be it the cover letter, your resume, or your portfolio.
Depending on your specialty, you’ll get more passes for certain areas and be more strictly judged on others. For example:
- UX designer — your portfolio should have clear information hierarchy and be easy to use on any device
- Visual designer — your portfolio should look beautiful and demonstrate your unique style
- UX researcher — your portfolio should be logical, clearly demonstrate your influence, and be written for your target audience
The Mistake
I’ve seen so many ways portfolios are incongruent with how the designer presented themselves, such as:
- a UX designer with flickering scrolls in their portfolio
- a web designer with a portfolio that’s not mobile friendly
- a visual design portfolio that has pixelated images
- a product designer with mostly graphic design projects in their portfolio
The Fix
Just because your portfolio is a design doesn’t mean you have to design it from scratch. As a designer, one of your skills is delivering the best design with limited time, so focus on what is the best experience for the person reading the portfolio: getting to the information they’re seeking as smoothly as possible.
It’s totally fine to use existing layouts on sites like Squarespace and Behance. A portfolio design that leaves little impression allows the reader to focus on the content. A portfolio design that leaves a big impression will make you more memorable, but if it leaves a big negative impression, then that’s worse than leaving no impression.
A few rules of thumb to follow:
- Simple but smooth is better than special but buggy
- Tell a coherent story about you, remove works that don’t serve that story
- Empathize with your portfolio’s end user
- Test on several devices and browsers
If you avoid mistakes #1 and #2, and serve reader’s needs before bells and whistles, you’ll naturally end up with a well-made portfolio.
Looking for more guidance on your portfolio? This great article goes into a lot more detail on how to do some of the things I’ve recommended.
