I'm about to show you my very first ux design portfolio that changed everything for me and got me hired as a ux intern and at the end I'm going to explain why my portfolio helped me get that job when I first set this portfolio up I used something called Simple which was on WordPress now would I use that same platform again probably not but honestly when you're thinking about what to use for your website I wouldn't lose too much sleepover because honestly if it's something that is flexible and that could just get the job done I would go with that okay so let's start with the homepage ooh one thing that I need to mention is I will not be showing you my portfolio on the URL or like the domain name itself because I accidentally deleted my portfolio long story short it is not there right now and so I'm going to be showing you my portfolio in figma and whatever designs I had at that time before I share my screen here I also want to note that your homepage is super super important because this is when you're like getting your face card ready this is what the recruiters see immediately when they come to your page I will be honest it was really hard for me to think of like my brand in terms of like the font and the color palette and a logo like thank God I was in a boot camp because they helped me out with this because this is just not my expertise at all I'm going to show you on the screen here iterations I went through when I was first thinking about you know what is my visual branding you can see visual design is not my thing so I went with something super super simple with a logo that was just my first name and I tried it in different colors I just highly recommend you get all of that in line before you go and work on your portfolio so with that style in mind I went with a very minimal aesthetic look and initially I just really wanted like a greeting that's like hey this is me this is kind of my tagline of who I am as a designer as the hero and then as you move down you'll have more of my work showcased this second one was actually supposed to be a Netflix redesign I just like couldn't find it in figma and so this is actually a real project that I did after I got my ux design internship but quick tip here vary the projects that you show on your portfolio so I wanted to Showcase that I could do a mobile app I wanted to Showcase that I could do e-commerce and then if the Netflix one was on here I wanted to Showcase that I could do a redesign or Design Within an existing framework or an existing design library now one more big elephant in the room and I know you're going to ask Mimi so you're saying none of these projects went live real clients didn't use these is that okay to put on your portfolio and did you call that out because I had not been a part of any paid ux design work and they were projects and capstones that I took from my design boot camp and this is where I'm going to be very real with you I never thought to explicitly call out like hey recruiter here's a label on each of these projects saying that this is a boot camp project or this is a personal passion project and I'll tell you why first of all at that time I truly did not think it was necessary because it's not like this project wasn't real I still took five weeks or seven weeks or however much just time out of my life to work on this project and I did speak to real people granted I was not getting paid for this work and I wasn't exactly working with like a project manager or any developers but that's not to say that this was fake I was still able to test it with people in terms of usability testing and I still had a goal and a problem to solve so that was my thinking back then and it still landed me a job now fast forward to 6 years later and I've been on the other side of hiring ux interns I will say this if you don't call it out here on your portfolio you will have to answer for it at some point most of the time hiring managers can tell and they can look at a portfolio and they can say okay these look like more personal projects especially if you're app lying for like ux internships or Junior ux design internships and your resume is truthful and your resume says I have zero to one year experience of being a ux designer all right so if we go back to my homepage you can see that I essentially created like a tagline for myself and that's also another tip create a theme for yourself mine was all around empathy so like you'll see this not only here in the homepage but I'll also have it in like my contact area and also my about section I really wanted people to remember remember me more outside of just design and more on like my whole design philosophy I wanted to attract companies and Company cultures that had those same types of philosophies as well and it honestly worked because now I work for a company where out of our four company values one of them is empathy and so I really just tried to like hit people on the head with this whole ideal of that because that's really eventually the kinds of people and employers that I wanted to attract okay let's let's move on to my case study let's go with my like her project this is a net new app that I designed let's start with the hero section so first I have when did the project happen the title of the project a little quick summary honestly this probably could be shorter shorter the better the role what did I do in this project I did ux and UI design but I also worked on like The Branding and like the color palette and then how long was the project and then how long is it going to take someone to read this entire case study and then if you have a link to a prototype that's great totally optional moving on to the next section actually before I start I do have this like little fun little guy over here basically I found a way to display a persisting UI here where when you scroll each section will progress to The Next Step so like as you scroll this next step will turn into the teal color and so forth and so on and that's how I really chunked out this case study and I made it very like chronological based off of my design process this is probably like the only real fancy thing I have on my portfolio but other than that I keep it very very minimal here so you can see here I lead very much with the problem of the entire project like what is the problem that you're trying to solve and then tell me the process that you took to get there so this first area here is more for research it's really to help show the recruiter who am I designing for do I know who I'm designing for what's the person what is their story like and show any kind of artifacts that you have that relate to that research the next one here is what do I need to design so defining the project how did I Define the scope I created a user flow and to figure out what screens needed to be designed obviously an image would have been great here of the user flow for some reason I couldn't find it it's fine that happens no worries a tip here which is kind of obvious but and people say this a lot but I just want to drill it in keep it short and simple you can already tell every single one of these sections are pretty short they're like two to four sentences and you really want to think like Tik Tok style I made this portfolio back in like 2018 or 2019 we did not have Tik Tok at the time so even more so now in 2024 I expect these to be possibly even shorter in sentences and have way more images to really keep whoever's on this page engaged and that they don't bounce so the next step is ideating this is me showcasing like how did I explore different Design Concepts for the project um were there any wire frames showing kind of like the low Fidelity designs that I had quick tip here it is okay to Showcase messy artifacts do not be afraid to show off paper and Pen sketches again like I said before more visuals the better again I sucked at this and I probably threw away my piece of paper that I was like Scribble scrabbling on so also if you can remember try and take pictures as much as you can and it's really just a showcase too it's kind of fun to be like as a designer I can get creative on screen and offscreen after that let's move on to UI and some more visual stuff so this is more like how did you take this all into higher Fidelity this project was a little different cuz I did work on The Branding I did work on the logo so I wanted to Showcase all the different iterations of the logo that I was working on and the color palette moving on to validation and user testing this is where I talked about how did testing and research go um what were my research goals what were the research results I highlighted in this project that there are a lot of glaring pieces of evidence that no one could figure out where a certain feature was so like for instance for this like I remember adding recipes onto this app and then during testing I found out that no one could find recipes and it wasn't very discoverable and so I made the decision to call out here that if a product manager did exist on this project we probably would work together to say like hey this is probably a V2 and it's not necessarily something we need for MVP because recipes don't solve the initial problem that we talked about that takes me to another tip share The Good the Bad and the Ugly and yes this is a personal project I did not work with an engineer I did not work with a product manager but I'm acting like I'm anticipating what a product manager would say and thinking about what the experience would look like if I were to ship this feature out into the real world because you still want to showcase that you can think like a ux designer and you can think like someone who is going to be collaborating with other stakeholders usually that's where the challenges arise and so it's really important also to Showcase as many challenges that had happened in the case study as well like honestly as someone who's hired design interns before I don't want to see a case study where things have gone perfectly from start to finish because in the real world that rarely happen and being able to recognize that and showcase that in your case study is going to go a long way in showing humility and that's definitely something I appreciate when I look at case studies okay moving on to handoff so how did handoff go with Engineers again anticipating like I had Engineers really being able to Showcase like I am practicing my skills of how to Showcase all the components that I've designed for this project being able to label them correctly being able to put them in a nice to understand kit for any of my stakeholders moving on to measuring success now since this was a brand new project I mentioned getting Baseline metrics on usage and that's what I really want wanted to focus My Success metrics on here is a tip demonstrate your understanding of metrics I get this question a lot and even when I was designing this myself I was like wait like I don't have metrics because like this never really went out to anyone so like what am I supposed to do here it is tricky because it is a personal project but if you don't have metrics I would just write out what you would hope to see in your metrics make sure you tie that back to your project goals I actually have a really good example of showcasing metrics on a portfolio that hasn't gone out to real customers so I highly recommend you watch this video and I talk about it a bit more in depth and then finally next steps so this is like what would I do next it's kind of straightforward it's like depending on success metrics maybe I would tailor each of the Futures maybe I would like revisit the whole like recipes feature that I had just again anticipate if you had the time what would you work on next for this project finally Lessons Learned this is a really important piece I really really highly encourage you to think about this area as a place to talk about like all your surprises other challenges maybe like mistakes and how you came from it or what you would do next time if this were to happen this is something that you should always have in your case studies that's really the end of the case study at the bottom here I do have like another entry point to get to all of my other case studies so it's like kind of easy to access there I'm going to move on to the about section here so let me move over there so this is really like your bio area I have a picture of myself I used to be blonde it was a fun little era of mine sometimes I think about going back but I'm like man the the damage that was done to my hair again design philosophy hitting it on hitting you on the head with My Philosophy uh and then also passions Hobbies love interest food travel photography I don't need to get into it basically have fun with this area like don't think about it too hard just be yourself be yourself okay lastly we have the contact page here pretty self-explanatory put in your full name your email address or a message and then it linked back to my inbox once you submit the message then you get a confirmation of a thank you and that's about it that's about it as if it is so easy I won't lie to you making a portfolio is so hard so hard like literally the number of times I was like I don't want to do this anymore like maybe I just like won't become a unx designer because I don't want to do my portfolio countless countless if you hate working on your portfolio or you're doing it right now and like you need a little bit of like an oomph I highly recommend you open a new tab and watch this video next it just this one just really helps you take like a mental reset it just kind of gives you like A New Perspective so check that one now next the final thoughts on why this portfolio helped me land my first ux design job number one The Branding interestingly enough I started seeing a pattern where a lot of the companies that were reaching out to me to have interviews had very similar brand bring to my portfolio especially agencies and that's where I first got my ux design job was at an agency and funny enough the company I went with had almost the same exact font and the same styling so already having that was like a good hook to pull in any companies where they're like oh I think she do well here because she already kind of has the same visual aesthetic that we do secondly design philosophy back to that tagline after my first ux design job I actually went on to two more companies with the same exact portfolio and at both of these companies their biggest value was empathy and so again it just really aligned with what I already had it's really important to think of your through line here because if you have a portfolio and design philosophy that's like I love accessibility I also love transparency and Ai and also empathy and also psychological safety and also inclusivity and also like it's kind of hard to tell like what's your thing though like what makes you stick out from other designers and what is like something that you value as a designer thanks so much for seeing my portfolio I'm so excited I was able to share this with you guys and if you want more portfolio tips make sure to watch this video next