 Hey, in this video, I'm going to be reviewing a number of UX design portfolios. I'm going to look at a different range of experience levels for UX designers, and I'm going to look at them from the perspective of a design firm looking to hire a UX designer. So as I'm talking about these portfolios, I'm going to be focusing entirely about how well the person was able to communicate the UX work that they did as opposed to the quality of the work itself. So maybe the work was great, but the person wasn't able to communicate it and that's going to be my focus because all I know is what I can see on the page. And I'm going to critique how well this person was able to communicate what they did before we get into it. If you have any questions or comments along the way, make sure to drop them in the comments section. And if you want us to review your own portfolio, make sure to put the link to that in the comments and maybe we'll feature it in a future video. If you'd like to get some very actionable tips and tricks about UI and UX design, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter and the link to that is in the description below. So with that, let's dive into the first portfolio. So the first portfolio I'm going to be looking at is for MD if Tucker, probably pronouncing that wrong. Sorry, man. And this is a portfolio for someone based in Bangladesh, right? So I won't be able to take a look at everything that's on here, but for example, let's pick this one. It's called impact a crypto platform. So if I'm someone looking to hire a UX designer, I want to be able to see their thinking process. The last thing I want to see is just some pretty mockups of something because that won't tell me whether this person was able to solve a problem or not, or whether they just designed a bunch of nice looking screens or even copied them from somewhere. Right? So let's dive in and see what MD has here. Okay. So it starts off with challenges, which is good because when you're looking for a UX designer, you want to know that they can solve a product challenge, right? And so this has this at the top. Now it starts out a little bit talking about the industry in general, and it doesn't really give a very specific challenge, even though it has the red here, but that's a little bit too broad. So it says that crypto has a lot of people involved, you know, different ages and so on, but that's not a very specific challenge, I would say, and I would want to find out more. The good thing is that MD spells out the process that he used or the general steps. So he goes through research, sketches, wireframes and finding UX issues, right? And then he goes on to detail each one. So this is really good because we want to see the thinking process behind the portfolio. So I believe this project also included some branding and logo work. We're not going to focus on that in this video. We're just going to focus on the UX aspects, right? So if I scroll down here, so this includes a flow chart to the application, which I guess maybe sort of useful, but I wouldn't be really interested in it because I don't know if this flow chart makes sense or not as someone who is not familiar with the project, just looking to find out whether this person can be a good fit for UX designer. And so next, MD goes into the sketches and wireframes and an inspiration board. So this is he's just taking us through his process, then shows up the sign up screens, which if you're going to feature screens in your designs, I would skip the sign up screens, honestly, just because they're not that challenging. It's fairly well known how to design a good sign up flow. And I would instead focus on the core challenges, right? So you have to keep in mind that anyone browsing the portfolio will be browsing other portfolios if we're talking about someone looking to hire, right? And so I want to be able to browse really quickly. I want to be able to get the gist just from reading the headlines. And this portfolio is fairly long. And even though it shows that the person has put a lot of effort into it, which is good, it takes a little bit of time to find like the information that I'm looking for, which is can this person take a problem and analyze it and start to come up with solutions in a structured and reliable way. So then it goes on to show the dashboard screens and buying and selling screens. So this is all nice and well designed. It looks pretty, but I don't know if it functions as it should, right? So what MD didn't do in this case is present the different solutions that were explored and why, for example, a particular this particular solution was picked, right? Now, let's see if he talks about if these designs were tested in any way or validated. So it goes on through more flows, but and it goes through the mobile prototype as well with some animations, which is good. But one main critique is that this is just too long. You need to curate your portfolio to only give the information that the person looking at cares about. And just keep in mind that the person looking at this will not take like half an hour to dig into everything, right? Because you're not going to be the only designer out there being assessed for a particular role, which is the job of a portfolio in the end, right? And so this is just too long. Even if you worked really hard on a project, you cannot and should not put every screen that you worked on there. You need to curate, you need to tell a quick story to hit all the major points without having it be too long, right? And so even though this portfolio, specifically this case study here, looks very nice. The problem is that it's too long and is a little light on the details about how the problem solving happened and instead focuses a lot more on the visuals, which might look good, but I don't know if they performed well and I don't know what was the rationale for picking them. So it's not about me using this product. It's more about knowing the thinking process behind this product and knowing what difficult challenges did you face and how did you solve them? So my three tips for MD would be to shorten the portfolio down and curate more what you want to tell by showing this case study. And second would be to have a clearer definition of the challenge. It's good that the challenge section was the first section, but it lacked a little bit of detail. It didn't need to be longer. It just needed to be more specific. And the third tip would be to show whether or not these designs performed well and what you learn from the feedback that you gathered. And again, this is not a critique of the quality of the work. Maybe this app went on to be really, really good and to do great in the market. But I'm just assessing the communication skills of how the project is presented here. All right, moving on to the next portfolio, this one is by Sun Young Cho. So right off the bat, this is a very simple portfolio. It doesn't have any fancy layouts or anything like that, which is actually fine and even preferable in some cases because it shows that this person is not trying to be a little too showy or have the presentation cover up for any lack of problem solving skills, for example. But as a minor critique of how this is presented, I'd say the text is a little bit too long and if you're going to be applying for a UX design job, even if you're not going to be a visual designer or a graphic designer or anything like that, it's still good to have a good looking portfolio, even if it's kept very simple. So in this case, I would just make the whole page a little bit narrower so that on a big screen, it's easier to read the text because this is too long. Right. So let's get into what Sun has on here, right? So she has a few projects and this is, I think, the page for a specific project. So a nice thing that she does is that she says when this project took place. In this case, it was between 2017 and 2018. So you know that this person didn't work on something like 10 years ago. It is now applying for something new, right? And it shows some basic information about the project, which is good. And it spells out specifically what her role was in the project, which is very important because chances are for any project or any big project, you're going to be working with the team and it's important to separate what you did specifically from what other people you were working with did, right? And then she goes on to say what she accomplished, which is good, and spells out a fairly detailed design process. Well, this is really good to show, but we also don't know like if this been copy and pasted, right? So it's good to show like here's the process that I use, but then you need to back it up by talking about these steps, right? And then let's see if she does that here. So for research and sketches, she shows kind of initial sketches and then how those were turned into screens. That's always very nice to see. She also talks about here's the overall problem. Here's the general solution and she has a before and after screens, which is always very nice if you're working on an existing product and you can demonstrate very visually. So even if I'm going through this portfolio really quickly and I can see the before and after, I can immediately like with one second without having to read anything. So you're like, oh, OK, this is obviously an improvement, right? Now this I only wish that this image included a few annotations to say why something was changed so that not only maybe it looks better, but it also works better for a particular reason. And this doesn't do that, but it's still a very good step to include before and after. It also breaks down the solution into multiple steps and talks about specific challenges within the overall challenge, which is also very good and important. And then goes on to show more screens from the solution. I think this portfolio also suffers from being a little bit too long. But what I like here around the end is the design guidelines, right? So this shows me that the decisions made around the layout and the spacing were very conscious decision. This wasn't just a person quickly drawing shapes and like eyeballing it to see what looks better. Instead, they probably gave some thought or a lot of thought to the spacing here. And it also tells me that this person will know how to transition to work with a developer because they have all the information here that a developer would ask for in order to implement the design. So this is a very nice touch. Now, something else I wanted to highlight about Sun's portfolio here is alongside the project staff. She has a top she has something called one minute ideas. And these are just hobby and like tinkering ideas. They're just concepts, I believe that didn't necessarily come out or maybe they were explored, but the idea here is that this is just a playground. And this is really nice because it shows you what this person is interested in. It adds a little more personality because projects are usually a lot more about the client and the problem. And if you're going to be hiring someone to work at your company, you also want to know, is this a good fit for someone? Do they have interests that could work well with the team? And you just get a better feel for who that person is. So this is a very nice touch. If you can clearly separate out, hey, here are my hobby projects and here are my real projects. That's always nice to see. She even has videos that walk you through these concepts and explain them in more detail, which is very nice. So overall, for Sun, my main tips would be to make the portfolio look a little better to shorten down the case studies and highlight a little bit more because this was a redesign highlight why these changes were made visually. She showed the before and after, but didn't show exactly why, like in the image itself, these changes were made. But overall, this is very nice. And I would probably reach out to Sun and send her a message to see maybe if we want to have a call and then decide from that point if she's a good fit to hire. Because remember, that's all you need to do, right? Like your portfolio should be a teaser and it's not going to land you a job straight away. All it's going to do is move you to the next step so that the person looking at your portfolio reaches out to talk to you to want to learn more about you and see if you're a good fit. The final decision will not be made just based on a portfolio without ever talking to you and like immediately sending you like a job offer. Right? So all it needs to do is peak the interest of the person looking at it and say, like, I'd like to know more about this person and how they work. And this portfolio does that. All right. So next up, we're looking at the portfolio of Jimmy and Jimmy from Vancouver, Canada. And it says here on his portfolio that he has three years of experience in pushing pixels. Now, without going into anything else, I would really advise Jimmy to take that off because that's not a good thing to say about yourself. Typically, a pixel pusher is someone who only does the design and doesn't think about the problem solving as someone who just makes things pretty, right? So that's just a small comment before we get into the portfolio. So let's look at what Jimmy has here. It's something called culture like. So if we click on that, I like the layout of how everything is placed here. It's very clean and minimal. It's not too busy and lengthwise, I would say this is OK. It can probably be shorter, but it's not too long like the other ones that we looked at. And it's nice that at the top, he has kind of the basic information about the project and he has key contributions. Now, because he worked within a team, it's not clear whether these contributions are his or the teams in general that work on the project. But I would assume that they're his. It would be nice if he made that a little more explicit, though. So Jimmy also spells out the process that he used for the design, which is really good. Let's see if he talks about the different stages. And he has a little bit of introduction about the company that he worked with and the challenge, right? So one thing I would comment here, the challenge is describing the app in general. But I think later he says this, he spells out the specific challenge that he worked on. So it's a little bit misleading in the beginning. That wasn't the challenge that he's working on. He's working on a part of that, right? And then here it says that the product was already in testing. And so he and his team were going to work on a part of that project. And it's just better if designers are more clear and more upfront about what they did without shying away from it. Because if someone looking at portfolio feels like you're trying to make it sound like you did more than you actually did or try to make it fancier than what it is, then that might be an immediate signal to just stop looking at this profile and look at something else, right? But in this case, it's OK because he does make it clear that, hey, this product was already designed and that they were going to work on this specific piece, but it could be clearer. And then he goes on to detail the goals that they were shooting after with the design and what the learning were from user research. So this part is really nice because it shows that after they did the research phase, if we look here back at the process, so it says background research, then he goes on to say, like, what did they learn from the research? And he puts it in terms of insights and he puts the insights in the headings, right? So this is really nice because, like I said, a recruiter or a company looking to hire is going to want to look at a lot of options and want to be able to get most of the information very quickly. So without reading the details, I can see that here's insight one, insight two, and it says what the insight is right in the title. And it also says what the insight is and then how this was used in the app, right, like in the results section. So this is very nice. And then it has a section from findings to features. This is also really good because it shows how each stage transitions into the next and then how paper concepts were turned into prototypes. This is also very nice and you can see that it looks good. And this portfolio has what the previous two, I believe, were missing, which is talking about testing the design. So this says, does it actually work? And then it talks about the user testing and maybe some challenges that arise from the user testing, right? And then it goes on to say like now that we know that it works, we did some iteration on it and a few more details. At this point, I would probably just lose interest because I've already seen that this person knows how to lay out their thought process and has taken me through everything that they did. So I'd be interested in reaching out to this person to start a conversation because the portfolio looks good. They walked me exactly through what they did, the process, the challenges behind it, the insights that they found. They don't just it's not that they just went and did a bunch of research and then I don't know how useful that research was. It shows exactly how that research was used. So overall, this is a very good portfolio. Any suggestions I would make here would be minor. Again, it's always with the length thing. I think it's hard for people when they work hard on something to keep it short and try to figure out what are the most essential parts that they need to keep and then cut everything out. So my only advice to Jimmy would be to make the portfolio a little shorter. But otherwise, this is really good. And there's a trend here that you see from these three portfolios that we picked at random that they all tend to be a little too long. You got to keep in mind that anyone looking to hire is going to be looking at multiple options. They really want to see things quickly if you can put information into images and like headings so that the person can first decide based on the general structure, whether they want to read more like and read the text. Right. But don't make me read the text before deciding whether or not I should look at your portfolio in more detail. Right. So this is something really important to keep in mind. And it seems to be a trap that most designers, both juniors and experts fall into. So this would definitely be a key takeaway from this video. And for the final portfolio, we're going to be looking at. We're going to look at the portfolio of Anne Minkenberg. Anne is located in Germany and it's clear from her profile page here on Behance that she doesn't have a lot of projects. So I would assume that this is a junior designer. And she also said that in the form when she submitted her portfolio to us for a review. And so it's good to know that going in so that I keep that in mind. It's good even for someone to spell that out on their portfolio. Right. If you're a junior, don't try to pretend that you're a senior because someone hiring you will find that out pretty quickly. And there are a lot of companies who are actually want to hire juniors, right? Because they're building out a design team and they can't hire a full team of senior designers for whatever reason or they like to train designers in house. So don't shy away. If you're a junior, you can just say that. And then the person reading your portfolio will not have very high expectations because they know that you haven't had the time to build the experience necessary to be a mid-level or senior. So let's dive into this case study from Anne and this one is called Nazal. So it has an overview at the top. It says that the client is a fictitious university project, which is really good that she says that at the top. It's fine to showcase fake projects if you don't have anything real to show. Of course, if you can be creative and find a way to do a real project, even for free, that would be really helpful. You can even say if you did it for free and be completely honest about it, rather than say that this was or kind of try to convey that this was a piece of paid work, but it's always good to see something that was real because then you can talk about it a lot more concretely and discuss it in more details and the thought process behind it. Whereas with a fictitious project like this, you're going to be probably a little lower on details. So here it says that this was a fictitious project for a university developed in eight weeks in a team. And Anne does say what her specific role was, which is good. So she did conceptual design, the style guide and the UI design, right? And then talks about the design process. Now, this could be better because it shows here identifying the problem. And right under it, it says ideation. So those should be two different steps. And it has ideation before research, which is not very typical. She doesn't explain why that process is the way it is. But it's still good that she showed which process she followed. Right. Then she talks about the ideation and the challenge all very briefly. I think this is OK, but if you're going to talk about something, you should have a purpose and why you needed to include that. Like, basically, why did you feel that this was so important for me or like anyone who's looking to hire you would want to know why is this important for us to know? Right. And then she goes on to talk about research. So the one comment I would have here is to use real device frames rather than try to make your design more attractive than it would be in the real world because you're using this device with very impossibly thin edges. And this device doesn't exist. So you're trying to cheat a little bit, right? And it's also just better if you use real device mock ups, if you're going to use them at all. So this is something that you can do very easily in any design tool that you're using. So if you're using it like Figma, you can say you're using an iPhone 10. And then you can take a screenshot of the prototype, which puts it in an iPhone 10 frame for you automatically, right? And that's just better than pretending you have this, you know, kind of a magical device that doesn't exist. So this project focuses on AR and what's missing from this is talking about how the AR design was done because AR design is still fairly new. And this doesn't really talk about how and tackled that challenge, right? Talking about the challenges of, you know, the design guidelines for AR not established, the tools for designing for it for AR is not or not established. And it would have been really interesting to see her talk about how she was able to get around these challenges and create something. So she obviously created something which helps people interact in an AR environment in nature. And that's all well and good. But it would have been very good to see, especially since she's a junior, more text about the thought process, right? So there's a balance to be struck between how long your portfolio is and how much detail you have. So the text needs to be short, but also communicate important points rather than, for example, what we have here is explaining the product itself, right? I'm not necessarily interested in the product like we saw from the first portfolio that was trying to sell us on the product. I'm more interested in how you tackle the challenges, how you translated things from a challenge to a solution concept and then to a design. And so if we keep scrolling down here, we'll see that she has a learning section at the end. But this learning section falls short of what I would expect to see in a section like this. She talks about what she could do in the future and something that she came across when researching called the fourth wall. But these are not interesting to me, right? Again, I would want to see the learnings in the headlines themselves. And this doesn't show me that. And also these learnings were not taken from her testing the designs. Because remember, when it comes to UX design, the research is part of it. The design of the screens is part of it. And also testing the designs is part of it. So I want to see the whole process and this doesn't have that. But as a junior, I can see that and put a lot of work into this page, into this case study. And if I were hiring a junior, I would probably message her to see if we could get on a call and I can find out a little bit more, see maybe if she can present her process a little better and ask her questions. But as far as junior portfolios go, this is good. It has some flaws in it that we pointed out. It's a little low on detail. There's a lot of scrolling and a lot of white space. And I would have preferred something more compact that gave me all the information that I needed to know without so much scrolling and to include a learning section that has the learnings from users to show that user testing was done. So this rounds off the portfolios that we wanted to take a look at in this video. So thank you so much to everyone that sent us their portfolio and we're open. To having us critique the portfolio. Again, this was a critique of how the projects were communicated rather than the visual design or the UX work that was done on the projects. It was a critique of how well the processes and the thinking behind them were communicated and we'd love to get more portfolios to maybe feature in future videos. So if you want us to consider your portfolio, make sure to post it in the comments to round off this video. I'm going to talk about a few general good guidelines for you to keep in mind when you're working on your portfolio. And I gathered these from the team at Agent Smart from very senior designers. And that's what they would like to see in a portfolio. So the first thing you need to think of when you're working on a portfolio is that you need to know how to structure information both visually and in text very well. It's all about the structure. I want to be able to see very quickly what you worked on and then decide if I want to find out more information. But just by looking at the overall structure, I need to be able to make a decision about whether or not this is worth pursuing further. Number two is whether or not you can communicate the challenges and the solution clearly. And this is something that we saw in the portfolios that we just looked at. Some people did it better than others, but your focus should really be on hitting these points when creating a portfolio, as opposed to like spending too much time on how good it looks visually. And one tip that might not occur to most designers is to have a PDF portfolio. The reason for that is that if you create something like a slide deck in like keynote or PowerPoint or just an A4 sized portfolio with a few pages, it's a much more curated experience because then the person looking at your portfolio doesn't have to navigate around a website and you've selected the best of your work. So you selected, you know, two or three pieces of work that you're really proud of that showcase the best of your work and people can go through these in order without having to worry about any navigation. It's also very useful for recruiters or companies to have just like a bunch of PDFs when they're narrowing things down and it's easier for sending around in the company, things like that. This is something that most people don't think about, but it's actually a very helpful thing for the company that's doing the hiring. And lastly, always make it very clear which contacts you were working with. So we saw in the portfolios that we looked at that people specified when they were working in a team, which is really good, but also make it really clear not just what the team worked on, but what you worked on specifically without boasting too much about how great of a designer you are. So if you keep these points in mind and try to learn from the portfolios that we looked at, you'll be able to create a good portfolio that's short, concise, demonstrates the points that someone looking to hire you wants to know. And remember the job of a portfolio is to get you to the next step in working with someone, whether it's freelance or hiring, and you just need to get to the point where they would message you or give you a call. And of course, it should be very easy to find out the contact information for someone to do that, right? So you don't need to talk about every little thing that you did. It should be a curated experience that can be done very quickly. I can take a look at your best work very quickly. And ideally, if I can have that as a PDF, it's very nice. You can email it around. I don't have to click into an external link and that will just make it more likely for someone looking to work with you to reach out and talk to you. So that's it for this video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, we'd love it if you would like and subscribe and hit the bell icon. We put out videos like this every week, and so you'll be the first to know. If you want more actionable tips and tricks that will help you grow your career as a UX designer, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. And the link to that is in the description below. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you again soon.