How to sell your portfolio in a UX interview
A lot of UX designers think that having a stellar portfolio is a guaranteed way to landing a job. The portfolio is your gateway to the job interview and this is where even talented designers can fumble and have a disastrous session. Having the ability to sell your portfolio is equally as important as having the portfolio in the first place. Hiring managers will closely monitor the way you explain your work. This is done to find out if the work portrayed is really your own (or how much of it was directly attributed to you) and whether you’re able to clearly communicate your design thinking.
Here are five principles to keep in mind when presenting your portfolio during a job interview.
Have one project ready for the interview
Most employers will not choose a specific project to review. They’ll always begin with ‘Show me your best project’. At that particular moment, you need to have a project ready to showcase.
You might think that the interviewer would appreciate having the freedom to choose a project from your portfolio, but they don’t have the time. They need to interview 10 other candidates for the same position so they have a limited time slot. Be ready with your best project — the one that showcases all the skills that the company is looking for.
Keep it short
A lot of designers think having a long case-study with tons of data and information is going to impress the hiring manager. In some cases, it might. But, most companies (even large ones like Adobe) appreciate smaller, structured case-studies. It’s easy to unload every aspect of your project onto your portfolio, but in most cases this could work against you.
You will have 15–20 minutes on average to defend your portfolio project. You should be able to cover everything from your problem statement to your process to your findings to your prototype. This gives the hiring manager a 360 view of your entire UX skillset. A snapshot of each of your skills is much better than droning on about how difficult it was to acquire your target user for your usability test and why you chose a particular button color.
Defend your process, but be open to suggestions
There will be moments when your process will be questioned. It’s extremely hard to quantify a designer’s portfolio as each designer has their own process. You might have chosen to utilize a quantitative approach to data collection rather than more conventional ones like user interviews. These will be questioned.
You need to be able to use a rationale to defend your process and deliverables — ‘Why did you do it this way?’ and ‘Why you opted not to do it the other way?’. This gives a deep insight into your design thinking. Even if the interviewer disagrees with your reasoning, they’ll still be intrigued by the way you approached a problem.
UX design is not formulaic. There’s no right way or wrong way to approach a problem. When you’re part of a design team, there’s going to be conflict among designers on how to approach a problem. Defending your ideas is crucial in these moments.
It’s also extremely important to have an open mind about suggestions to improve your design. Designers can sometimes have an elitist mentality about their process. This needs to be avoided at all costs because UX design is and will always be a collaborative process and being adamant about change is a detriment to the project’s long-term success.
Validate your prototype
Your prototype is the final deliverable. When working on a portfolio project, you need to have data that shows that users reacted positively to your design. This can be done with usability testing, user interviews, A/B tests, first-click testing and multivariate tests among others.
However, if your portfolio does not have any user feedback to validate your prototypes, you should be prepared to defend them with your own reasoning. These can include how the prototype affects the user flow or the information architecture. You could essentially state that the work needed to complete a task is drastically reduced with the new UI.
If you’re not able to defend your prototype, then everything the lead to this point becomes questionable.
Communicate clearly
This is extremely important. As a UX designer, verbal communication is an essential skill that’ll determine how successful you’ll be at a UX job. Even if your project is not as good as your peers, you can still score a lot of points by having clear articulation.
A UX designer interacts with multiple stakeholders in projects. These include product owners, engineers, data-scientists, project managers, and end-users. As a UX designer, you often will have to moderate conversations between multiple departments with different stakeholders. Communication is key in these situations.
If you’re not clear about your process, the interviewer will not understand your potential and will also see this as a red flag because they will anticipate future problems because of issues with communication.
