Preparing for a UX/UI Design portfolio review (my way)
By: Penny Pang
Tags: UI Design, Design Portfoliio, Experience Design, Job Interview, UX Design

Disclaimer: Every hiring managers have their own preferences on what they want to see and you should always be adaptable in the way you present your portfolio review.

I would highly recommend to always have your portfolio review presentation ready no matter what interview stage you’re at. ALWAYS.

Common mistakes

Having been the interviewer myself and mentoring multiple junior designers getting into the UX/UI Design industry, here are some common mistakes that I see when a portfolio review session is presented to me.

1. Am I in a Shark Tank show?

Don’t pitch your project. You’re not trying to sell the business idea here, you need to sell your skills and yourself. A lot of people worried that their portfolio review is too long. That is because you’re talking 90% about how amazing the app is rather than what you did and achieved.

2. Yo, where’s your design?

People have this “double diamond” process engraved so that their case study follow a standard UX process. That is fine, but where is your design and why does it take so long to get there. This is what I’ve learnt from doing my portfolio review, hiring managers want to see your visual work and that you can actually design and prototype. While the research aspect is also really important, the design part is what you’re likely to get hired for (for UX/UI designers).

3. Amazing design, but what’s the problem?

UX/UI Designers are problem solvers. Putting the problem at the core front of the presentation and showing how you solved that through your design will really show that you understand the user’s need. Identifying problem is easy, but framing a solvable problem is not.

4. HOW HOW HOW

You talked about the process but how did you do them? How did you conduct the user interview, how did you conduct user testing, how did you come up with the wireframe, how did you conduct the workshop? etc.

Structure

Here is a recommended structure that I use to present my portfolio review in a job interview. I try to keep it around 7-10 mins to leave room for some questions as well.

1. Project Overview

Include this: Project name, your role, who’s in the team, duration, tools, who’s the client?

A one sentence describe what does the ‘product’ do?

2. The Brief

What’s the problem?

Objectives you’re trying to achieve

3. The Process

I suggest making a flow chart diagram to outline the overview of the project

4. Discovery phase (if you have one)

(optional) include user personas, user journey and user interview. But most importantly, talk about how you did it! How did you conduct the interview? How did you derive the user personas

5. Findings

Display your findings but don’t talk about all of them, ain’t got no time for that. Just summarise your findings in 1–2 sentences

6. Solution

Include your problem statement (if you have one)

What are some features that you’ll be designing?

7. The design process

You can show some wireframes ,design and prototype

This is actually a really good chance to talk about how you collaborated with others, how did the stakeholders involved in your wireframes, how often were you getting feedback?

Did you do some user testing? If yes, how?

8. Wrap up

Did your design solve the problem?

What were the outcomes?

Did you achieve your objective that you set in the beginning?

What I did

I have 2 design case studies- one is a UX piece to showcase my research end-to-end project and the other is purely a UI piece to showcase my visual design and prototyping skills.

In my case, I wasn’t able to present the work that I actually put up on my website, because they were all short-term University projects. The actual client work was confidential. So, I had a separate presentation slide that contains a client work at a high-level. I made my slides on Figma so that I was able to switch between presentation and showing the working prototype in one platform.

Creating presentation slides

I also preferred to create a separate presentation slide instead of using a case study on my website. The case studies on my website are very text heavy, and scrolling as you’re presenting is actually a distraction. Remember, human cannot digest words and processing your speech at the same time. You might lost their interest.

When I create my Figma slides, I have very minimal sentences and use a lot of visual elements to aid my speech. This helps the interviewer’s attention to focus on me, rather than reading the slides themselves.

Presentation done on Figma

No slide deck is fine too

Sometimes I don’t even have a presentation deck and just put this flow chart on the screen and talk through it stage by stage. At the end, I just show my design prototype.

One pager slide also done on Figma

Want to get your portfolio review critique?

The only way to improve is to practise your portfolio review to others! I am more than happy to give you feedback or if you just have any questions. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or check out my portfolio.