Create your UX / UI portfolio #01
By: Deborah M.
Tags: Technology, UX, UX Design, UI, Design

Create your UX / UI portfolio #01

It’s time for you to leap in your career

Image by the author

Once again I decided to share the content of one of the courses I teach. In this journey, you will practice, and exhibit the skills you have learned and developed during your professional experiences. You will create your professional portfolio, culminating in a better digital presence and the world of UX / UI. Let’s talk about the steps and skills used by professionals: from conceptualizing a project idea, doing case studies, selecting the best work, researching the best forms of digital presence, and then compiling the information for an audience. Having a professional portfolio will help you as a UX / UI professional, showing your work product, as well as practicing and improving your skillset.

INTRODUCTION

We will work to make you clear what kind of professional you are and how you want the world to see you.

We will start by understanding what CONTEXT we are working on so that you understand well what your needs are and how it relates to the reality of a UX / UI professional.

You will realize when we are discussing these points that you will need to establish very well what is the PROFILE of UX / UI PROFESSIONAL you want to be and want to present to the market.

Let’s define how much you will share in a PORTFOLIO AND A CURRICULUM see how to get the best out of both.

Then we will recognize what your OBJECTIVES AND GOALS are, that is, define what you need to present a good portfolio suited to your profile and point out what we must do to get you there.

In the second part of our course, we will define how to present the best cases of your work in your portfolio. We are going to do the CURATION OF WORKS and present them from the STORYTELLING ELEMENTS.

After your best works are defined, you will effectively create the portfolio, defining the best VISUAL ELEMENTS, INTERACTION ELEMENTS, and opting for an HTML from scratch or a ready platform. Keep in mind that this course does not focus on code development (HTML / CSS …), but on the criteria for deciding what will represent you as a professional, the means of dissemination, and the creation of narrative and visual content.

With your online portfolio defined, we will focus on creating a PDF version, understanding how to HIGHLIGHT A PARTICULAR PROJECT, and CREATING A LETTER OF PRESENTATION for the job market.

To further align the portfolio with the current moment, we will analyze and use the best that MARKET TRENDS can offer, understand how SOCIAL NETWORKS help in the digital presence, and learn tools to monitor your target audience.

CONTEXT

Image by Etty Fidele — unsplash

To better understand the goals of our course, we will meet Maia.

Maia is a young professional who has worked in an Information Technology company since she graduated from college. She started as an intern but as soon was hired as a junior professional in the digital platforms creation and development team.

As an intern, Maia did a little bit of everything, but over time she discovered that her passion was the universe of UX (User Experience), and the best interfaces for interaction.

Now, with a little more experience, Maia wants to establish herself in the market as a UX / UI professional, be it growing in the company she is in or moving towards a new opportunity.

Maia is a typical representative of her generation, extremely connected, and a technology enthusiast. She consumes a lot of cultural material, but always by digital media. She loves binge-watching and is a dedicated gamer. She always reads about design and culture, usually on blogs, social media, and portals.

For the new year, Maia made the following resolution: she wants to leverage his career as a UX / UI professional.

According to the networking that she has (colleagues and work superiors), and following the market trend that she follows, Maia knows that to stand out she needs a lot more than competence and a good portfolio of projects. She needs to know how to build her brand and sell her work.

So, to achieve this goal, Maia will have to prioritize the following points:

Understand well what the market expects from a UX / UI professional. Researching the vacancies published on specialized websites and understanding what those responsible for recruitment expect is a way to go.

Curate the most relevant projects that represent her professional personality well. This is where the choice of the best projects for the portfolio will come into play.

Have an impactful and coherent digital presence. It is not enough to be behind the scenes. You need to show what you came for and also be on social networks, in groups and showing that you think about technology. A YouTube channel or podcast can be interesting alternatives. Or even a blog, for those who like to write.

Be on, or enter the radar of recruiters and digital influencers. On social media, it’s cool to connect with our friends, but following and connecting with people who inspire can open many doors.

As a creator of digital content and an avid consumer of computational culture, Maia also sees it as an option to be recognized as an influencer in her field, as someone who researches and knows her area well. But for that, she must build her brand.

Meanwhile, Maia works, and one of the things she lacks is time. She may not be able to set up her website from scratch. And that’s fine. She can use a social platform like Medium or Behance and make the same impact. She may not need to have eight different profiles on different social networks, but she can focus on one or two (like Twitter, Instagram, and/or Linkedin) and be relevant.

There are several ways for a professional to show their relevance in digital media. To do this, Maia, like you, needs to focus and decide what her path will be.

Our goal: Find the best portfolio building strategy for the type of UX / UI professional you are.

UX / UI PROFESSIONAL PROFILE

Before proceeding with the search for the best strategy for building the portfolio, Maia needs to do a personal exercise and find out what kind of professional she is, what paths she wants to go and how the market recognizes her.

She starts looking for job ads and job descriptions for UI designers, and finds mostly interpretations of the profession that are similar to graphic design, sometimes extending to brand design and even front-end development.

When she searches for “specialized” definitions of User Interface Design, she mostly finds descriptions that are partly identical to User Experience Design — even though referring to the same structural techniques.

For example, she is faced with the following job opportunity:

UX / UI Designer — Company X

What will be your activities? Immersion and discoveries: - Apply qualitative and dynamic research;

- Create user journey;

- Analyze heat maps and the like. Creation and prototyping: - Participation in the design of new features and solutions;

- Propose and participate in hypothesis and concept experiments;

- Draw flows and wireframes;

- Design interfaces and interactions for digital products;

- Prototype ideas easily. Validation and Learning: - Apply usability tests;

- Define validation strategies, such as A / B tests, concept tests or similar. Requirements - Have studied Design (or related courses);

- Experience with product designs and digital platforms;

- Domain of interface design tools, such as Sketch, XD or Figma;

- Domain of prototyping tools, such as invision, Protopie or similar;

- Domain of Adobe tools;

- Be engaged with what you do, our projects and the market in general;

- Communicate ideas clearly, orally and in writing.

This is because, although the two activities are different and are ideally performed by different professionals, they go together, and Maia herself exercises and researches the two areas. This may seem a little strange since as a UX professional (user experience) she conducts research with users and helps them discover exactly what features a product should have and how the user’s entire journey should be mapped. And as a professional UI (user interface) she works the interaction between the user and the device of this product and ends up thinking about screens, wireframes, responsive interfaces and iconography.

But as Maia is still in the beginning of her career she prefers to keep working in the two fields, which, although different, are complementary. She believes that right now, the more you expand in terms of knowledge, the better. She can develop her field research skills as well as using prototyping tools. And maybe, when she is a senior professional, she will decide to focus on just one area and be a great reference in UX or UI.

You, like Maia, can decide to embrace the two universes, or define yourself as a UX professional or UI professional. It is just important to remember that often, the market does not do this hyperspecialization division, so showing that you are a versatile professional can facilitate your placement in the market.

For example, as a UX professional, Maia has knowledge in:

- User research

- Interviews

- Persona definition

- Ideation and problem solving

And as a UI professional she will present herself as quite eloquent in:

- User Journey

- Wireframes

- Prototyping

- Interface software such as Adobe XD, Sketch and Invision

Maia knows that a career in UX requires empathy, a penchant for problem solving and a creative and analytical approach. UX professionals also need world-class communication skills and a little business knowledge.

A UI career also requires an understanding of the principles of user experience, but is much more focused on the visual and interactive aspects of design. Maia, just like you should have a close eye on visual aesthetics and like the idea of ​​making technology visually appealing, easy to use and accessible.

With these clear ideas in mind, it becomes easier to decide what type of ad to respond to, and how to present yourself to companies. Of course, if you, like Maia, like the idea of ​​a career that combines the two, there is nothing to stop you from becoming a more complete and versatile professional!

Next, we will work on the planning and designing a portfolio.