If you want to get 100 designers to agree on something, mention the pain of portfolios. Whoever comes up with a solution for reducing the friction of documenting and updating portfolios will make a killing.
Last year I shared a case study format. It's a simple template, broken down into 5 sections with multiple questions, for writing a case study. In it, I mention Maxim's tip to ‘show your mistakes’ and routes explored but not taken. It's a useful guideline to use when writing your case study.
I'm going to share a few more portfolio case study writing templates below. The hope is to, eventually, have a clear and simple portfolio case-study writing walk-through, to save designers time and pain. One of those designers being my future self.
Ridd uses the analogy of a recipe video (which, if you're like me, is the only way you can cook) - it starts with the final product, the delicious plate, then the rest of the video is dedicated to teaching you how to make the dish.
He breaks down the format into the following (copied directly from Ridd's thread):
Project & team info
Who was the project for?
What was your role on the team?
What were you directly responsible for?
How did you collaborate with other team members?
What business context is needed to understand the project?
The problem
How did you figure out what to work on?
Was there a specific problem that you set out to solve or goal you hoped to achieve?
How did you narrow down the scope of work?
What "no-go zones" were established?
How did you make sure you were solving the right problem?
Assumptions
What were your initial assumptions going into the project?
How did they change and what altered them?
What details can you share about the type of user you were designing for?
How did the target user persona impact your design decisions?
Did you work on anything BEFORE diving into Figma?
How do you think about progressing through different levels of fidelity?
What decisions were made at each level?
How did you gain alignment as a team?
How did you set engineers up for success?
Feedback
What was your strategy for getting feedback? How did you get it and at what points in the process? What were you hoping to learn? What did you actually learn? How did that measure up to your initial assumptions? How did feedback impact your strategy moving forward?
Learning
What were some of the tradeoffs you decided to make and why? What did you try that didn’t work? Do you have any ideas as to why they failed? How did you adjust? Is there anything that you would've done differently? What did you learn for your next project?
Measuring
How did you (or do you plan to) measure the impact of the project? What does "success" look like for this project? Were there any ways in which the project missed the mark? What business needles did the project move? What are some potential next steps?
I signed up for Spotify Screenshare day in July. It was 2 hours or so of back to back calls with Spotify designers at all levels. My last call was with the lovely Tamara Hilmes. At one point we talked about what she looked for in designers when hiring, "a clear understanding of the product development life cycle. I want to see process in a portfolio, not just pretty UI". I found myself asking her, "how do you evaluate someone's process when you're going through portfolios? You must go through hundreds. How does a portfolio balance demonstrating process without becoming too long?"
Her answer ended up being one of the clearest and most concise portfolio formats I've come across so far.
Role and team
• Mention the other people you collaborated with, what was your role versus other team members? A red flag is seeing a lot of, "I did this, I did that, and this". You didn't do the work alone.
Clear problem statement
• Outline the problem
• Mention the goals of customers and goals of business/entity you're working with/for
Process
• synthesis is key: 'here's what I‘m about to get into’ followed by concisely covering the points you listed
Results & Outcomes
• Signals from research and testing - the initial hints of results to come
• Launch results and outcomes
• If metrics are private mention what sense you had from analytics
There's a clear theme beginning to emerge from the questions and formats recommended by various designers - tell a story:
→ start with a problem, flesh out the ways you tried to solve it
→ mention the others involved
→ talk about what you learnt along the way
→ wrap it up with the result/outcome/solution
I recommend watching the case study walk-throughs in this video for a brilliant example of storytelling.
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