Anastasiia
How to build portfolio for ux/ui designer role?
How to build portfolio for ux/ui designer role if there were no real life projects. Maybe some tips on where to start, how many projects to include, and the best way to present them
7 answers
Matt Jafari
Matt’s Answer
I'm super excited for you to begin your journey into UX design! A fantastic starting point would be enrolling in an online course, like the Google UX Design Course which will definitely expand your expertise in this field. 🎓
Simultaneously, remember to explore Figma with the help of YouTube tutorials. This will give you an edge as a designer. You can also visit Behance to get inspired and see how other designers present their UX case studies - it's always great to learn from others! 😊
And remember, the perfect portfolio is just a myth! The best approach is to create a Minimum Viable Portfolio. 💼 Here are a few tips to get that portfolio started:
1. Introduce yourself 🙋
2. Outline problems 🎯
3. Showcase your workflow 📚
4. Explain your thinking 💡
5. Share measured outcomes 📊
These steps will help you craft a fantastic portfolio! Believe in yourself and know that you've got this. Your passion and determination will lead you to great opportunities and accomplishments in UX design. Good luck, Anastasiia, and enjoy this amazing journey! ✨🍀
Hi Matt. Thank you so much for the response. I will use this advice to start my journey! Thank you, Matt!
Anastasiia
Rana Fathi
Rana’s Answer
Great question, Anastasia!
When I first started out in UI/UX, I also didn't have any real-life projects. I would get caught up in courses and books, and some of them say to have an elaborate portfolio that costs a bunch just to host. Thankfully, that is not the case. Before I tell you a step-by-step to building a decent beginner's portfolio, let's first define some important terms.
A) Portfolio: In reality, a portfolio is just a showcase of work, this means it can be digital or print, hosted on a website or in a PDF document, the sky really is the limit. In UI/UX design, this mostly means an online portfolio, a great option (that I personally use) is Behance. It's free, and already an established platform for designers and creatives.
B) Case Studies: This is what you feature in your portfolio, aka your work. Now, there are a lot of ways you can go about building a case study, but first, what is it? A case study, as the name suggests, is a study (research, improvement, and output) of a case (real, imaginary, personal, non-personal) of your choice. This then means that you can create case studies of just improving existing products. Got a website you use but absolutely hate? Redesign it, got a feature you wish your favorite app had? Include it. After all, UI/UX design is all about experiences, if you can create something to better someone's experience and lessen their pain points- congrats!
So here's just one way to go about building your portfolio:
1. Create an account on Behance, fill in your information, and you can always brand it later.
2. Create your first case study. The topic can be a course project or as we said before rework of something else. One thing you can use is the Figma Community and search for "Case Study Template" and fill it up with your process. Note: Everyone's process is different, don't be too worried if the template includes an "affinity mapping", for example, section that you didn't do. I promise you, as long as you communicate the problem and solution, you're golden.
3. Publish your first project! Behance is super easy to use, once you export your Figma frames as images you can drag and drop them. Give it a good relevant name, add your project scope (ie Course, Grad Project, Personal, etc.), and publish!
Hope this helps :)
Rana, thank you so much. I will use all your tips, this is very helpful. Appreciate it and once again thank you!!!
Anastasiia
Kristen Etzel
Kristen’s Answer
Dante Guintu
Dante’s Answer
One candidate that I interviewed volunteered time with a local non-profit that needed design assistance. Often these groups like small businesses do not have the resources, so finding a good fit will take some effort. Most of all they'll appreciate your time, and you get to build your portfolio project. (Do the whole user centered design process and capture all the artifacts!)
A former teammate participated in a number of hackathons, even start-up incubators where the team welcomed a designer's perspective. Although a hackathon generally lasts for a weekend, often the team worked weeks beyond on their spare time to firm up a concept. The point here is to be part of a team that solves a business or user need even if it is an experiment. Crafting a portfolio piece (unless it's really specific and constrained) can be difficult.
Hopefully this along with many of the good suggestion in the thread will spur some ideas for you.
Best of luck.
Hi Dante, thank you very much for suggestions, they are very helpful!
Anastasiia
mariam Elsherief
mariam’s Answer
you can do this just by asking AI to give you documentation for a UI UX project ( to act as if he were a client ), also there are some websites( for example: UI Daily Challenge) that send you a daily challenge to do via email.
good luck!
Brandon Dang
Brandon’s Answer
For some inspiration on portfolio work, as stated by some of the others you can start looking at portfolios on website such as Behance for example of the works that are often put onto their portfolio. If you search up Google UX Certificate portfolio examples you might be able to find some good examples of what a portfolio looks like.
Jess Beeler
Jess’s Answer
Wonderful to hear that you are exploring UX/UI! You certainly got some excellent and really comprehensive advise above. One thing I would love to call out to you is making sure that you develop your user research skills and/or work closely with a researcher in your work.
Research with end-users is fundamental to creating engaging and compelling designs. Research often starts with exploratory or discovery research, where you are learning about a particular problem that people need solved in their lives, framing up compelling insights (this is key! look into insights development to learn more about how to create compelling insights), and ideating on how you might solve the problems that your insights uncover.
After your discovery work, you move into prototyping your design and researching it with potential end users. One key to remember here is that your prototypes or designs are "sacrificial," meaning you are using them to learn whether or not you have arrived at a meaningful insight and identified a problem people need solved in their lives. As you move through the research, testing your prototype or MVP (minimum viable product/prototype), you will gain more insights on what isn't working with your design, what ideas you might need to kill, and how your work will need to evolve. Remember that failure is learning and is not a bad thing, it's the only way we will be able to design compelling designs that solve problems.
The world of research is rich and diverse and I encourage you to do some research of your own on ethnography, human-centered design, design thinking to learn more. There is too much UX/UI work out in the world that skips much of the research process, resulting in products, websites, services, etc. that are not easy to use and don't solve problems people actually have!
Best of luck!
Jess