Advice on your design portfolio

From a guy who has screened hundreds of candidates for companies like Intuit and Facebook

7 min readApr 25, 2019

I just got home from a speed-dating-style design mentorship event and I am equal parts exhausted and energized. Exhausted because I’m an introvert and talking to strangers for two hours straight is physically and emotionally depleting. Energized because talking with new graduates or early-career designers reminds me why I got into this field and why I get up each day to do what I do.

One thing stuck out to me at this event, and it validated what I’ve been seeing for years interviewing candidates hoping for admission to companies like Intuit and Facebook: portfolios often focus on the wrong things, and are too damn long.

Here is the advice I gave to young designers tonight and that I want to give to all designers looking for feedback on their portfolio.

A quick note before diving in: this advice is mostly about your online portfolio. You should be aware, however, of the differing objectives and contexts of an online portfolio and an in-person portfolio review. The goal of an online portfolio is to quickly catch the attention of a recruiter or hiring manager and give them just enough context to want to talk to you in person. The goal of an in-person portfolio review, on the other hand, is to dive deeply into one or two projects and provide much more detail about the problem, the solution, and how you got from one to the other. Therefore you should have two versions of each portfolio item.

Tell a story, not an outline

The purpose of a portfolio is to get a recruiter or a hiring manager just interested enough to want to talk to you in person. I did a random audit of design portfolios from new to experienced designers and found that the average word count for a portfolio page was over 1300.

And don’t get me wrong, length by itself is not an issue. Almost every portfolio I see has the same format, and it looks and reads like an outline, not a well-crafted story: a header followed by a paragraph and an image, repeated over and over. These sections often include:

Project Overview
Design Challenge
My Role
Design Process
Competitive Analysis
Heuristic Review
User Research
User Personas
User Stories
Affinity Diagramming
Usability Testing
Sketches
Wireframes
Flow Diagrams
Design Specs
Prototype
Outcome / Metrics
Retrospective / What I Learned

This list makes it easy to understand why the average portfolio piece length is 1300 words. But hiring managers and recruiters are sifting through tens or hundreds of resumes and portfolios per week. Think about the hours, days and weeks you spent meticulously documenting your process and solution only to find out (or likely not find out) that not a single person has read it in it’s entirety.

Finally, this outline format makes for somewhat uninteresting reading. Instead, tell a story, focusing on the most interesting and impactful parts of the project. Knowing that people reading this won’t make it too far, make sure you grab their attention and convey the major points at the beginning.

Instead, tell a story, focusing on the most interesting and impactful parts of the project

My preference of format is a brief description of the project that touches on the problem, the solution and the outcome (user or business), paired with a prototype. Because this is often not enough space to tell the full story, a “learn more” button or link to the full write-up is often necessary. But again, the hiring manager will likely not click that.

Recommendations:
1. Challenge yourself to edit down the length of your portfolio pieces. Can you get it down to 500 words? 200 words? 100 words?!
2. How would you explain your portfolio piece to someone not in the technology or design field? How would you explain it to a child? These thought exercises will likely lead you to more of a narrative than an outline format.
3. Try fitting everything noteworthy (problem, solution, outcome, prototype) “above the fold”, or at least before you think most people would drop off.

So if length is an issue, what should I cut?

Don’t talk about your process

Of all of my advice, this will be the most controversial, but hear me out. I have sat through hundreds of interviews and the number one mistake I see made, especially by younger designers, is too much emphasis on process. At times, interviewees will spend 20 out of their allotted 45 minutes just on process to the neglect of more important things (more on that later).

Specifically I see a lot of photos of sticky notes on a wall, people putting sticky notes on walls, product UI sketches, images of well-known design processes, etc. The emphasis on process is not entirely the fault of these new graduates. They just graduated from a program that spent so much time focusing on the design process.

Don’t get me wrong, this is all good, and things you should do. The problem: it’s something all designers do, so talking about it is just wasting time. The sad truth is, good process doesn’t always lead to good design, so I say just skip it.

Good process doesn’t always lead to good design

Recommendations:

1. In your online portfolio, don’t spend more than a sentence on your process.
2. Include more detail about your process if it is somewhat unique or important to the outcome

So if you shouldn’t focus on process, what should you focus on?

Focus on product thinking and craft

At a glance, your portfolio piece should convey that you are a solid product thinker and your designs posses a high level of polish and craft. While there are many other skills involved in design, some hard skills and other soft, if you are not solid in product thinking, interaction design, and visual design, it is unlikely that you will proceed to the next round.

When looking at a portfolio piece here is the [non-exhaustive] list of things I am thinking as an interviewer:

Product Thinking

What is the human problem being solved?
How do you know it’s a real human problem? (i.e. what research insights or data backs it up?)
Why does the business care about this? What business metrics or outcomes might the solution affect?
What was the actual outcome of this work? Was it successful? Did you meet or exceed the business metrics? If not, why?
Knowing what you know now, what might you go back and do differently?

Visual Design

Did you work within existing pattern libraries or OS guidelines? Or did you develop something new? Either way, why?
How did the use of color, typography, etc. help you solve the problem you identified?
Do you have rationale for each design decision, big and small?

Interaction Design

What was the hardest interaction design problem you came across? How many iterations did you go through? How did you choose the end solution?
What is one example of how this started out more complex, and you simplified it over time?
How do you use design to gently guide the user to an intended outcome?
Did you prototype the flow, adding motion design to ensure it is a quality experience?

Prototyping used to be icing on the cake; it is becoming table-stakes.

This is a lot to cover and adding it all would go against the first piece of advice around format and brevity. Consider what is most important to show on an online portfolio, and be sure to have answers to all of these questions and more in person.

Recommendations:
1. In order to reduce the length of your portfolio piece, try focusing on what is most important: product thinking, visual design, and interaction design.
2. If you want to highlight your interaction design skills, include a prototype with every portfolio piece including micro-interactions and animations. It shows a level of craft and attention to detail that is desirable in a well-rounded designer. Prototyping used to be icing on the cake; it is becoming table-stakes.

Take it with a grain of salt

Of course a lot of what I’m saying here is over-generalized and might not always make sense given your specific situation or goal. But this is advice I have given so often it finally made sense to write it down.

So take my advice with a grain of salt, and please comment and let me know if it has helped you or if you have any questions.