A portfolio is a place where you can highlight your work process and showcase your talent by curating some of the past work projects. This is a dedicated space where you can tell the world about your journey and present yourself as a proud designer. Creating an attractive UX portfolio allows you to reflect on your experience, skill sets, and achievements.
A UX designer plays an important role in building an interface that provides the user with a friendly experience. He should be skilled with the latest technologies. He must be able to accept the challenges and fulfil all the responsibilities. But above all, he should have a nicely designed UX portfolio that will help him to showcase some vital information about him. It should highlight the areas in which he holds specialization, his strengths, his own work processes, and previous case studies. Most importantly, the UX portfolio must have a dedicated column for showcasing his design styles.
For the ease of making a UX portfolio, we have brought to you some useful tips here.
Ask yourself these questions:
At first, acquaint yourself with the answers to these specific questions:
What kind of UX designer do I want to be?
What do I need to do in the field of UX design?
What are my UX-related skill sets?
How do I want to use my earned skills in UX Design?
After finding suitable answers to these above-mentioned questions, you need to focus on building the portfolio.
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Use simplified approach
Present the artefacts of your design process in a transparent and uniform manner following a specific sequence.
You should include some sketches and wireframes to create a nice visual appeal. You can also use journey maps and prototypes in your UX portfolio.
Keep yourself away from using features like complicated animations and unconventional page layouts. It could distract visitors from the real purpose.
Write project summaries
Providing a sophisticated yet enriching summary of all the previous and current projects should be added to your portfolio.
At first, you must define the problem and highlight the zones where the solutions were explored.
Project summaries are there to offer you a great chance to showcase your abilities that you delivered the right solutions exploring all possibilities that fetched beneficial results.
Declutter the excess baggage
It should be kept in mind that people have very little time to go through your previous works and projects.
So, it is important to show your best always in every aspect. Make sure there is a lot of nice things written with respect to your finished projects. Have a sincere eye for the things that contradict your design process and carefully eliminate them from the portfolio.
Explain without any jargon
Use a voice that is approachable and professional. Try to avoid excessive self-esteem and emphasis on your own capabilities. Whatever they wish to observe, they will do it with their own knowledge and experience.
Write in simple language, avoiding too much use of UX terminologies.
Building testimonials
After working for a certain period of time with various projects, the designer can ask for testimony from his clients.
Including short and crisp yet effective testimonials from the stakeholders help to create a great impact to inspire the people should are looking for a designer like you!
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You must be wondering about doing all the hard works in order to create a great UX portfolio. But the good news is, you don't need to be alone in the whole process. There are a handful of popular tools that help to make the portfolio-building process an easy task.
We have brought to you some of them here.
Google Drive
When you are creating your portfolio, use Google Docs that will serve you as a collaboration-ready and cloud-based editor.
Clipboard Manager
It is another important tool that you can use while building your UX portfolio.
The clipboard manager has become an inevitable part of our daily lives. It is a handy tool that saves time and energy by providing an opportunity to save text and images. You can do it by using simple and easy copy task. Along with this, clipboard managers are very useful for editing the content, too.
Hemingway
Hemingway is a free app that helps you in writing a better portfolio. You just need to do simple tasks: Copy and then paste your text. Then, the app will highlight the portions of the content, providing the required suggestions for editing.
Image Optim
This is an incredible app. It helps the user to reduce image sizes, keeping the image quality unchanged.
You just need to drag and drop images into the ImageOptim window. Then it will work to reduce file sizes. It loads very faster and that's why it needs less time, offering a quick solution to the image size tasks.
GIF Brewery
GIFs are one of the most popular and coolest things these days. It could be used as a creative way for designers to showcase flows and animations. The whole process of making a GIF is a tedious task. But here is your solution! Use GIF Brewery for the purpose of inserting GIF as per your wish and make the UX portfolio an attractive one.
Closing Thoughts
A portfolio is an essential part of a designer’s journey. Creating a sophisticated yet attractive UX portfolio to showcase the strengths and expertise area, is a must to do a thing for every budding designer.
It should be created in such a way that helps to appeal to the target audience. It will further help the designer to land his next job.
A sincerely curated portfolio allows everyone to identify the skills and work process that help in building a clear vision for the works or projects to focus on in the coming years of career.