Patrick Neeman Follow

Interaction Designer and World Citizen. Runs uxdrinkinggame.com and usabilitycounts.com. The o
Jan 17, 2013 4 min read

The UX Portfolio: Telling Your Story

How you tell your story is as important as the story itself.

User experience designers are storytellers.

The stories that you tell in client meetings and job interviews are about
the applications you design. The best stories are thoughtful, compelling
and successful. Each story that you tell builds upon your library of ex-
perienceit shows the arc of your career and why you should be hired.

How do you tell your story? If youre uncertain, here are a few ideas
that may help.

Tell One or Two Big Stories

There should be at least one or two projects that you can tell a user ex-
perience story about, from inception to release. This means showing o
some actual project deliverablesfor instance:

The user research you performed

The actors and personas you developed

The user stories you wrote

It also means talking about the project. For example:

 The process you followed to come up with user goals

The assumptions you made, and how you validated them

Your design considerations

Explaining the full lifecycle illustrates how you think, and gives your
audience a more complete picture. Lynn Teo, CXO at McCann Erickson,
covers this process extremely well in her presentation, Portfolios Mat-
ter: Building the Portfolio to Win the Job.

Once youve set the scene, its time to play your trump
card: demonstrate the only deliverable that truly
mattersthe final product.

When talking about my portfolio, I frequently talk about Jobvite be-

cause we were able to achieve the full lifecycle on that project. How-
ever I also talk about a small business called Bob The Chiropractor,
because its big story about a small business. Its a project that demon-
strates how, even with limited resources, you can achieve great things.

No project is too small to illustrate the big idea.

Tell A Bunch Of Small Stories

Not every UX Designer gets to experience the complete user experience
lifecycle on every project, so it may be necessary to show how you took
an existing product, made some changes, and improved the product as
a result.

Small stories are very important because they show how you can think
on your feet and draw on your past experience to make informed de-
sign decisions. They also demonstrate to organizations that youre able
to fit into a larger team.

When telling a small story, its even more important to include the final
product. Your stories should always be results-driven. Whether theyre
stories about big or small projects, you need to show the positive eect
that your work had for your story to make an impact.

Tell Stories That Fit Your Audience

Every time you tell a story, there are embellishments and changes that
you naturally make fit your audience. For example, you dont use the
same language with your mother that you do with your friends.

The same goes with your user experience stories.

Tell your story dierently, depending on whom youre talking to

whether its another designer, a product manager, or even the CEO.
Each of these individuals needs to hear how your story fits within their
context, so you should change the message accordingly.

Telling your story also depends on the organizational context: the sto-
ries you talk about for an e-commerce project will be dierent than for
a content-driven intranet, so you may have to research your audience to
ensure youre telling the right stories.

Tell Stories That Sell

You should practice your stories, and be able to

elaborate on them when questions come up.

Its not enough to tell your story using an electronic portfolioyou

should be able to walk up to a whiteboard and explain the story visu-
ally, so that your future employer or client understands fully.

Walking someone through the deliverables you produced on projects

big and small is a great well to sell yourself. I love seeing photos of peo-
ple working together, organizing information with a bunch of post-it
notes, because it shows a thought process that is more than shiny
wireframes.

Weaving together great stories is a matter of pacing and keeping the

audience engaged. Remember, you should be telling your best stories
a project that ends without any lessons learned isnt very engaging. Al-
ways aim for quality over quantity.

Tell Stories That Have A Great Ending

The best way to illustrate your value as a user experience designer is to
not talk about the great wireframes you built for a project, but how
your work translated into a measurable return on investment for
your company or your client.
When a project is coming to a close, make a point of capturing facts
that you can use to sell yourself in the future. For example,

Our user research and changes to the application increased engagement 10-
fold.
Conversion increased 400 per cent over one month through A/B testing.

Most design is very subjective, but results that were achieved due to the
work you performed is not.

Tell Your Story

Creating a kick-ass UX portfolio is all about defining who you are.

Why are you good at user experience?

How can you communicate your experiences in a compelling fashion?

Whats your story?

. . .

Originally published at Usability Counts.