UX Designer Online Portfolio Website

UX Designer Online Portfolio Website

Don’t know how to put together an impressive UX design portfolio? Don’t worry. This guide has everything you need to know to build a killer UX designer online portfolio website.

With new and exciting software, websites, and apps coming out every day, UX designers have never been more in demand! But without an online portfolio website, even the best UX designer would be hard-pressed to land a good job. From graphic design to web design to UI/UX, designers are also as pervasive as ever, and as a designer, you need to find a way to stand out.

With a portfolio website, a designer creates an online presence for themselves that cuts their work in half—serving as a digital gallery of their best work, a marketing tool, and a virtual calling card all rolled into one. So if you’re looking for a way to expand your reach and score more clients than ever, it’s time to put together a killer portfolio. Here, we’ll run you through everything it takes to create a winning UX designer online portfolio website.

How to Create an Online UX Design Portfolio

While most design portfolios are more or less the same, a UX designer portfolio requires a bit more work than a graphic design or an interior design folio. Here are the steps to building a UX designer portfolio:

1. Evaluate Your Past Work

A portfolio is meant to showcase a UX designer’s best work. In this case, less is more, but you need to be deliberate about your choices. You should include five to eight case studies that reflect what you do best, what sets you apart from other designers, and what kind of work you want to keep doing.

In essence, you want to create a “brand”—something that makes you unique as a UX designer—and make sure that your portfolio delivers the message loud and clear.

2. Create Detailed Case Studies

While most designers can get away with simply showing their final product, UX designers will find more success when they’re able to show their design process. Most potential clients and employers want to see how you work, research, conceptualize, manage your time, and problem solve. These things aren’t evident in the final product, so you need to present a case study that covers the design process from start to finish.

Here’s how you can create a UX case study:

  1. Open with the design problem. What is the brief and what problem were you tasked with solving? Highlight the challenges posed by the project so you can show readers how you decided to solve them later on.
  2. Discuss your role in the project. Especially in a team effort, it’s important to be as specific as possible about your contribution to the project. You don’t want to misrepresent yourself by taking credit for other people’s work.
  3. Talk about your proposed solutions for the product and how you got there. Show sketches, prototypes, and rough drafts. If possible, bring up your references and inspirations. There’s a saying that “everything is a remix”, meaning all artists and designers are riffing off each other and taking inspiration from each other’s work. Pointing out your inspirations shows clients that you know how to do your research, can pinpoint what works in a product and are humble enough to acknowledge others’ work.
  4. Discuss any issues you encountered during the initial stages. This is a great opportunity to show off your problem-solving skills—something every UX designer must have. Talk about how you approach troubleshooting. Clients want to hire designers who can think on their feet!
  5. Show the results of your design. Many young, new designers make the mistake of leaving this key detail out of their case studies. At the end of the day, a client needs to sell their product, so they’ll always be looking for a UX designer who can deliver positive results.
  6. Talk about your key learnings and takeaways. Case studies are also great opportunities to show that you’re capable of learning and growing. With each case study, you should take some time to discuss what you’ve learned from each product. The best UX designer is someone who is humble enough to learn from their mistakes and who can accept that there is still a lot to learn.

3. Create a Bio

Your work is the most important part of your designer portfolio, but you should never forget your bio. This is where you talk about yourself, from your academic history to your professional background to any relevant hobbies and interests. This part is important because your work can only say so much about you. Clients and employers also want to get to know you as a person, and your bio is your chance to do that.

4. Add Your Contact Information

Like we said, a UX designer portfolio is akin to a virtual calling card. Make sure that potential clients and employers can contact you right away by making it easy to find your contact information. If you have any professional social media accounts where you share your design work and experiences, be sure to add links to these as well.

UX Designer Portfolio Websites that Attract Clients

In today’s hyperconnected world, it’s not uncommon for potential clients to “meet” designers through their portfolios. And in that case, you need to make sure your portfolio makes a strong and lasting first impression. Here’s how:

Quality over quantity. This is so important that it bears repeating. Designers need to narrow down their work, not stuff their folios with every single product they’ve worked on. Clients and potential employers don’t have all the time in the world to go through each post on your website, so pick a select few that represent everything about you as a designer, and make sure each design is as impressive as the next.

Tailor-fit your portfolio. Because clients and potential employers are often too busy to review each applicant thoroughly, it’s always a good idea to tailor-fit one’s folio to the company or person you’re applying to. What does this mean? If you’re trying to land a job designing apps, edit your folio so that it mostly features apps! It’s that simple. You’ll save clients a lot of time, and make them happy knowing you’re capable of delivering on what they need.

Don’t be afraid to get personal. Empathy is an integral part of the design process. Whether you’re writing your bio, your case studies, or your blog, you should try to strike the balance between a conversational and professional tone. Don’t write a bio that’s cold and devoid of any personality and avoid being arrogant or inappropriate!

Make your site accessible. UX design is about making products more accessible through design. Don’t just tell clients that you’re capable of creating more accessible UX design—show them. Make sure that your pages are mobile-responsive and easy to read and navigate. Optimize your images so that they can load even with slow internet speeds; just don’t compromise quality.

UX Design Portfolio FAQs

Feeling a bit lost? These answers to our six most frequently asked questions might help.

Creating and designing a UI/UX portfolio involves four steps. First, a user experience designer must build a shortlist of five to eight of their best projects. When choosing which projects to present in their portfolios, designers should consider not only the best-looking output, but the types of projects that showcase their conceptualization and problem-solving skills, their collaborative spirit, and their artistic values.

Next, a designer must develop case studies for each project. To make a case study, a UX designer should get photos and screenshots of their entire design process. Throughout the case study, you should be making insights and key learnings from each phase.

Next, create a bio. This is where you put all your professional and academic information, as well as expound on your values and vision as a designer. Lastly, don’t forget to add your contact information so that clients can contact you.

Designers’ portfolios must show how a designer thinks—thus the need for case studies. UX design work is all about making a product easier to use, more enjoyable, and more marketable. These things might be more difficult to show off in photos of finished products, so your next best step would be to explain the entire design process. This means a designer needs to run their site visitors through every step of the development of a product, from conceptualization to troubleshooting to the finishing touches.

You could also include sketches, mind maps, sticky notes—whatever makes your process clearer and easier to digest.

Potential clients and employers often give up on portfolios that are filled with too much information, so always aim for something short and sweet. Try to narrow down your projects to five to eight case studies.

When looking for new players on a user experience design team, a designer often looks for someone who would work well in a team, a designer who looks through tons of research and references, and a person who will always double-, triple-, quadruple-check their work. These are just a few key traits to have as a UX designer.

While the consensus for the number of case studies to include in user experience design portfolios is about five to eight, it’s not a hard and fast rule. After all, when you don’t have many years of experience in UX design, you can’t dictate the length of your portfolio. Instead of trying to hit a precise number or length, you must focus on the quality of your featured projects.

Often, the best portfolios feature works that showcase how a designer makes decisions, how much time they spend on a project, how well and often they collaborate, and how they approach and understand “design thinking”.

With a “less is more”, “quality over quantity” approach, you’ll land more clients and projects.

Even without very many experiences in UI/UX design, a young designer can still create a portfolio that’s impressive enough to rival more experienced ones and land an entry-level job. We recommend three ways to go about this.

First, you can start by making redesigns of existing products. At times when you’ve got little work coming in, make the most of your free time by redesigning a well-known product from scratch. This will show clients your ability to spot errors or pain points in existing products—a valuable trait to have in a user experience team.

Next, you can tap into friends and family who need a UX designer for their small business. Small businesses don’t often need complicated designs, so building for one shouldn’t take too much of your time.

Lastly, designers can ramp up their portfolios by applying for internships. These are great learning opportunities that will immerse young designers into the world of UX design. Even though you most likely won’t be able to construct a product design all on your own, you can still feature work that you’ve helped build. This will show future clients that you’re capable of collaborating and making various ideas work together into one cohesive design.

Create ux design portfolio

Build Your UX Portfolio Quickly and Easily

Don’t let portfolio-building get in the way of your design work. Format is a website builder that allows UX designers to create killer portfolios in six simple steps. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and you can pick from an array of modifiable templates, upload your best work, and customize your website. Change your template, fonts, background colors, and the like, then make use of Format’s special add-ons including a blog, an online store, and an SEO editor.

Once your trial’s up, you can continue using the website builder for just $10 a month!

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