Design job seekers often fail to talk about impact. Here’s why that matters
Businesses often don’t care as much about what you did but what it resulted in
After reviewing dozens of design portfolios to hire a designer, I’ve concluded that many designers don’t know how to communicate their impact.
Many designers would talk about their project goals and user problems in great detail, along with what they did, but not mention anything about outcomes beyond handing their work off to developers.
I’m not alone in this realization: many others, especially on LinkedIn, seem to voice similar concerns. This isn’t something we’re taught in design school, but it’s becoming increasingly important in the job market to do this for one key reason: it makes us the least risky candidate.
Here’s why that matters, now more than ever.
Businesses often choose the least risky designer, not the best one
One of the things I learned, not only through interviewing designers and reading other research, is that sometimes it’s hard to see the full picture of a designer’s experience in a snapshot.
While portfolios and interviews can give you a sense of who they are, businesses often offer five—or six-figure salaries to unknown people based on talking with them for an hour or two. While I understood that on some level, being forced to decide who to hire based on an hour-long interview with them made me understand one important thing.
Businesses don’t always hire the best candidate; they hire the least risky one. I heard this idea from Charlie Hoehn, author of The Recession-proof Graduate, but I never truly understood it until I was on the other side of the hiring process.
If a designer seems the “least risky” and checks all the boxes decently, they often win over a design candidate who may have better skills but be more risky. This is often why, when you spend a lot of time in a domain (like Healthcare UX), getting a job outside that domain becomes much harder.
This is why it’s important to show them the impact of your design. We often position ourselves as “problem solvers,” which sounds good to businesses. However, without data that shows you solved a user’s problem, businesses aren’t always sure what they’re paying for.
What’s more, what we rely on for this, before-and-after images, isn’t always helpful.
We often place too much focus on visual design for impact
What many designers do, instead of talking about impact, is present before and after screenshots of whatever they designed to show how much it improved.
While that sometimes works, I’ve increasingly found it less effective for conveying the impact of what you’re doing. This is for several reasons.
First and foremost, sometimes, the biggest issues aren’t visual problems. For example, imagine that one of the users' biggest problems with a site was Information Architecture: the menu items were confusing, and users had difficulty finding what they needed.
If you showed a before and after of the menu, and all you changed was the wording, does that convey a strong impact on the business? Not really. Visually, it looks like you spent 30 minutes changing a few words around. It might not convey how many users were frustrated during user testing or anything else.
But more importantly, it places too much emphasis on visual design skills. While visual design is important, showcasing visuals without presenting logical reasoning (or actual business outcomes) from your design may make it seem like you don’t know what happened after the handoff.
This is why Dan Winer, Head of Design at PandaDoc, recommends talking about impact in a format recommended by Google Recruiters: “Accomplished [X], as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]”.
Doing so quantifies the impact of your design and clarifies your contribution. It’s here where we can recommend data-informed design.
Data-informed design, or knowing the outcomes of your design
Rather than looking at visuals, using data can be a universal and easily understood way of showing your design's impact.
This is where we can lean into Data-Informed Design, a topic that people like Julie Zhuo, former VP of Design at Meta, have written about.
This process is about using data, particularly customer data, to help you understand problems, evaluate your design decisions, and measure outcomes.
“Diagnose with data, treat with design” — Julie Zhuo, former VP of Meta
For example, rather than having a neat visual design as your outcome, speaking to how one of the major issues around a project was users not understanding why they should create an account, and then showing your re-design resulting in increased user account signups, is a more understandable and desirable outcome.
After all, while businesses like a redesign that makes their website look better, they want a redesign that fixes many of the problems users run into (and subsequently improves KPIs).
Some of you hesitate because you have no idea where you might find any of this data. Here’s the thing: you don’t have to scour your company’s archives to find this data. You only need to schedule a quick meeting with your Product team.
To understand the impact your design will have, talk to your Product team
If you talk with your Product Manager (or Owner), and they can’t tell you which metric they’re targeting or the desired outcome, it’s time to update your resume.
If that's the case, your project is doomed to fail, so you might as well get a head start on the job-hunting process. The thing is, there are so many metrics out there that it’s impossible to target everything.
That’s why Product teams (and executives) create roadmaps, write goals statements, and create “North Star Metrics” to prioritize one metric over all else. Every project decision is likely to improve one metric to the detriment of another, so it would be impossible to make decisions without choosing this metric.
In that case, all you have to do is ask two important questions (during two separate meetings):
How would you define success for this project/ What metrics are we targeting?
Did we reach our intended metric goals for a project?
In the first meeting, all you need to do is get your team to define success in metric terms. Whether increasing user signups by 10% in Q3 or successfully releasing a product, your Product Manager should be able to tell you these things.
You would then take that and define it as the goal of a portfolio project. Then, sometime later (after handoff), have another meeting with the Product Manager and ask, “Did we reach our goals?” If so, that’s how you show your impact.
You designed something for (X reason from the Product Manager), and the outcome of your re-design was (Y Metric Goal from the Product Manager). It's as simple as that.
Of course, there are other things I can recommend, especially in scenarios like you no longer having access to relevant data, but just showing that amount of impact can make you stand out.
Not enough designers talk about the impact of what they do
The surprising thing I saw while reviewing resumes and portfolios is that not enough designers have taken this extra step.
They’ll show you going from a rough sketch to a high-fidelity prototype (often with nearly the same design!) as visual progress, but they never try to show what this design accomplished.
As a result, interviewers see they know how to design a feature but perhaps not why it matters. In addition, the main question that they’re looking to answer, whether these skills will translate well to solving our problems, remains unanswered.
However, taking this extra step to discuss the impact of what happened after you handed over your designs makes you a more ‘safe bet’. You have looked outside the realm of pixels, seen what the business was trying to achieve, and learned how your designs can help businesses achieve those goals.
So, if you’ve encountered issues getting callbacks and interviews, try looking at your design portfolio and seeing if you’re addressing the impact. If not, then perhaps you’re missing the extra step businesses want to see to hire you.
I’ve revamped my Maven course to teach Data Informed Design. If you want to learn this valuable skill, consider joining the waitlist.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Creator of the Data and Design newsletter. His book, Data-Informed UX Design, provides 21 small changes you can make to your design process to leverage the power of data and design.
I see the header image, think "what is THAT?"
...see "Art by midjourney" and that has the imact that I'm out. But hey, at least I tell you. no image is better than this garbage. maybe make something yourself when you blog about design!!!!!!