Focusing on your Design process is one of the worst strategies for your design portfolio
How one-page project summaries get interviewers to pay attention
Believe it or not, the design process is one of the worst things you can focus on in your portfolio.
This is what many Designers are led to believe through boot camps or other schooling. But this was a lesson I had to learn the hard way: nobody, except Designers, cares about process.
The sooner you move away from focusing on the process, the sooner you can focus on what truly matters to the people hiring you. Because there's one simple fact you have to keep in mind: designers aren’t the ones hiring you.
Don’t target other designers: target the business needs
Designers don’t hire you: Businesses do. To explain this, let me take a moment and talk about the concept of risk.
In weak UX job markets or economies, Businesses don’t often hire the best candidate for the job; they hire the least risky one. Hiring a candidate costs a lot of money: between paying recruiters, training/onboarding, salary, and more, businesses may lose a lot of time and money if they hire the wrong candidate.
Even if you’re only talking with a Design Manager and other Designers, they often assess you with one thing in mind: what value are they getting for paying all this money? After all, if you can’t do the work, or if you can’t get along with others, then it doesn’t just reflect poorly on you: the Design team suffers as well.
In addition, the people hiring you are busy: the average UX position likely gets 100+ applicants and the people hiring are likely Design Managers reading resumes and portfolios in between doing design work and other responsibilities.
As a result, a Designer who quickly explains the business impact and value they offer on their past projects is often a low-risk candidate who is much more likely to be hired.
On the other hand, a Designer who spends most of their time dwelling on the process doesn’t just seem riskier. It can also sometimes raise red flags about your knowledge.
No two designs are alike, so why is the process the same?
Sometimes, the process can be a crutch: I’ve met designers who have followed and discussed the same design process in their projects. When I (or other hiring managers) look at that, we’re probably thinking one of two things:
You think that Design is a linear process: You sincerely believe that every Design project should stick to the exact same process
You have no idea why you’re doing something: You are using Design processes to create features without understanding why the business wants this.
Nobody cares about the exact process itself. Instead, they want to understand its outcome or impact that resulted from it.
“One thing that separates design (especially UX design) from pure art is that design’s value lies in the impact of our work.” - Jane Li
If you go through the design process to create your final design solution and Nothing changes, businesses won’t want to hire you. After all, while a pretty interface is nice, they care about improving the user experience and changing undesirable user behavior.
Rather than abandoning your site, users decide to keep logging in. Rather than abandoning a cart, users decide to purchase a product. From a hiring manager's perspective, this behavior change is the purpose of Design.
So how do you highlight this? Create an executive summary.
1-page Executive summaries and Why-What-How
The Why-What-How model is an adaptation of Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle model (Why-How-What) proposed by Jeff White, former Amazon UX lead.
It’s the framework he used to help present to Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives dozens of times. It’s a way of structuring your thoughts to ensure you’re telling your audience the right story.
It simply consists of three levels:
Core question (Why): Why were you asked to design something?
2nd question (What): What did you end up designing?
3rd question (How): How did you determine what to design?
When we lay things out like this, we can see why dwelling too much on the process is harmful. We’re spending a lot of time on the lowest level (How) without touching on the other two levels.