If you think your design portfolio needs improving, start in the middle
How a journalism technique can fix your design portfolio.
If you’re having trouble explaining your work as a Designer, learn the power of writing a great Hook.
I’m usually not one to give design career or portfolio advice, but the job market is so crazy that many designers are having difficulty getting past the first step. Here’s the truth: you must quickly show your value as a designer to be considered for positions.
You don’t need to learn to craft the perfect elevator pitch. All you need to do is lean into a time-test technique from Journalism called the Hook.
This is something that I learned when going through the process of hiring another designer.
The scale of applicants makes traditional design methods obsolete
People have given up finding jobs on LinkedIn simply because too many people are applying.
Whether you get 600+ applications for a PM position in a week or 100+ applications in a day, it becomes improbable to get hired if you’re applicant #101. However, many designers haven’t done the math, so here’s what I experienced when I helped my team hire another designer.
The VP of Design, the Visual Design Manager, and I reviewed 50 applications simultaneously (out of 103) to find the right candidate.
We didn’t have a dedicated hiring manager working to do this full-time: we would read portfolios and resumes on lunch breaks, between meetings, and after work.
Even spending 5 minutes on each candidate meant that we spent 5 x 50 minutes, or over 4 hours, of unpaid overtime, just to read through portfolios and make decisions (i.e., a 44-hour work week).
This wasn’t even considering the additional time needed to schedule interviews, discuss candidates, etc.
While we tried to give each applicant a fair shot, the ones that got furthest in the interviews had one thing in common: their portfolios were easy to read and understand the impact.
Why? Because I had 5 minutes to get to know you, your work, and whether we should continue reading or skip to the other 49 candidates.
Does it suck that you only have 5 minutes? Of course. But I have a life, too: I’m not going to, for example, do 12 hours of unpaid overtime to give each candidate 15 minutes.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this phenomenon, either. Businesses must learn about you quickly and determine whether you’re a good fit.
But luckily, you don’t need to create a high-pressure sales pitch in your slides to get your point across. All you need to do is learn about the Hook.
How journalists have stayed relevant throughout the years
Isn’t it incredible that journalists and newspapers still exist?
In the age of YouTube videos, TikTok, Instagram, video games, and all these other things eager to grab your attention, how do written words on the page still have a fighting chance of engaging the audience?
The answer is the Hook. Journalists can’t afford to start articles like we might start a traditional fantasy book like Lord of the Rings: no one would read them, and they’d be out of a job.
So, they create a Hook. This is something, a visual, a title, or the first couple of words that engages readers to keep reading. Yes, this sometimes appears as ‘sleazy clickbait titles,’ but it’s also a valid journalism technique that addresses a straightforward question: What’s in it for the reader?
What, for example, about the title tells a reader that it’s worth reading these words instead of watching a YouTube short? They won't read on if it doesn’t capture the reader’s attention.
Luckily, crafting this for a design portfolio doesn’t take years of experience to master. It’s all about starting with your Design Transformation.
In Media Res, or starting with your design transformation
The #1 thing more designers need to do is lead with a high-quality visual.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen a design portfolio formatted, so the first image anyone sees is a rough pencil sketch or a workflow diagram.
This is how you were taught in school, and in a rational job market, it would make sense to go in order. But starting in the middle, or in media res, is a powerful storytelling technique that you can use to have a greater impact.
From Dante’s Inferno to Breaking Bad, stories start in the middle to engage users quickly, create curiosity, and give a sense of urgency.
Show me the end result, and if I find it interesting, I’ll read about how you got there, even if it takes 30 minutes.
On the other hand, if you’re adding friction to your portfolio by putting what people want to know about at the bottom? That’s a way to get your portfolio skipped over.
But that’s not the only fundamental issue that people have.
Talk about what you did in the title
In addition to a high-quality visual, you must discuss your impact as a designer on the projects you showcase. This sounds basic, but several portfolios I’ve seen don’t clarify what you did.
The issue is twofold. First, designers need to provide more context about what you did. For example, they might provide a title like “PetsApp, a pet-walking app,” which wastes space.
When someone sees that, they might think, “Okay, they did design a mobile app for pets.” But this isn't sufficient for multiple reasons.
The first is that you might be working on a team. If there are two designers on a project, were you the one who created the design? Were you sitting around, eating popcorn, and watching others work?
They’re not interviewing your company. They’re interviewing you, and clarifying what you did around a specific project immediately makes it much easier to understand.
As I’ve mentioned before, the most impactful example is discussing the impact of business on your design. For example, “I Increased User signups by 20% by re-designing PetsApp.”
If you can bring up metrics associated with a project, this is the quickest way to convince businesses to hire you.
But talking about what you did in a title can be sufficient if you can't. “I re-designed the entire “Adopt a Pet Workflow” in PetsApp.” might be a good place to start.
After that, one more thing to tackle: simplifying context into a problem.
The first sentence: explain your problem in simple terms
Too many portfolios immediately jump into a project as if I’m their colleague.
No, I don’t know about CMO/CMS. I don’t know about SNMP/ICMP. I don’t know what your previous workplace, Genetech, does.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t necessarily need to know all these details to understand what you did as part of a project. It’s a tough habit for some people to get over, myself included.
When I first started interviewing for positions, I found myself devoting eight portfolio slides to explaining Laparoscopic Cholecystectomies as part of my first design project.
All you need to do, in the first couple of sentences is set up two things:
What’s the user problem you’re addressing?
Why does it matter?
You don’t need to discuss the entire history in your portfolio. While you might give this context when talking with interviewers, you don’t have time to waste on a static portfolio.
There’s often a straightforward template to ensure that your first few sentences make sense:
1st sentence: What is the business impact or market research?
2nd sentence: What are users currently doing?
For example:
Pet adoption is a $160 million market that isn’t well-served (Market Research)
Users often have to drive to multiple shelters to see what’s available, and starting the process often takes weeks (What are users doing)
In those two sentences, you’ve told me context-wise everything I need to know. You’re designing an app for Pet Adoption because it’s a new market, and users aren’t satisfied with what exists.
Even if I don’t know much else, I have enough context to jump into the rest of the case study and explore you further as a candidate.
Creating a strong hook gives you an advantage in this tough market
I wish designers didn’t have to pitch themselves and interviewers had enough time to read everything about your case study.
But that’s not how it works right now. Jobs are flooded with applicants, and businesses don’t have a full-time hiring manager. This means that we, on the hiring side, are being squeezed to find a colleague.
Correcting these three basic mistakes doesn’t make you the best candidate for the job. But it can help you avoid getting ignored or skipped in an otherwise hectic process.
Doing these three simple steps to your portfolios is much more likely to get you further in your interviews than before.
So, if you’re struggling to make it past the first interview, try adjusting your portfolio with a hook to show what you did. Often, that’s all you need to do.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. He teaches a course, Data-Informed Design, on how to become a more effective communicator through the power of using Data.
The way to phrase the problem simply yet clearly is so critical for a strong UX story! I love the examples you shared.
As a former journalist, I totally need to use this. Thank you for this and your previous posts about getting to the results quickly in your portfolio.