How to level-up your portfolio.
The value of showing your rough work.
As a Senior Product Designer at Shopify, I consider myself lucky to meet with aspiring designers, students, and others interested in design and our industry. From these conversations, I find we run into similar challenges, sometimes at different points in our careers. So I’ll be writing a series of short articles aimed at answering some commonly asked questions. This is series one.
What should you include in your portfolio? You most likely have a series of steps you follow when designing a solution to a problem. You might tweak these from time to time, change, adapt, and hopefully improve them, but this series of steps is what makes up your process. Everyone has a process, organizations have process, and even when people say they don’t have a process they almost always do. Process isn’t a bad thing, as long as you understand how each step provides value, and you’re not doing things just for the sake of doing them. Process should never get in your way. Early on in your career your process might be hard to spot, hard to nail down, but as you gain experience and work through more projects you’ll begin to realize which steps are valuable, where they apply, and what might be missing.
A huge part of your process is rough work. It’s the path you took, forks you navigated, and the trade-offs you made to arrive at your final solution.
At the highest level, your process should consist of at least 3 main phases: discovery (conducting research and understanding the problem), exploration (iterating on possible solutions), and design or build (creating the final solution). One of the greatest ways you can strengthen your portfolio, and communicate how you work is to show and explain how you went from the initial problem to the final solution through these phases. Telling the story of a project by showcasing your process helps the reviewer understand your rationale and the trade-offs you had to make.
Tell the story of your project in phases. Discovery. Exploration. Design.
It can be incredibly tempting to start solutioning right from the beginning; resist this urge. The discovery phase is where you become familiar with the problem. It’s where you dig deep to find out everything you can about the problem space; why it exists, how it exists, who it affects, how it affects them, etc.
A good starting point for a portfolio piece is to clearly communicate the problem you’re attempting to solve. You want to avoid any confusion around the actual problem, so be clear and concise. The discovery phase is also the time to expand your understanding by conducting research, talking to people (target users), analyzing data, performing competitor audits, etc. It’s a great idea to highlight some key points from your research (user personas also work well). This helps reviewers gain additional context and lay the foundation for the story of your project. Showing work from the discovery phase communicates your ability to think thoughtfully and critically before jumping to a solution. It also lays the groundwork for how you formed your opinions moving forward.
Once you feel like you’re an expert on the problem, you’re ready to begin the solutioning and iteration phase. Mind-map exercises, user flow diagrams, sketches, wireframes, prototypes, and feedback, are tools to help you explore and iterate. It’s easy to include too many artifacts from this phase of your project, resulting in a confusing web of visuals; where it’s difficult to see how the work progressed.
Your goal is to show the progression of your thinking. Take one or two early artifacts that helped you distill all of the learning from the research phase, a user flow, one or two sketches, and a series of wireframes. Focus on how you progressed from the possible solutions toward something more concrete. Explain the trade-offs and why one solution is better than another. Every project has trade-offs, every decision has consequences; this is one of the biggest challenges designers face. Showing how you evaluate potential solutions, and make decisions is one of the most valuable things you bring to a portfolio review.
The final design is often what everyone tends to fixate on. This is often the work we see on sites like Behance and Dribbble, and to be honest, it’s usually what catches everyone’s attention. However, you’re applying for a job, so including only the finished piece is simply not giving yourself enough credit. Telling the story from the beginning allows you to showcase your thinking, talent, and hard work that you’ve put into your work.
The finished piece is like a capstone to the entire project; if you’ve done a good job, the solution seems obvious. You want the viewer to think, “Well, of course it’s like that. It just makes sense.” At the very least, they should have a good understanding of why you designed it a certain way, and how you arrived at the solution.
Exposing your thinking can be scary, but it usually sparks a healthy conversation. Since you’ve shown the rough work, you can be confident in explaining the rationale behind your decisions. Be proud of the stupid ideas, messy sketches, and x number of iterations. Going through that process, and sharing it with others is how we all get better.
Good luck!
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