product design case studies

13 best product design case studies 2023

Product, Behind the scene

Box Annotations

Very clear and easy to read case study with video explains how it works, and great visual.

Behind the scene

Tumblr Queue V2

Aileen, an intern shared the story of her internship project at Tumblr. Great visuals and ease of reading make it a great case study!

Freshalian Pasta - UX Writing Case Study

Discover how words shape User Experience and how to find them

Designing Facebook Collage

Christophe shared an inspiring process on how his team created Facebook Collage

Designing the UI of Google Translate

The design story behind making Google Translate

User research, User retention

Pathrise Resources

Very detailed case study on how to increase user engagement and retention

Product, User retention

8 tactics tested on 300M users

Learn how Duolongo gets people to come back.

The evolution of HEY

Learn how Hey.com was built, from idea to launch.

The making of Bloggi

A full story of how Hernán built Bloggi. An inspiring story for you to write about your side project.

Product, Process, Redesign

Uber - Perfecting the Pickup

Simon shared the whole process when redesigning Uber Rider. A greate example on creating a case study.

Product, Process

Building SoundCloud

An in-depth retrospective on building SoundCloud from Michael Nino.

Product, Redesign

Apple Music Case Study

Jason Yuan got rejected by Apple Music. So he spent 3 months to redesign it.

Web, UI Design

Lonely Planet

This case study from Ueno is agreat example on how to write and design a case study for a web project.

Curated design portfolio inspirations and case studies. Delivered every Monday.

How to Create a Case Study for your UX and Product Design Portfolio

Learn how to design your case study to sell your work and show your value.

Zight | May 03, 2018 | 6 min read time

Article Last Updated: July 02, 2023

How to Structure your Case Study

Part 1: design a case study landing page.

• Write a Project Summary
• Define the Objective
• How did you Contribute to this Project?
• Take Animated Screenshots of Your Work
• Highlight Product Features
• Capture Gorgeous Hi-Res Photos of People Interacting with your App
• Use Metrics
• Gather Testimonials
• Add a Call to Action

I meet with a lot of designers who are unclear how to promote their work. They create beautiful apps and web sites and work hard on a project. Then have trouble summarizing them into a clear concise case study, and in the end, they sell themselves short.

I want to help designers breakthrough this case study funk. So I put on my detective hat, and asked them: “What is difficult about creating a case study?” Some replied they have trouble condensing information into a short concise page. They also struggle with:

“Case studies are hard. We want them to be interesting and not overwhelming. They take time and it’s tough to tell a story.” Lukasz Lysakowski, Design Director at Peek

Most UX and Product Design case studies contain too much information. Designers should summarize their projects into clear, concise statements instead of showing us this 10000px long document with endless examples of how they accomplished something, with no clear understanding of what the product is. In this article, I will teach you to put together your case study without overwhelming people.

As a designer, it’s important to find what works best for you. Here is one way to organize your case study.

Landing Page

Create a success story for your project. Summarize the product, skills, the challenges, highlight features, and explain the outcome.

Explain your Process

Explain your process in a separate section of your site. Or, you can write a public or unlisted Medium post and link to it from your portfolio. Hiring managers want to understand how you solve problems. Your process includes wireframes, strategy, user flows, design thinking and anything else you feel is necessary to communicate how you achieved a result.

For this article, I’ll focus specifically on designing a case study landing page.

Think Like an Ad Agency

Advertising agencies win clients because they know how to sell their work. Every project begins with a creative brief and ends with a case study. The creative brief outlines the scope, the unique selling point, target audience, goals, deliverables, and schedule. When the project is complete, the agency publishes a case study to summarize the project, show the outcome, and its effect on the business.

Case studies tell a story with big beautiful graphics, clear objectives and metrics.

We should take hints from well-respected design agencies like Frog, IDEO, and DesignIt. They tell the story of their work with big beautiful graphics, clear objectives, and metrics. They make it easy for the client to understand the project and grasp the outcome.

A light bulb went off when Barrington Reeves, a Graphic Designer in the UK, gave me the idea to look at ad agencies for case study examples. I Googled top agencies around the world, took screenshots, and dissected them. Hold on tight because this is awesome. Here’s a breakdown of what I discovered.

Case study breakdown

Common patterns include:

• Project Summary
• Role and Services
• Product Features
• Animated screenshots
• Screenshots
• High-resolution photos of people using your product
• Testimonial
• Call to Action

1. Write a Project Summary

Describe your product and explain how it works in a few sentences..

2. Define the Objective

The objective explains an overview of the product, who the user is, what problem you are trying to solve, who was involvedand provides background information and technical details or specifications.

Who is this project for? What is the challenge?

Student Projects

If you’re working on an experimental project and don’t have a real client, explain your intent for the project, the challenge, and the solution. I’ve listed a few examples but will go more into detail in a future post.

“I designed a system for NYTimes readers to cater to their busy schedule. They can select quick-read articles ranging from 2-5 minutes and receive smart notifications based on their Google Calendar.”

Example 2: “As a Slack user, I wanted to make the mobile app as good as the desktop. I analyzed in detail what could be revised and proposed a redesign concept.”

3. How did you Contribute to this Project?

This is where you show off your skills. List everything you accomplished to bring this project to life.

• Designed user interface for the mobile app
• Branding and graphic design
• Front-end development
• User Interviews
• Extensive Market Research
• Customer Journey Maps
• Affinity mapping

Capture your process with 1 or 2 photos

4. Take Animated Screenshots of Your Work

Use motion and animation to get attention and bring your design to life.

You can use motion capture tools like Zight (formerly CloudApp) to capture screenshots, record animations, and annotate on the fly.

5. highlight product features, show off product features while explaining your design process.

6. Capture Gorgeous Hi-Res Photos of People Interacting with your App

7. Use Metrics

Measure the effectiveness of your design. How did it impact the business? Did it increase sales? Did you recruit new customers? Were you hired for a job? Keep it simple. Define the metrics and measurements used to evaluate a project’s success.

Examples of metrics:

• Increased Sales
• Increased Signups
• Customer retention
• New visitors vs. repeat visitors
• Create awareness
• Improve brand perception
• Prompt a specific action
• Retain customers

Metrics are important because they give a business case for you to get hired. A design is successful when you are able to increase sales or grow a customer base.

8. Gather Testimonials

9. Add a Call to Action

ABC –Always Be Closing. Finish each case study with a call to action that inspires the viewer to get in touch with you for future projects or employment opportunities.

A well-designed case study demonstrates your talent, skills, describes an overview of your process and makes a business case for your work. Get clear on what you’ve created, and simplify it. It might take a while to summarize into brief statements, but you can do it! Write it down, edit, edit, edit and keep editing.

Do yourself a favor, and spend the time to design a beautiful portfolio that shows the value of your work. Invest in yourself because you’re worth it.

More Resources for your Reading Pleasure

How to Create and Write a Case Study (+ 12 Case Study Examples) ‍

G2 crowd assembled a list of effective methods to sell your skills through case studies. These don’t relate directly to product designers, but are still useful. 

The Minimum Viable Product Design Portfolio ‍

Kostya Gorskiy, Design Lead at Intercom, shows us how to simplify our design portfolio so it’s more effective.

About Andi Galpern Andi Galpern is a UX Strategist at Zight (formerly CloudApp). She is also the founder and producer of Cascade SF, an experience design organization in the Bay Area. Her events provide a go-to space for product designers to learn new skills, connect with industry leaders, mentor, and stay ahead of the job market. Everyone works together toward a more fulfilling career.

Since 2011, Andi has organized hundreds of design and technology events to bring communities together. She regularly works with designers around the world to help them create presentations and become leaders. Follow her on Twitter @andigalpern.

Ready to chat with us about how to save time, money and help your team communicate better?

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Product case studies.

Product case studies focused on great stories from designers openly sharing their design process.

Designing a video creation platform

Sascha, currently a design lead at Any.Do, shares his process for designing a video creation platform for Promo.com. Also worth checking out his other case studies, which include a VR Gallery for Daydream app.

Democratizing access to bike maps

Cristiano shares his process for designing an open platform to democratize access to bike maps of Brazilian cities.

Productivity Tracker App

Ilija shares how he imagines an ideal productivity tracker would look and feel like.

The Safest and Easiest Way to Use the Internet

Judit and Matt give you insight into their UX process in re-designing a VPN service.

Burner for Android

Lex Roman is specialised in Growth Design and shares her process trough interesting case studies in her portfolio. I also recommend taking a look at her blog, if your interested in the field of Growth Design.

The Design of ConvertKit Over the Years

I've been following Nathan Barry for a while and listened to several interviews, it started as a true maker story and evolved into what it is today; a multimillion-dollar business. In this case study, Nathan describes all his iterations from 2013 to 2018.

Social and Discovery Mobile App for Action Sport Lovers

Natalie walks us through her process for designing the user experience of a niche based social media and discovery platform.

Putting Usability Ahead of Expressivity

Rachel shares her process of designing a meal-planning app. Structured into two parts, and this final part shows how important user testing and feedback is to your design process.

Shine Bank 80% Conversion Onboarding

An interesting case study on growth design. Arnaud explains how his team on Shine creates trust with users and achieve 80% conversion from their onboarding experience.

Impact  —  A Crypto Platform

Eftakher shows us his step-by-step process of designing a crypto platform.

From Idea to App Store

Robert Cooper shares his process of how he designed, built and launched his idea into the App Store.

Resume Maker Side Project

There's nothing like a good maker case study. A lot of great products start as side projects and learning how people do it is inspiring to kickstart your own ideas.

Unboxing Chrome

Carrd: the making of.

This indie project is such an inspiring story. AJ, the maker, has documented the whole process from idea to launch.

There are a few UX lessons in this case study, and if you're into coding, there's some of that for you as well. Thanks to Jake for this excellent tip.

Designing a Text-To-Speech App From The Ground Up

Creation of a virtual skilled service marketplace, a needle in a haystack — validating our dating app idea, how we built goodshows app, how we built freshclub, a fish in your ear, case study: watering tracker, ui and ux design for a mobile photo editor, designing a theme for trav­el blog­gers, quill app – case study, designing the new gyant health for ios, the inside story of reddit's redesign, how a product system can help you focus on what matters, how we designed whimsical for speed, what it’s like to spend 326 days on a massive product release, google design exercise: faces app, inside typeform version 2, the windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering, optimizing sketch files, how i designed otomate - smart home app, the new headspace, look at your product from a new perspective, how we designed our bank account: nuconta — part i, case study – zepl - making #bigdata friendly, color hunt: behind the scenes, how i accidentally launched a startup while waiting for my visa, kindara: my first ux case study, ui/ux case study : a brand new “get taxi experience”, creating a first product design system in sketch, case study: helping you find nearby people to run with, banco galicia - mobile app design, fitgenie case study, gmail: an unsolicited redesign (#1), chatbots: your ultimate prototyping tool, designing glitch — where we started, mideast tunes, zara: a usability case study, instagram ios redesign, building version 1 of your app, building soundcloud, lessons learned while designing a fun personal finance tool, designing the new flipboard, plasma design system, case study: peek launcher, we launched our company with a parody product, zoombot — our journey on creating a chat bot for real estate, redesigning sidebar, break this safe, oneshot, a one week design case study, news, in context, the making of gyroscope running, design principles: choosing the right patterns, fontspiration, designing the new foursquare, you might also like.

5 Case Studies of Big Brands Evolving in 2018

In 2018 we saw a lot of big brands evolve into something new. These curated rebranding case studies all show their new strategic brand direction. ‍ Learn more →

Curated UX design case studies. Delivered to 28.000+ members.

New Case Study

The psychology of Temu’s casino‑like shopping UX

Case studies

Temu Onboarding

GoDaddy: How to improve checkout flows ethically

GoDaddy Checkout UX

Framing Effect: Why context affects decisions

Framing effect

The psychology behind highly effective landing pages

Landing page conversion

Apple vs Meta: The Illusion of Privacy

Apple privacy policy

Beehiiv subscription: 5 small UX mistakes that make a BIG difference

Newsletter subscription

The Search War: Bing AI Chat vs. Google

The Psychology Behind Loom's Explosive Growth

Loom onboarding

Episode 1: Can Bing's new AI search challenge Google? 

Bing onboarding

Typeform: How to offboard users the right way

Typeform offboarding

How to increase signup confirmation rates with Sniper Links

Email confirmation UX

Labor Perception Bias: Why faster isn't always better

Labor perception bias

Tech ethics: If cookie consent prompts were honest…

Cookie consent

Amber Alert Redesign: 5 UX Improvements That Could Save Lives

Amber alerts UX

Google: How to increase feature adoption the right way

Google feature adoption

How Linkedin Increased Notification Opt-in Rates by 500%

Linkedin notifications

The Psychology of Advertising: Why this ad made me stop scrolling

Advertising psychology

The Ugly Truth About Net Promoter Score Surveys

Net promoter surveys

The Psychology Behind Amazon's Purchase Experience

Amazon purchase UX

One Simple Psychology Framework To Improve Your Onboarding

Blinkist onboarding

How Blinkist Increased Trial Conversions by 23% (Ethically)

Trial paywall optimization

YouTube’s Attempt To Solve The Paradox of Choice

Youtube retention

Adobe: The Psychology of User Offboarding

Adobe offboarding

Signal: How To Ethically Boost Your Revenues

Signal monetization

Chrome vs Brave: How To Use Ethical Design To Win Customers

Brave onboarding

The Psychology of Clubhouse’s User Retention (...and churn)

Clubhouse retention

The Scary Future Of Instagram

Instagram monetization

The Psychology of Misinformation on Facebook

Facebook misinformation

The Psychology Behind TikTok's Addictive Feed

Tiktok feed psychology

How To Properly Apply Jobs-To-Be-Done To User Onboarding

Headspace onboarding

How To Notify Users Without Being Spammy

Lifecycle emails

User Onboarding: Is HEY Email Worth It?

Hey onboarding

7 Product Team Pitfalls You Should Avoid

Product team pitfalls

How Tinder Converts 8% Of Singles Into Customers In Less Than 15min.

Tinder monetization

Coronavirus Dashboard UX: How Design Impacts Your Perception

COVID dashboard UX

How Morning Brew Grew To 1.5 Million Subs In 5 Years

Morning Brew retention

Uber Eats: How To Ethically Use Scarcity To Increase Sales

Uber Eats retention

Airbnb: How To Reduce Churn With Personalization

Airbnb personalization

6 Ways Mario Kart Tour Triggers You Into Gambling Your Money

Mario Kart monetization

Strava: 7 Strategies To Convert More Freemium Users

Strava monetization

Tesla: How To Grow Through Word-of-Mouth

Tesla charging UX

How Hopper Perfectly Nails Permission Requests UX

Hopper onboarding

9 Ways To Boost SaaS Revenues With A Better Upgrade UX

Zapier monetization

Superhuman's Secret 1-on-1 Onboarding Revealed

Superhuman onboarding

Trello User Onboarding: 7 Tactics To Inspire You

Trello onboarding

5 Deadly Onboarding Mistakes You Should Avoid

Sleepzy onboarding

Duolingo's User Retention: 8 Tactics Tested On 300 Million Users

Duolingo retention

Calm Referral Strategy: Drive Viral Growth With Simple Rewards

Calm referrals

Spotify vs Apple: How Spotify is betting $230M on podcasts to win over Apple users (Ep. 2)

Spotify onboarding

Spotify vs Apple: How Spotify is betting $230M on podcasts to win over Apple users (Ep. 1)

Spotify vs Apple

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Below are the 7 case studies for product design: 1. Onio_Productisation_Ideas to Market Ready Product Development 2. Onio_Design_Product_Innovation_ Godrej_Vita__Hospital_bed 3. Onio_Design_Future of Small cars in India 4. Onio_Design_complex_products_robot_takshak 5. Onio_Design_category creation_Italia_Amaron 6. Onio_Design_Technology_Innovation_SES_treadmill 7. Onio_Design_Writing_Instrument_Lexi_FMCG

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Some of our successful collaborations.

Working with businesses both small and large we've worked on some pretty interesting projects over the years. Whilst not everything is able to be shown at once, please explore some of our previously successful case-studies.

Insight-driven Design.

An insight driven design process explores and uncovers the needs of users to create beneficial products. By putting people at the centre of our design approach we define new market opportunities, find new ways of applying technology and provide true benefits to individuals. Having worked across a broad range of design problems in numerous product sectors, our team are well placed to tackle some of the most demanding projects. Some of these applications include: ‍

Consumer products; consumer electronics / prams and pushchairs / children's toys and games /  men's and women's soft goods / audio-visual equipment /  computer peripherals / cookware / extreme sports equipment

Medical device design; drug delivery devices / surgical instruments

Industrial equipment; personal protective equipment (PPE) / HVAC and air filtration products

Industrial Design

Momo Audio Wireless Earbuds

ULU Herbal Oil Dispenser

Medical Device Design

Prima Medical Electrosurgical Devices

➔ coming soon more wonderful products currently in development.

Helloface Transparent Respirator

Heavy Industry M/ATX Computer Case

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Matthew Evershed Trigiene Dental

" As a start-up company on a tight schedule, we were very happy with one over three's responsiveness and quality of work. Their design and prototyping experience were impressive, and they provided great advice on areas outside the scope of our project - saving us valuable time. "

C.Sele 7Gen Gmbh

"One over three have been extremely helpful at every stage of my project. They had the information I needed at the start, and advised me on steps I wasn't even aware of. I highly recommend their services and will be working with them again on future projects."

L.Williams PXB Apparel

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6 Excellent Product Designer Case Studies & 8 Tips for Yours

What is the recipe for perfect product design case studies? The dozens of design leads and HR managers we’ve interviewed say that they expect a blend of

• storytelling
• stunning visuals and
• personality.

This article will guide you through the steps of creating case studies that check all those marks, and more! This is your one-stop source of tips and steps based on actual research, and real-life examples.

Let’s be honest: putting together a case study can be rather difficult. However, there are some techniques and tools that can help you along the way. One of those tools is UXfolio , our portfolio builder that makes the whole process faster and easier. Obviously, these 8 tips apply regardless of the tool you are using to build your product designer case studies.

1. Inject your personality into your case studies

Showing personality in a  product design portfolio , case study, or  resumé  can be challenging. Finding the balance between just enough and too much takes time and experimentation. Still, if you want to set yourself apart, you have to find ways to inject your personality into everything you submit with an application.

Here’s a pro tip:  whenever you relate something back to yourself, to your personal experience with the project, you’ll allow a small bit of your personality to shine. If you don’t go overboard, you will show just enough of yourself for recruiters to see the type of person and designer you are.

Define what you do

There are ways to sprinkle tidbits of your personality into everything you make. Start by clearly defining what you do. Do this in your portfolio and at the beginning of every case study: In what quality were you part of the project?

Find personal connection to the product

Next, you can share your connection with the product. Your case study intro is perfect for this. Answer questions such as:

• How did it relate to you (if it did)?
• Did you have any experience in this niche before?
• Were you using similar products before?

Talk about your experience throughout the process

In the body of your case study go on and talk about your experience throughout the project. Maybe this was your first time using a specific UX method. Let your readers know! Then go on and share what you liked about it, and what you didn’t.

Juniors have it easier

Leslie’s Meal Planner case study is the perfect example of a product designer case study based on a mock project. Putting together a portfolio as a junior designer – who doesn’t have real-life projects yet – is challenging to say the least. Most design leads advise juniors to build a portfolio based on

• internship experiences ,
• mock projects, or

The secret is to treat these mock-projects exactly as you’d treat real-life projects. Put in the research, testing, and the same effort you’d put in a real-life project. The best thing about mock-projects is that they provide plenty of room for your personality to shine. Just base them on topics or apps that interest you and let your readers know.

Check out Leslie’s introduction:

“I’ve been struggling with food allergies for years, so it seemed obvious that I will try to find a solution to this common problem.”

Immediately in her intro, we learn something personal about her. It is easy to see why she’s passionate about the topic. By kicking it off on a personal note, she pulls in the readers immediately.

This approach aligns with the advice that  Marc Greenberg , UX lead of Robotics at Postmates, gave to junior designers:

“Start close to you. Everyone can identify where their own frustrations, troubles, and difficulties lie. The first step is to design solutions to those things.”

2. Put everything in context

Both HR managers and design leads list ‘lack of explanation’ as a common reason for rejection. Our experience through expert reviews supports their statement.

Stop defining UX methods in your case studies

Many designers will list the methods they have used during a project. They do a good job of explaining the general purpose of said methods. The only problem is that both HR managers and design leads are aware of what ‘A/B testing’ is and what purpose it serves. What they don’t know is:

• Why did you choose that method for that specific project?
• What did you learn (or did not learn) by using that method?
• How did your findings influence the project?

By failing to answer those questions, your case study will fail to fulfill its purpose. The key is storytelling. In the context of UX portfolios, the word storytelling refers to the story of a specific design project and not the story of UX design in general. Storifying your design process is not that hard of a task. Just follow the golden rule:

Whenever you mention something in a case study, explain why it’s relevant to the project at hand and how it influenced your process.

Better Cover, a product design case study by Joanna Yoon, illustrates how to place research in context. Joanna lists the methods she used, then goes on to provide numbers and results. She presents the results in a visual way, which makes it even easier to digest all the data. And this takes us to our next tip: visuals.

3. Keep it visually consistent

Your taste level will be judged based on your portfolio and case studies, and not only the products that you’ve designed. Ideally, while working on something, you think in personas, mood boards, and design systems. Do the same when putting your portfolio together! After all, it’s a product designed by you.

Stop over-designing

Don’t go overboard with your portfolio design. The more stuff you add, the higher your chances of not matching the tastes of others. What’s even worse, you’ll ruin the UX of your portfolio. Check out what Spotify’s Paul Farino had to say about over-designed portfolios:

“I see some portfolios that may take ten seconds to load and it’s very flashy and there’s a lot going on on the screen. But those animations and that extra flare don’t contribute to the story you’re trying to tell. It actually just makes it a poor experience.”

You might think that things floating into the screen left and right show that you are tech-savvy and on-trend, but you are actually over-designing, which ruins an experience that would be seamless otherwise.

There are many well-written product design case studies out there that fail because of presentation. Design is the easiest part of case studies, especially if you are working from a template, such as the templates that you can generate via UXfolio .

Be mindful of colors

Keep in mind: your case study will already include some colors from the product itself. The safe thing is to use matching colors. Introducing new colors on top of what you inherit from the product is a risk that you should not take. It creates a mess, especially if your viewer doesn’t have the time to take it all in. Focus on keeping your fonts and colors consistent throughout the case study, portfolio, and resume.

Make it easy to skim

UX/UI Recruitment Consultant,  Joe Jackson , advises UX designers to 

“Make it digestible, skimmable, and impactful.”

Your case studies’ users – recruiters and design leads – spend a maximum of 3 minutes with one portfolio. If you have 3 case studies, that’s less than a minute per one. This means that you have to prioritize visual hierarchy.

Take the text of your case study, and see how it would work without the images. Did you use enough headings? Are they applied consistently for the same type of content? Can you organize some of your data into tables or illustrations? Did you use matching colors on your visuals?

Visual consistency checklist:

• Is my content organized into logical chunks consistently?
• Are my fonts consistent throughout the case study?
• Do I have a good text-to-image ratio?
• Is the style of my illustrations and images consistent?

As you can see the keyword here is ‘consistency’

4. UIs matter

When you ask HR managers whether UIs matter in UX portfolios, the answer will be ‘yes’. They know that UI and UX design are not the same. But that doesn’t change the fact that having stunning UIs in your case studies will increase your chances of landing a job. It’s not right, but it’s true. If you want to maximize your chances of success, accept the fact that UIs matter.

Here’s what  Tony Aube , Google AI’s Sr. Product Designer had to say about this:

“I believe UX portfolios have too much text and explanation about the design process, while they don’t have enough visuals. The truth is — and I have learned this the hard way — recruiters respond a lot more to visuals than to text.”

The thinking process behind this is very simple:

“If you can’t figure out something as simple as proper drop shadows, I doubt you will do a good job on a multimillion-dollar purchase flow redesign.”

Reasonable.

Just leave them out

If your UIs are not yet polished, it’s better to leave them out of your case studies. Remember: you will be judged on everything you present. It doesn’t matter if you explain right next to it that you have just dipped into visual design. The image will linger. If you don’t do UIs, stick to wireframes and protos, otherwise, you risk shooting yourself in the leg.

5. Deliver on the promises you made in your resume

Your resume, cover letter, about page, and case studies must be aligned both visually and content-wise. If you promise serious research-game in your resume, your case studies should stand proof for that. This way, by the time the HR manager finishes with your submission, they will be convinced that you are indeed big on research. But for this to happen, your entire application must reinforce the statements you make.

Make everything match

When you are eyeing one specific position at a company, align everything you submit with the job description. From your resume to your case studies, everything should support the fact that you are the best candidate. It might seem like too much effort, but in the end, it’ll be worth it. The least, you’ll end up with a brilliant portfolio.

There are plenty of UXfolio users who make great use of the multiple portfolios feature. They create different (password-protected) portfolios, tailored for different applications, and even different positions, such as product designer and UX writer. They understand the impact of a customized application.

6. Show your best work only

If you do a bad job with your own ‘product’, how could they trust you to do a good job with theirs?

Avoid showing mediocre or unfinished work. As mentioned before, you will be judged on everything you present, regardless of any explanation you provide. If your case study is still “in the works” or “coming,” do not feature it in your portfolio! If a case study doesn’t feel right to you, it won’t feel right to the HR manager either. And so on. You get the message: if it’s shaky it doesn’t have a place in your portfolio.

Apply this to everything

The same applies to the visuals you present. If they are shabby, you will be the applicant with the shabby visuals. You must treat your portfolio like you would treat a client. If you do a bad job with your own ‘product’, how could they trust you to do a good job with theirs?

Ask your teacher, your peers, or literally anyone to give feedback on your portfolio. Spam hundreds of Facebook groups with your case study, ask your teachers to review it, send it to HR managers for review. In UXfolio , you can request peer reviews as well as expert reviews. The latter will be given by our designers, who have seen thousands of portfolios.

Here’s Trevor Denton’s advice on the matter:

“Quality over quantity. Many designers oversaturate their portfolio with projects. You don’t need to show me every single thing that you’ve done. Show me the things that you’re most proud of!”

7. Reflect and plan

Close your case studies with reflections and learnings. We work in an industry that evolves at a rapid pace. We must do the same to keep relevant. And openness to learn new things is at the core of evolution.

Mention what you’ve gained professionally from each project, even if it’s a mock-project.

Even the most mundane projects can bring something that contributes to your professional growth. It’s all just a matter of perspective. So, mention what you’ve gained professionally from each project, even if it’s a mock-project.

End with ‘Next steps’

As a product designer, you are well aware that a product is rarely finished. There are always tweaks that could make it even better. There are things that you find important but you couldn’t accomplish. Collect all of these into a ‘Next steps’ section, to show your awareness. Such a section also proves that you think ahead.

So, give your reflections and lay out your plans and ideas for future improvements.

8. Give credit for good karma

Paul Farino , Spotify’s Sr. Product Designer put it best:

“A lot of times we see case studies at a large company and you know they had a ton of other designers, whether researchers or product folks involved. It usually makes for good karma to give credit.”

Not only is it good karma, but it is also extremely beneficial for you. Most positions require the candidate to be a good team player. What better way to show that you fit that criteria than giving credit to the people that have contributed to your work? However, there is a way to do this right.

Let’s say, you have been working closely with front-end developers. When you mention this, describe what type of a collaboration it was. What did it involve? How did you make it work? Maybe you had a dedicated researcher to help you collect all the data. Mention how did you align the research and design. How did the researchers’ work influence yours? It’s all about giving context.

Take the advice of Google UX Design Lead,  Koji Pereira :

“No good product gets created by one person. So you don’t have to mention names, but it makes for good practice to just say, ‘In this project, I had two designers and five engineers working with me.’ (…) We at Google want to know if you’ve ever worked with a researcher. Have you ever worked with an engineer or a PM?”

Build meaningful case studies with UXfolio!

UXfolio is a powerful portfolio and case study building tool that’ll save you hours of work. Our pre-made case study sections come with image ideas and text prompts that’ll guide you through the entire process. Your only job is to focus on the content! Try UXfolio for free!

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Top companies want to see your design process and decisions in your portfolio

A typical mistake I see in UX portfolios is lack of content explaining their contribution to the effort, the images are only the final product and not the process to get there.

UX is very much about strategy and if the person is not showing how they got from A to B, they appear to be another UI trying to move into a UX role.

Start creating a UX portfolio , that gets you hired