UXMas: The UX Portfolio — Telling Your Story
I was happy enough to contribute my festive cheer over at UXMas. The story, The UX Portfolio: Telling Your Story, was great fun.
Here’s an excerpt:
Tell One or Two Big Stories
There should be at least one or two projects that you can tell a user experience story about, from inception to release. This means showing off some actual project deliverables—for instance:
- the user research you performed
- the actors and personas you developed
- the user stories you wrote
It also means talking about the project. For example:
- the process you followed to come up with user goals
- the assumptions you made, and how you validated them
- your design considerations
Explaining the full lifecycle illustrates how you think, and gives your audience a more complete picture. Lynn Teo, CXO at McCann Erickson, covers this process extremely well in her presentation, Portfolios Matter: Building the Portfolio to Win the Job.
Once you’ve set the scene, it’s time to play your trump card: demonstrate the only deliverable that truly matters—the final product.
When talking about my portfolio, I frequently talk about Jobvite because we were able to achieve the full lifecycle on that project. However I also talk about a small business called Bob The Chiropractor, because it’s big story about a small business. It’s a project that demonstrates how, even with limited resources, you can achieve great things.
No project is too small to illustrate the big idea.
Cheers.
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