Radu Vucea ⭐️

There's nothing more effective for creating credibility and visibility into the value of UX research than involving your stakeholders. So make sure UX research is not limited to the design team but that you bring in Product Managers, Software Engineers, and Stakeholders. The more you involve your peers, and they get to see the benefits of UX research and how you're running it, the better.

Keeping your portfolio up-to-date and relevant is definitely essential. However, don't fall into the trap of feeling you constantly have to do that. An update every 6 to 12 months is more than enough. I've seen designers paralyzed by the need to constantly tweak and update their portfolio, focusing entirely on that and postponing other important tasks, such as actually applying to roles.

It's important to note that your online portfolio plays only a small part in getting a role as a designer. In its online form, your portfolio merely serves as a quick filter for the hiring team so that they can move you to the interview phase, and nobody (that I know of) got an offer only for their amazing portfolio. I'm mentioning this because too many designers focus only on their portfolio and almost rarely on other skills.

Interactive elements can effectively make your portfolio website more engaging. However, more often than not, people overdo this, resulting in chaos that will have the opposite effect of what you were hoping, confusing people and driving them away. So, please be careful and not overdo it. Sometimes, just a hover effect or a simple transition animation is all that you need.

Although I agree that you should showcase your personality, I disagree that this needs to be done through visual elements like colors and fonts. The goal of your portfolio is to convey your skills and experience effectively. Too often, I see young designers going crazy with fonts, colors, and illustrations to the point that it gets out of control. This results in a difficult-to-read portfolio. If you want to showcase who you are as an individual, you can do that through a curated portfolio (e.g. I'm showing only non-profit work) and a simple introductory video that can be front and center on your homepage and can convey your personality a thousand times better than any typeface.

Most portfolios I see these days focus too heavily on a "process" and its deliverables. This is a mistake. Most companies will never be able to solve design problems through a linear process, and the deliverables a designer creates are a means to an end. Companies hire designers to solve problems and create impact, not to sketch personas. To tell an effective story, you should focus on your goals rather than wireframes and user flows. These deliverables should be introduced as a means to an end, such as creating clarity, validating concepts, or testing a hypothesis. So please avoid a portfolio or case study that goes like this: context, problem statement, secondary research, primary research, flows, wireframes, etc.