Alfred Kahn

Everything mentioned above are good things to include, but they are all focused on nuts & bolts items. If you want to stand out, be sure to illustrate how you delivered value to the your company for every project in your portfolio. Basically, don't just include the "what", include the "so what" too!

All the suggestions mentioned in the article and the comments are very useful, but I think the most important step is to start by writing a User Research Plan and then share it with stakeholders. This should be a pretty low-effort endeavor, in fact, Tomer Sharon created a great 1-page research plan template you can use: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/ux-research-plan-stakeholders-love/

50% of design is sales: you are selling a concept, research findings, designs, etc. But as designers we can be good at it if we apply UX techniques – understand the needs, goals, motivations and context of your stakeholders (they are just like users), and craft your message and deliver for them. And always, always, always tell a story!!!

User Research is absolutely critical: while it is possible to do great design work without it, the risk of being off the mark is huge, and frankly very few designers can pull it off. One of the challenges that many designers confront is that they are not given the time/pace for research. One way that I have dealt with that is to say usability testing is the design's QA, and that I would be happy to give that up if engineering is willing to give up QA. Basically, if they think they can write perfect, error-free code, we are willing to take the same risk with our design work. That usually ends the objections. Finally, if you can only get the space for usability testing, do RITE testing and piggy-back some guerilla research on each round!

It's pretty straightforward to wrap the evaluation of third-party components or plugins to your usual usability testing program. You can create scenarios and tasks that make it likely that participants use the components and then you can use the data you capture from observing your participants to evaluate the accessibility of the components/plugins you are using. You are probably doing this for design system components already, so including third-party components into your process should not be much of a stretch.

All of the methods covered in this section and the contributions are good, solid tools, but don't forget that you might be able to leverage published studies and academic research as well. Secondary sources are perfectly valid and can be a rich compliment to your primary research!