Web design concept from Shutterstock The following is a guest post from Joanne Weaver, head of The Joanne Weaver Group, a recruitment agency for creative business professionals. These tips, gleaned from years of experience, are geared towards UX folks, but should be valuable for user-centered visual designers, too. YOUR UX BRAND STARTS AT THE GET-GO From the moment a hiring manager opens your introductory email, itâs âgame on.â You are creating your own personal UX brand at every touchpoint â from your initial email (personalized to the recipient, easy to read, links included), to your resume and portfolio. You are selling your ability to create a fantastic user experience on the job so make sure your initial presentation proves youâve got the goods. Your portfolio is a wonderful opportunity to show off your storytelling skills and knowledge of best UX practices. AND NOW, THE PORTFOLIO! These are the types of deliverables that I love to see (in this order): ⢠whiteboarding / sticky notes (shows your thinking and conceptual ability) ⢠personae ⢠annotated wireframes representing as many platforms as possibleâmobile and tablet (iOS, Android, and/or Windows), web apps, websites, kiosks/touchscreens, etc. And the heavier-lifting, the better, i.e. an e-commerce site or transactional mobile app trumps a microsite or mobile game. Put your heaviest-hitting stuff further up in your book. ⢠sitemaps / user flows ⢠finished visual designs of the project are a nice touch; if you didnât do the design yourself, make sure to mention that in your portfolio. Team working creatively image from Shutterstock What format to choose in showcasing your work: ⢠If you have a website: Before I even look at the work itself, Iâm judging the layout and design of the site. If I canât navigate through your site easily, itâs game over. Again, simple and elegant wins every time. Get a designer to help you if visual design isnât your bag. ⢠An updated, downloadable resume in the âAboutâ section of your website is essential, and a choice between .pdf and .doc formats is a nice touch. ⢠If you donât have a website, all good! I actually sometimes prefer a pdf booklet of your âbiggest hits.â Itâs a no-brainer in terms of navigation â you canât go wrong with up and down arrows â and you can tailor the content and the positioning of that content for each role you target. ⢠Create a single link to your portfolio if itâs large (i.e. a Dropbox link), or make it under 10MB so you can send it as an attachment in an email. Twenty pages ought to do the trick. Present just enough to tell a story and create enough interest for them to invite you in for an interview. Do what you do best: Tell a story All of the above pointers are moot if you donât provide context and storytelling around them â this part of your portfolio is CRUCIAL! You can approach the storytelling aspect in a couple of different ways: Ideally, you have a sampling of deliverables across a single project that you can walk people through, with a running narrative of what the project challenge was and how you solved a problem, step by step. (See more on this topic here.) Barring that, Iâd show as many of those types of deliverables as you can, across multiple projects. You want a hiring manager to know that you can execute on all those different types of deliverables. That said, donât scrimp on the storytelling, and the explanation of what someone is looking at so they can make sense of it and understand context. You want someone to feel like youâre holding their hand and walking them through your book as much as possible. Resist the urge to overshare! Refrain from showing work that you arenât legally supposed to show, or that might make a former client upset if they saw it on your site. If you do, you run the risk of making a potential employer think âWould they do this to us, too?â Password protect your sensitive work. Again, the more discreet you are here, the more trust you engender with whomeverâs peeping your work. Long live the elegance and kindness of great user-centered design, everywhere! Joanne Weaver heads up The Joanne Weaver Group, and balances her UX recruitment career with her music career. She walks the walk in her unshakable stand for people discovering and living their dreams.
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