Design a UX Portfolio Recruiters Read For More Than 1 Minute 

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GMT20250818-160116_Recording_avo_1280x720: Hello everyone. Happy Monday. We are gonna get started here with our. UX portfolio mini workshop, where we’re going to give you some really practical tips for how to make your portfolio optimized so that recruiters and hiring managers actually spend more than one minute. On it.

So that is our game plan for today. We’re gonna be moving really quickly. And I am just going to share my slides

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GMT20250818-160116_Recording_avo_1280x720: All right, so how do we make a portfolio that people are gonna read for more than one minute? You see this stat all over Instagram, LinkedIn, et cetera. They don’t read, they skim, they only spend seconds on your portfolio, et cetera.

My stance on this is. They will spend [00:01:00] more time if you make it easy for them to do so. So that is what we’re going to go over to day. Specifically we’re gonna give you a framework for not just writing the content of your portfolio, but also how to literally lay out and design some of these slides.

So. A little bit about me in case you haven’t, uh, met me yet. I’m Sarah Doty. I’ve been in the field of user research and product design for 20 plus years. I’m also the host of the Career strategy podcast and the founder and CEO of career Strategy Lab. So one of the things I wanna do just to kind of like set the stage here, so I’m guessing you’re here because you want to.

Improve your portfolio. Right? And why do you wanna do that? You probably want to be in a position to either get hired right now ’cause you’re in a job search right now. Maybe you’re happily employed and you want to [00:02:00] position yourself to stay at that company and get promoted. Or maybe you’re happily employed and you’re.

Doing this now is gonna be a lot easier than if I am laid off, right? And so in order to get hired or promoted, there’s really three things that you need to have in place. We’re not gonna go into all of these today, but you need a design strategy, a marketing strategy, and a sales strategy. Four getting hired or getting promoted.

And so today we’re gonna go over this part here, creating the portfolio, which was one of the three things that we need to be doing in our marketing strategy for us. All right, so let’s dive into this portfolio strategy.

So. Your portfolio is probably being ignored right now because you are not designing for the users of your portfolio. And when I say designing, I mean both designing the content and [00:03:00] the layout. Your portfolio. So let’s briefly talk about the users of your portfolio. I will also send you an article I wrote that goes into more detail about the multiple users of your portfolio.

And of course my little icons didn’t translate when I exported, but who are the three users? Well, let’s think about the hiring process, right? So you apply for a role over here, someone likely the recruiter or HR person is vetting you, right? So that’s one of the users, that person who’s doing the initial vetting.

Then you’ll get into the interview process, right? That is where the hiring manager. And or your future colleagues, peers, et cetera, like people that also might be viewing you people who are a part of like a panel interview or something like that. Right? So these are really the three users. The recruiter [00:04:00] slash hiring manager, or the recruiter slash HR person, the hiring manager, and then your future colleagues and peers.

Those are the three users. Now, let’s think about some of the traits of these people. And we don’t have time to go into like a deep dive to all of them, but we know they are busy vetting a high number of candidates, right? You see the jobs that are posted, there’s 50, 100, 200, 300 applicants, right? So they’re dealing with a large number of people, right?

As a result. Of the high number of people applying, they don’t have a lot of time. Right? And what do they wanna see? This third one, this is really important. They wanna see examples of your skills in action. Or you can think about it as the receipts, right? It’s not just enough to say you have the skills.

It’s not just enough to say you do user research. They want to see examples of that in your [00:05:00] portfolio that go into the details of your thought process, your decision making, et cetera. Now they initially do skim through your portfolio, right? But if we give them a reason to, they’re going to start reading.

And it’s a pretty safe assumption that the further you get into the interview process, you’re into round 2, 3, 4 of interviews, they’re spending more time on your portfolio, right? Because they don’t wanna miss, make a mistake and hire the wrong person because that’s an expensive mistake, right? So they’re gonna do more due diligence and spend more time the further you get now.

You might be thinking, well, how the heck do I design one portfolio for all three of these people? And what I’m gonna show you today is a portfolio framework that I believe really does meet all of the needs for these people with [00:06:00] one approach to creating your portfolio. And how do I know this? It’s because I’ve been teaching this framework since 2017 and helping people get hired despite the job market.

With this exact strategy. So how are we gonna meet the needs of all these people without creating the separate portfolio for them? We’re going to use something from journalism. Maybe you’ve heard of this before, but in journalism there’s this framework called the inverted pyramid, and it goes like this.

At the top of, uh, a story in journalism, there’s always something called the lead, which really is like, what’s the most important information? And then there’s the body of this story, like the details, background, et cetera. And then we get into the tail. That could be additional background also like extra facts, information, et cetera.

So let’s look at a real example. ’cause if you’re like me, [00:07:00] you learn better with exact examples. So the. Inverted pyramid framework in action in journalism. And then I’m gonna show you how this tracks to your portfolio. So Taylor Swift has been in the news recently and just conveniently, I already had this example teed up for this.

But let’s look at this real news article from when Taylor and Travis first started dating. And let’s look at where we see the lead, the body, and the tail from our inverted pyramid show up. In this article. So where is the lead? Well, it’s right here. Will Taylor Swift Return as Chief’s Cheerleader for 2024?

2025 season? Okay. You can kind of think of the lead like as the title or the headline. It’s like if someone only reads this thing, they’re kind of in the know. Right? They have the gist of what the rest of that story is going to [00:08:00] be talking about. Right. Now we move into the body. Obviously it’s the. Bulk of the article, right?

And we can think of this as kind of supporting information that goes into the detail of Will Taylor Swift return as chief’s cheerleader for 20 24, 25 season, right? So it’s kind of building a case. As to why Taylor might be at more Chiefs games, if you read it, it goes into details of her attendance at the previous season.

It goes into examples of how she and Taylor, or she and Travis go to great lengths to be there for each other at, you know, her concerts and his games, et cetera. Then the tail. That’s where you’re kind of like geeking out, like you’re a swifty and you’re going into all the extra details about their relationship and the evolution of their relationship, and examples of like public expression about the [00:09:00] seriousness of their relationship and all of these details.

Now, if you don’t read the tale, you’re still gonna have a ton of information from this body, and even if you only read the lead. You still kind of know what’s happening in the zeitgeist, right? Will Taylor Swift return as chief’s cheerleader for 20 24, 20 25 season? Every single news article, every like interview you see on the news every, podcast, even like news podcasts, they all get your attention with the lead. Then if they get your attention, you’re gonna listen to that supporting information in the body, and if you stick around long enough, you’re gonna get the tail, that background information where you can really nerd out on whatever topic is being discussed.

Now, this is a tried and true storytelling framework. That really is going to help you with your portfolio also, [00:10:00] because we know portfolios are about storytelling, right? You see all day long on LinkedIn, et cetera. People saying Tell a story. Tell a story, and they give kind of vague advice as how to do that in your portfolio.

This is super practical and it’s gonna help solve your content problem and your design problem when it comes to your portfolio. So let’s look at an example. For the purposes of this, I’m gonna work from an example of a portfolio that is a presentation. I have other podcast interview or podcast episodes and articles about why I think a presentation is the best structure for your portfolio.

You can dive into that later, but for now, that’s why we’re looking at a presentation slide here. So, one thing I wanna point out too is that the layout you’re seeing on this slide. It is not meant to be an exact cookie cutter prescription saying like, every slide [00:11:00] in your portfolio must have this large text at the top and then two columns.

That is not what we’re talking about, but I am gonna point out some of the elements that should be on every slide. So let’s go back to our portfolio pyramid framework, right? So the lead on this slide. We have the lead, which is the most important information, which is really the headline. So how do you make the lead or the headline stand out?

You put it in a larger font, right? Because we know when something is a larger font or larger physical size, it stands out in the hierarchy of information. In this case, on the portfolio slide. And when something stands out in a hierarchy. Our eye goes to it and we are more likely to read it, right? Just like whoever designed this article, detail page for NBC News, they want you to read Will Taylor Swift return, blah, [00:12:00] blah, blah.

Therefore, they made it a larger font size, right? That’s hierarchy. Sorry if you already knew that, but based on all the portfolios, I see a lot of people don’t get that. So. Headline is our lead, the most important, and we make it stand out by making it a larger font size that’s going to hopefully get their attention so that they actually start to read some of the rest of the information on the slide.

Next, the body, so the body information on your slide. Similar to that article is really meant to support whatever that headline was. So if this headline was about doing user research interviews, the body information might go into, well, why did you decide user research? Was the right research method. Why didn’t you do a survey versus research?

Why did you decide [00:13:00] to do in-person research versus virtual research? Why did you decide to use this certain software, et cetera, right? So you’re supporting whatever that headline is, and then we go into extra information. Where there might be more details about that research that you did, et cetera. If, if someone doesn’t read this background information, though, they still know a ton about the research you did and why you did it.

Just from the headline, the lead and the body information, this is also. How we satisfy the three users of our portfolio. Right, because that busy HR person or recruiter, yes. They’re probably just reading this on every slide and glossing over this, but that hiring manager and people who are going to interview you, they [00:14:00] hopefully and are more likely to.

Read this stuff. If you do a layout like this, where most importantly we’re having a lead or a headline, that is drawing them into the rest of the information on the slide, so this only works though. If you pay attention to the content and the design of your slides, right? Because if we had a slide that looked like this, it’s the same information as what was back here, but where does your eye go?

It’s, it doesn’t know where to go because there’s no hierarchy on this slide because everything is the same font size, and I guess maybe your eye might go to this little graphic over here, but that’s kind of useless, right? It’s probably not gonna catch someone’s attention. They’re probably gonna stay on this slide for like [00:15:00] 0.01 seconds and move on.

’cause they’re just like, this is a bunch of text. I’m moving on. Right. Versus this. Okay. Their eye is like, I am gonna start here. Why? Because it’s standing out in the hierarchy of information. Same thing with this, right? Like so many portfolios neglect, simple, simple, simple design principles like hierarchy.

And as a result, your portfolio looks like a giant wall of text, like in encyclopedia, and our eyes are like, cannot compute, and our brain is like. Also cannot compute, and then we’re moving on and we’re not reading and we’re spending less than a minute on your portfolio. So that is how we can get people to spend more time with our portfolio if we design with these three users in mind.

And when you’re thinking about the content and design, you’re being very [00:16:00] intentional about what is the lead of this slide. What is the body information of this slide and what is the tail information of this slide? Now also, bonus here, I wasn’t gonna say this, but it just popped into my brain.

If you do this, you will be. Much more prepared going into UX job interviews because you’ll have thought through what you did in more detail than probably what you’ve done so far in your portfolio. So let’s translate this to some really practical things you can to start to assess your own portfolio and see if you are using this inverted pyramid already.

Or it maybe if. You could start using it next time you work on your portfolio. So if you only take one thing away, we [00:17:00] need to make sure that every single slide has these three things. Now, this headline though, this is important. The lead, we want to make sure that whatever that lead is, if someone only reads that, literally, if they only read that.

What are they learning about you and your skills and experience? Because if you look at your portfolio right now, I guarantee that probably 50% of you who are here probably more, but let’s be conservative. The, the slide, your portfolio slide, whatever, is in a larger font size at the top of it, it is probably something like.

Just one or two words, more like a title. It’s probably like user research wire frames, user flow personas things like that. And that’s kind of [00:18:00] useless, right? It’s not telling anyone what you did versus if you make that large font in your case, the title, right? ’cause most of you are just saying wire frames.

User research personas, right? If you turn that into more of a sentence, a lead from journalism, that’s how you’re gonna catch people’s attention. So how do we test for the presence of a lead slash headline? I interchange those words, so don’t be confused. I’m taking the concept of lead from journalism, and I am saying, let’s write a headline.

Versus a one or two word title for the top of your portfolio slides. So number one in the chat, let me know. I’m really curious. But number one, looking at your portfolio right now, whether it’s a website or a presentation, obviously we can still do [00:19:00] this same test together. But does your portfolio use headlines?

Meaning like true sentences that are at the top of every slide, just like we saw, right? This? Or do you just have one or two word titles?

So how many of you already have headlines or at the top of your portfolio slides? Is it just like user flows, wireframe personas, research, like one or two word titles essentially? Right.

Okay. Christina has a generic title, right? And now Christina, like, can you tell the difference between if, if you do what we just learned versus you keep your one or two word titles, you are instantly going to be doing a better job at storytelling, but also you’re making it easier for your user. To understand the story of what you did.

Now, if your portfolio is a presentation, one of the things that I [00:20:00] do that’s really easy, and it’s the first thing I do when I critique portfolios, I go in, like if I’m in preview, right? Like literally with these slides right now, I could say Vu, contact sheet. Then I can see all the slides in miniature format, right?

So if your portfolio is a presentation, do that. And then you’re gonna see something like this, right? And if I’m critiquing a portfolio, even though these are like the size of a postage stamp right now, I can tell. That at least this person has headlines on the slides, right? They’re small, but I know they’re there right now.

It’s a different question, the quality of the text in those headlines, but at least we know headlines exist. Then when I go into each slide, I’m gonna pay attention to the literal words in each those headlines. So that’s kind of like [00:21:00] part one of the headline test that I would encourage you to do. But let’s look at an example of where if I was critiquing a portfolio, I would be thinking, wow, major red flags.

All the red highlighted. That means the headline exists, right? Headline, headline, headline, headline, headline. What we wanna avoid, and it sounds like Christina, maybe you did this, is this where we have a slide in our portfolio and it just says wire frames, it just says research.

It just says personas. It just says outcome. Right? Instead, we wanna have a headline at the top of the slides. So keep that tucked in your brains, but that’s what we wanna do. So. After this workshop, or even as we’re doing it right now, you probably already have a sense of, okay, I nailed the headlines, or, wow, I did not nail them, or, wow, I never even thought about that.

And I’m hoping that after this workshop, [00:22:00] if you were to work on your portfolio, the number one thing I would say to do is not worry about everything else on the slide. Just focus on your headlines. And once you rewrite your headlines, then you could move on to step two of our little headline experiment.

And if, if it were me, I would literally cut and paste every single headline into a Google Doc, so I am not distracted by the rest of the information on that slide. I would like grab a coffee or something and look at that Google Doc and read those headlines out loud. And as you do that, I guarantee you’re going to start to think to yourself, wow, this feels off.

This is not specific enough. This story does not make sense. The order of information does not make sense, et cetera, because [00:23:00] we know. If we design our portfolio such that we have a headline in a large font size at the top, we’re gonna increase the chances that people are gonna read this. But if they read these and they’re confusing, they’re not gonna read the rest of it.

So that’s why I’m suggesting let’s really prioritize the headlines by putting them in a single Google Doc. Reading them literally out loud. This would also be a great test to do with like a friend or a colleague or something. Like read your headlines out loud to each other and see if they make sense.

But let’s see. Thar said, have a few headlines that are good, but many could use some more detail, right? And by detail, like you don’t just want your headline to say. Next. I did user research to understand more about the problem, right? Because that sentence could be in anyone [00:24:00] else’s portfolio.

That is boring. I did user research to understand the user’s problems. It’s like, well, obviously that’s why you do research. It kind of sounds like an answer to a question in like. What is the purpose of user research? If there was like a, UX exam, right? So instead you might say next I did 20 in-person interviews with people on our free trial.

To understand more about why they are not converting to paid users. Wow, what a difference, right? So that is an example of the specifics that you could put in a headline. We’re trying to make this manageable, right? Because you probably have a bookmark folder or saved collection on Instagram or LinkedIn or something of like a million portfolio tips, but then when you sit down to work on your portfolio, you’re like, well, I still dunno what to do, right? I don’t even know which tip to apply first.

This is what you should apply [00:25:00] first. ’cause it’s gonna help lock in the story you’re telling and it’s gonna help inform what else should be on those slides, right? The body and the tail. One thing I will say, not every literal slide will end up with a like tail information, for example. So like this is a framework.

It is not like. The laws of making your portfolio. So you’re all very smart, so use your own kind of critical thinking here. But at minimum, we need a lead or a headline on every single slide. here’s The test. I kind of, I tell people I coach, but like if you were to tweet out or put it in threads or whatever, each of your headlines in a tweet or a post on threads, after people read that, would they get the gist of what you did or would it kind of just sound like a bunch of answers to questions on a UX exam?

Right. First we [00:26:00] identified the problem. Then we did user research to confirm the problem. Then we create some wire frames to visualize the product. You know, like if, if it reads like that. You did it wrong, but if it reads like my example a few minutes ago, you did it right. Okay, so we tackled. Portfolio that stands out. Even, even if you just do these headlines, I promise your portfolio is going to improve. And it’s going to give you some guidelines for what maybe you need to add to your portfolio to support that headline.

Also, maybe stuff you could remove that is not supporting that headline. So quick recap here. We have to consider the users of our portfolio. There’s three of them. Though, they all have different needs. Some of the needs overlap. You can design one portfolio that meets all of their needs.

And I’m saying this because many of the people, [00:27:00] 99.99% of the people that I work with on their portfolios and they get interviews and they got hired. They’re not creating seven different versions of their portfolio. One for the recruiter, one for the hiring manager, one for this, one for that, et cetera.

They’re doing one because they know they have a lot of other stuff to do in their job search, and if they spend time making millions of versions of portfolio for all these users, they don’t have time to do everything else. So we can achieve that one portfolio for all our users with this inverted pyramid framework.

Most important, we gotta have headlines, headlines, headlines. Headlines. Okay. And the best way to test your headlines is to do that headline test. Cut and paste them into a Google Docs. You’re not distracted with everything else. Read through them and see if that makes sense. Right? All right, so I mentioned I’m teaching you this because I know it works.

’cause I see people get hired. [00:28:00] And people get hired. They also have another thing in common, and I know this because even though many of you think the summer is slow and no one’s hiring and UX is dead and the economy’s tanking and all this stuff, I have still seen people getting hired all summer, more than three.

These are just the three I selected. But they got hired at Fidelity, Liberty Mutual, Geico, also JetBlue a couple of days ago. A cannabis startup an ai, FinTech startup, et cetera. So, but what did all these three people have in common? Well, more than three. In addition to having a portfolio that had headlines, they also did all these other things, and we don’t have time to go into it, but.

I look at getting hired or promoted as really similar to launching a product. Right? And successful products have three things in common. They have an awesome design strategy meaning like a product roadmap, product vision, elevator pitch, et cetera, right? [00:29:00] Products that are successful have an awesome design strategy.

They obviously have a awesome marketing strategy. They obviously have an awesome sales strategy, and so I have applied that to essentially what I call the product of you. So if you wanna get hired or promoted, you too need this design strategy, the marketing strategy, and the sales strategy for whatever your goal is hired or promoted, right?

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GMT20250818-160116_Recording_avo_1280x720: I saw another question here I just wanted to address.

So, let’s see. what if you’ve only done visual design as a freelancer on projects? And not full-fledged testing, et cetera. Is it okay to only show that much information? I love this question. One of the questions I’m asked all the time is, can I include this project in my portfolio, even if it did not launch, even if it skipped user research, right?

Even if. Insert your reason there. The answer is yes. Because in your case you said you’ve [00:30:00] only done more of the visual design part. Well, if you’re applying for jobs it sounds like maybe you’re applying for more like product design, visual design jobs, right? So those job descriptions. They’re not going to expect you to be an expert at every other part of user experience, right?

So if you worked on a project that skipped research number one, that is not your fault. That does not mean that the work you did isn’t worth showing. That just means that someone. The team or the client said, we don’t have time or money to skip research, or we don’t need to do research.

’cause I think I know what’s best. Right? We’ve all heard that before. So permission to include projects that did not launch or did not tick the box of this kind of proverbial UX process that you’re supposed to show in your portfolio because. [00:31:00] There is a lot of advice out there that makes you think your portfolio must tick the box of every step in the double diamond process or whatever process is popular right now, right?

Not true. If you’re a user researcher, your portfolio. We’ll probably include projects that don’t go into a ton of design. Right. Because you’re trying to show off your research skills. So that was a long answer. I’m sorry. I get really passionate about this stuff. Okay, Grantley said I’m using a website for my portfolio.

Should I be using a presentation instead? Really, the short answer is in your job search, you need to think like a product manager. And product managers are always triaging time, effort, and money, right? And so in your job search, if you create a website that often turns into a lot of time and money that maybe you didn’t expect you would need to spend, number one.

Number two, I think ahead in the interview process. And I think, okay, so your [00:32:00] website got you some interviews. Great. You move along in the interviews and they’re like, oh, great. The next interview is gonna be where you’re going to present something from your portfolio. The question really becomes then are you gonna present right from your website or are you gonna be like, oh my gosh, I need a rush to make a presentation.

Right. And I, I know, ’cause I’ve seen it for years and years and years. People are able to get interviews and offers with a presentation. Then later, after you’re hired, fine, go make a website, make a landing page, whatever. It’s great. But in the middle of an active job search, you have so much else to do. That’s why I’m really advocating for presentation first, and then do whatever you want after you’re hired.

Yeah. All right. Bye guys. See ya.