UX Portfolio Myth: Your UX portfolio does not need to be a website (Myth 2 / 5)

Sarah (00:00)

Your UX portfolio does not need to be a website. And by making a website, you are probably risking the first impression that recruiters and hiring managers have about you. And that website you’re trying to make is probably causing you a lot of frustration, a lot of headaches, which is causing your portfolio to take longer than it needs to be to actually have it finished so you can start.

applying. So today I’m going to tell you what the alternative is to a portfolio website.

welcome back. We are in week two of our series about the five portfolio myths. If you are just coming to this podcast from this episode, make sure you look back to see last week’s episode, which was the myth that you need three to five projects in your portfolio. You do not. We’ll also link up all the episodes in the show notes.

So you’ve probably heard this advice that your portfolio must be a website. And people have probably told you, well, if you want to get hired in UX, you need to have a website because the website will prove to people that you can do UX. But last time I checked, not everyone who works in UX is literally responsible for the launching of a production-ready website. So

Let’s think about this. Instead, you need to create a portfolio that gets you applying and hired faster. And your portfolio website is probably taking you a heck of a lot longer to create than you thought it would. And it’s probably blowing the first impression that you’re creating with recruiters and hiring managers because what I have seen for almost a decade.

Of talking about and looking at portfolios when people started asking me about them in 2017, I have found that so many portfolio websites that people send me, even people with 10, 15, 25 years of experience in UX, those websites are hard to navigate. They lack hierarchy. It is

Hard to consume the actual content. The portfolio is not skimmable or scannable, or it loads really slow. And a busy recruiter or hiring manager does not have time to fumble through the UX or lack of UX on your portfolio website. And it’s not that you don’t know what good user experience is, it’s just that.

Wrangling these tools to make your website can cause you to take so much time trying to figure out how to use the tool that you don’t have energy left to fix all the UX mistakes, the navigation, the hierarchy, the skimmability, the scannability, all that stuff. So that’s kind of part one. But part two is that let’s focus on.

Using the tool to create our portfolio that we can work fastest in, and that is going to reduce friction for you in the creating of your portfolio and friction for the user, meaning the recruiter or hiring manager. So, my my counter to a portfolio website is to make a presentation. A portfolio presentation is free, right?

doesn’t require extra software. It will probably take you weeks instead of months. And another benefit to a portfolio presentation is that you can tailor it for each role you apply to. Whereas if you make a portfolio website, how are you exactly going to tailor that website for every job you apply to? Like serious question.

And sure, there’s probably ways you could do it. You could create a login and a password and, you know, change it for each person, but guess what? That’s now introducing friction to that person, the busy recruiter or hiring manager who’s trying to look at your portfolio, right? And it’s not just the friction, it’s the risk that they enter the wrong password or the wrong username and then they never look at your portfolio because they got frustrated and went on to the next person. Whereas with a presentation,

To customize it for the role you’re applying to, all you need to do is just duplicate the presentation. And maybe you’re gonna rephrase some things. Maybe you’re gonna rearrange the literal order of projects. Let’s say you have two projects in your portfolio, and the second one is way more relevant to the role you’re applying to. Let’s put that, let’s put that case study first versus second in that presentation, right? So

My counter to people who say, Well, you need a portfolio website to show that you know UX, is this unless you’re being literally hired to be responsible for the building of websites, then I don’t think you need a portfolio website, right? If you’re a front-end developer who’s being hired to build websites, then yes.

They are probably going to want to see examples of your code, right? So make a website. But most UX people do not need a website to show their UX skills. I just think this is a myth that people have just subscribed to without asking why. Why do I need a website? Right. And if people are telling you this right now, I would go back to them and say, okay, you told me to make a website.

But why? And if they don’t have a decent answer for you, then that’s probably a signal that they are just telling you something they read somewhere else and they haven’t thought about the why behind it. Now, recruiters and hiring managers, they want to hear about and see your thinking. They wanna see and hear about your problem solving, how you dealt with twists and turns in projects.

They are not hiring you for your web development skills unless that is part of the job description, okay? And a website, like I said, can actually hurt your first impression because of mistakes that are happening with navigation, content design, layout, and a bunch of other stuff. So let’s go through kind of a little pro-con list of making a portfolio website versus a presentation. So time.

Website is gonna take you months. For some of you, years. I have literally had people come to me and say, I’ve been trying to make my portfolio website for years. One guy told me this was before AI, but he told me, I’ve been working on my portfolio for over a year because I’m using it as an opportunity to learn to code. And it’s like, why would you make your first project that you code?

Be your portfolio. Arguably one of the most important projects you’re going to work on, right? So time. Making a website is going to be a lot harder than you think because despite what all these portfolio platforms and website builders tell you, it’s not always as easy as you think to get things to show up exactly as you want on the screen. Presentation, on the other hand, will take you weeks, possibly days, depending on

Your starting point, right? Like if you already have case studies written, you can have this presentation ready to go in days. cost, right? Website is probably going to have a bunch of costs. You need a domain, you have to pay for hosting, software. And hey, what happens if six months from now that company where your portfolio website lives like doubles their prices? Then what are you gonna do? But a presentation, I mean, you probably already have the software.

To make the presentation, right? Whether that’s Google Slides, Keynote, PowerPoint, Figma Slides, Canva, whatever, it’s probably already something that you have access to. So make a presentation is possibly free, if not cheaper than a website. All right, customization. We talked about this earlier. A website portfolio is difficult to customize for each user. Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy?

No. it’s going to take you a lot of time. And in your job search, don’t waste time on things that don’t matter. presentation is a lot easier to customize because as I said, you just go file, duplicate, then you have a new version of the presentation, you make a few tweaks to it, and you have that custom presentation for that specific role you are applying to. It’s gonna take you probably under an hour, to be honest.

the last thing is what I call interview readiness. So when people tell me they’re gonna make a website, I say to them, okay, let’s zoom out and think beyond just your portfolio website. Let’s look at the journey of you getting hired and the hiring and interview journey. So you apply, you get an interview. Great. Then what happens?

You’re gonna go through some other interviews. More than likely, they’re going to say, okay, we’d love it if you could talk us through one of the projects in your portfolio. What are you gonna do? Right. If your website, if your portfolio is a website, what are you going to present in interviews? Are you going to literally type in your portfolio URL and scroll through your portfolio website?

As you present this in an interview, or are you going to think to yourself, my God, I got the interview. Now I have to present a case study. Now I have to make a presentation, right? Many of you are going to then rush to make this presentation to present in the interview. What is going to happen? You are going to rush. And when you rush, you make mistakes. And when you rush, you get stressed. And then you’re going to go to the interview and probably not do very well.

Because you rushed through making up this presentation. On the other hand, if you just make your portfolio a presentation to begin with, you already have the presentation you can use in interviews. You do not need to have multiple versions of your portfolio, the one you applied with and the one you take to interviews. Because people in my UX job search coaching program are using the same portfolio to apply and the same portfolio to present.

projects in interviews. Now, this is not just my opinion. As I’ve said, I’m backing everything up with evidence based on research. And so one of the hiring managers that I spoke to, Patrick Neiman, who is the director of UX and AI Experiences at Workday, I interviewed him for my podcast. And when I asked him about portfolio website versus presentation, he said this.

And he said, I like presentations more than I like websites when looking at portfolios. When I see a story, I want to see how they present it in a deck because that’s the environment I work in. if you want to hear more of Patrick’s take on website portfolio versus presentation portfolio, then you can listen to episode 155.

Five of the Career Strategy podcast, and I’ll link it below. But I want to go back to what Patrick said because he essentially said he likes portfolio presentations because at his company and on his team, part of what happens in that job is a lot of presentations. And so the portfolio presentation, not just as a chance to show your work.

But it also shows Patrick how you put together a presentation, which is a foreshadowing of how you’re gonna put together presentations if you are hired there, right? And you’re giving presentations about user research or to stakeholders, things like that. another person involved in hiring that I spoke to was Steph McDonald. Steph is a lead recruiter at HubSpot.

Where she focuses on just hiring UX designers. And she said this: she said, using a presentation versus website, that’s totally fine. We have people use Notion, Coda, and other things, but it still needs to have that really polished craft level. And I would add to that that by making a portfolio website, you are risking.

That you’re not going to show that polished craft level because you’re going to end up making UX mistakes that introduce friction for someone like Steph, someone like Patrick, who is reviewing your portfolio. Like I said, they don’t have busy to go through clunky navigation and try and find projects or figure out how to, you know, find your about or your contact info, even. And so

The website risks that that first impression is blown because it is not usable for the user of your portfolio. If you want to hear more about what Steph had to say regarding portfolios, you can listen to episode 168 of the Career Strategy podcast. But I want to also share with you someone who got hired. So Marcus got hired.

as a lead product designer at Nava, which is a kind of public benefit company and consultancy. he ended up creating a portfolio presentation and was able to not just get interviews, but do really well in those interviews because when you’re not distracted by

The literal making of your portfolio, meaning learning some new website builder. You’re able to spend more time on the content of your portfolio, which means you are going to be better equipped to talk about those projects in interviews because you didn’t kind of let that take a back seat. because so much of your time and energy was spent trying to learn some new software.

To make your portfolio. So if you want to hear more of my interview with Marcus where he spoke about creating the portfolio, I will link it in the show notes. I forget the exact episode number, but the important takeaway here is this myth of how your UX portfolio needs to be a website. It does not. And if people are telling you that, seriously ask them why. I would challenge you to ask them why.

three times and see if they can come up with a solid answer because I really, really think this narrative of UX portfolios must be websites is just something that has been picked up and is getting recycled over and over. Now, before you send me a message on LinkedIn, I want to answer one of the questions that you probably have. You’re probably thinking to yourself, okay, when I apply for a job, it says link to portfolio. Okay.

That does not mean, therefore, your portfolio must be a website. All that phrase of link to portfolio means is that those are the words that the person who made that application form chose to put on that form. Likely a developer wrote those words. Probably a UX writer was not involved. So if you’re applying to jobs.

With a UX portfolio presentation, and the application says link to portfolio, just link to your presentation. This is not rocket science, right? Just link to the presentation. It doesn’t mean thou shalt make a UX portfolio website. Okay. So permission to make a presentation. And I will tell you, I have 850 people who have been through.

my career strategy lab program and thousands of people who went through a separate program just focused on portfolios. And you know what they made? They made portfolio presentations. And you know what happened to a lot of them? They got hired. So if people are telling you, no, you cannot get hired without a portfolio website, just tell them to get in contact with me and I’ll send them a bunch of testimonials of people

Who got hired with UX portfolio presentations and saved themselves a ton of headaches trying to make a portfolio website? All right, that is myth two. Coming up next week in our five-part series, I’ll give you a preview. Next week’s myth is you must show the whole end-to-end process for each project in your portfolio. No, you don’t.

And I will tell you why next week when we get to myth number three. All right, that is all I have for you today. If you want to catch up on the episodes in this series, just look in the show notes or scroll back in your podcast software, whatever you’re using. these are all gonna be together five episodes in a row. So they’re easy to find.

So I will see you next week for myth number three.

That’s all I have for you today for the Career Strategy podcast. I will see you in another episode.