In This Episode
- Seniority shows up right away in how you present your work: the layout, the spacing and how you've chosen to tell the story.
- Show a handful of recent projects. If you have 20, project number 20 probably looks dated.
- A senior portfolio shows influence: bigger decisions and more ambiguous problems, not small UI changes.
- Keep case studies focused. A long, overstuffed deck makes a recruiter wonder what you're actually trying to tell them.
- No metrics? Explain why you believe your design made things better. Numbers without context are what Jared calls "death by numbers."
Episode Summary
What does a design recruiter look for in a senior UX portfolio? A handful of recent projects that show influence, a focused way of presenting them, and clear reasoning behind your decisions, even without metrics. In this episode, Jared Tredly, a design recruiter at Shopify, explains how seniority shows up in a portfolio and why numbers without context don’t impress him.
For a senior candidate, Jared says it comes down to recency, complexity, and influence. He only wants to see a handful of projects, and he wants them current. Something from years back, even if it was once impressive, reads as dated. He wants to see a designer who shaped a bigger decision, the kind of project where the direction wasn’t obvious going in. He also says the strongest senior case studies often say less. A clean, well reasoned solution presented simply reads as more senior than a long breakdown of every step along the way.
He’s also candid about metrics. Designers without hard impact numbers, whether because they worked in agency and never saw post launch data, or for any other reason, still have a real shot, as long as they can explain why they believe their decision worked. Jared calls raw numbers without that reasoning “death by numbers.”
For anyone currently job searching, this UX hiring manager interview is a direct look at what happens on the other side of the submit button, straight from a design recruiter who reviews UX portfolios for a living.
This episode is a segment of my full interview with Jared. Listen to the full conversation here.
Frequently Asked Questions
01What does a recruiter look for in a senior UX portfolio?
02How many projects should a senior UX portfolio have?
03Do I need metrics in my UX case studies?
04How long should a senior UX case study be?
Show Notes & Links
- Episode 161: UX Hiring Insights: Sarah Doody’s Interview With Design Recruiter Jared Tredly from Shopify
- Episode 190: UX Portfolio Myth: You can’t show projects that didn’t launch (Myth 4 / 5)
- Episode 80: How to include numbers on your resume, even if you think you don’t have any
Episode Transcript
Sarah Doody (00:00)
Today we have Jared Tredly from Shopify where he is a design recruiter and Jared works on taking design talent to the next level.
I want to switch gears a little bit and think about your experience hiring for maybe more mid and senior level roles because I’m curious to hear if you’ve experienced this, but one of the challenges that I see senior people have is trying to package all of that experience into something that is consistent and concise enough to not overwhelm. someone like you, and I’m curious, when you are looking, hiring for a senior level candidate, what are you looking for in terms of, you know, traits, qualities, et cetera, beyond like using certain software and this and that, but what, what are you looking for that kind of tells you this person is a senior, for example?
Jared Tredly (00:57)
Yeah.
Sarah Doody (00:58)
What sets them apart from someone more mid or junior level.
Jared Tredly (01:02)
Yeah, you’ll hopefully see it. It shows up instantly in the way that they usually present their work as well. Their layout, their use of the spacing on their site and how they’ve chosen to present the work in itself. There’s usually a feeling within that of like, okay, this is someone that’s been in the game for a moment.
No matter what, I only really want to see a handful of projects anyway. If you are more senior, been in the game for quite a few more years, you could have 10, 20 projects you could potentially put on your portfolio, but…
I’m pretty certain that project number 20 is not looking and feeling very current anymore. It’s maybe something, you know, feeling very dated and old. So I’m just looking at the most recent work. I want to see the most recent stuff within that anyone who’s more senior in their career. I expect that as you get more senior, you should be able to push more influence and you
Sarah Doody (01:54)
Mmm.
Jared Tredly (01:54)
should be able to drive. bigger decisions, maybe bigger bets, maybe bolder plays in your work. That’s why more senior designers are often hired as you get to staff senior staff principle level. Those are designers that can wield a level of influence in their thinking and the ideas that they put forward. And they’re the kind of people you put on a project where it’s like, we don’t. really know what this is yet, but we think that you can solve it. Or we’re not just looking to change this button. We’re looking to change the whole paradigm of how a user interacts with our product. These are, these are like way bigger sort of projects, a lot more ambiguous. So when I’m seeing a more senior person’s work, I’m probably seeing like a bigger change or bigger project that they’ve worked on that had a larger amount of complexity.
If I see a project that, yeah, had a different type of simplicity, it was maybe a two-step cart refinement in a checkout. It’s like, okay, that’s good, but I’d probably expect something a bit more from someone more senior, more experienced. So the type of work, what you’re showing me, the level of complexity, what you solve for, the kind of influence that you might have had. I’m gonna hopefully get some signal like that from someone
Sarah Doody (03:09)
Right.
Jared Tredly (03:09)
much more senior.
Sarah Doody (03:10)
And one observation I have is kind of this misconception that every case study in the portfolio must kind of show this mythical start to finish process of UX. And I think in order to show that influence and bigger decisions, sometimes it makes sense to just focus on this one part of the user flow or the interface, even though you did redo the whole checkout experience, for example. Maybe the revolutionary part of it was in terms of, I don’t know, the part where you add a gift card or you send it to, you’re sending a gift, right? And the
Jared Tredly (03:47)
Yeah.
Sarah Doody (03:47)
billing address is separate from the recipient, because this literally
Jared Tredly (03:52)
Yeah.
Sarah Doody (03:53)
happened to me yesterday and it was a disaster. took me like three hours to send gifts yesterday. But like going micro is sometimes better than trying to show the macro in the project.
Jared Tredly (04:05)
Yeah, if we think about a project like that, a really experienced designer, probably worked through a lot of things. There was to figure out how they might create that interaction for the user, how from an infrastructure standpoint, they can physically do that with engineering and what they might show you in the end on their case study is a very simple, like, here was a problem. know, our users were struggling to send gift cards and then it could even be jumping straight to this beautiful fidelity of this, this lovely interaction where the user says like, center multiple and the cards just kind of come up and I see this lovely little prototype and it shows me this and I’m like, what a solve. That’s amazing. And that was so short and so that was like two, but we know so many things happen between those two steps to get there. I don’t need to see them all. And when I, when I do, when someone does pack them all in, it’s really hard to take them in. It’s really hard to read through them. If I send that to to a director of product design, that head of design that’s hiring. Definitely seen comments before like, oh, there’s a lot in here. Or if it’s a deck, they’ll go, 75 slides. What are they trying to, what are they telling me? And it’s like,
Sarah Doody (05:14)
Right.
Jared Tredly (05:15)
it’s maybe too much. You could still show me your seniority and you could still show me. how experienced and skilled you are because that solution was so well thought out and it’s so beautifully presented, that final product. There’s my signal of like, that’s someone I want to speak to. I’m not making the hiring decision. That’s just someone we need to get in the room.
Sarah Doody (05:35)
Right.
Jared Tredly (05:35)
So.
Sarah Doody (05:36)
So we’re talking about a few words that start
Jared Tredly (05:38)
Okay.
Sarah Doody (05:38)
with I. We’ve talked about influence.
Jared Tredly (05:41)
Yeah.
Sarah Doody (05:41)
You made me think of another I word, which is impact, because
Jared Tredly (05:45)
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Doody (05:45)
one challenge that many people I talk to face is they believe recruiters, hiring managers want to hear the impact, the outcome. If I don’t have metrics, if I can’t say I made the company a million dollars, I can’t talk about this project in my portfolio. So can you speak to…
Number one, guess, what is your perspective on including or not including projects that lack impact numbers, et cetera? Let’s start there. Maybe not sure where this is gonna go, but I’m curious.
Jared Tredly (06:13)
Yep. Yeah.
Now I got thoughts on this, think too. And I think impact, I think of it sometimes as like death by numbers. Like, if you’re hitting me with so many numbers, I don’t really know what they mean. Because I don’t know what your company might do. I don’t know where what the baseline was before. I know you’re telling me there was an increase in this amount of money. I’m like, how do you really quantify?
The impact, okay, what I really want to know is like, did you make a difference? Did what you worked on you as the designer, you were hired to make a difference. Things were here and you needed to get them here. And it was going to be a measurable difference. And that impact and articulating it that way is around, I think it was an actual positive difference. Like, okay, great. That’s a good signal. That’s what we want. That’s why we hire designers because they improve things. But underneath that, it’s like, why did it improve? or why didn’t it? And do you know? Because if I’m just looking at metrics, okay, I don’t really know what they mean. I don’t know if you know what they mean. I don’t know if you know why you got there. I don’t know if you understand any of that. So I’ve certainly had feedback over the years of designers of like, you know, they’re saying this designer wasn’t able to articulate why they made decisions. And I think that’s more important than just being able to say a metric.
Sarah Doody (07:30)
Interesting.
So yeah, so influence is greater than impact sometimes it sounds like.
Jared Tredly (07:36)
Sometimes, and that’s where it’s like, let’s give space to those designers that don’t have metrics, whatever
Sarah Doody (07:42)
Right.
Jared Tredly (07:42)
reason they couldn’t access them, they don’t have them, that’s okay, it’s all right. There’s still hopefully a measurable difference in what you did or something. There was a reason why it was done. And for you as a designer, know, typical cases, you work in agency, you deliver back a design to your client. they implemented, it was a positive difference. You don’t know what the numbers were because you don’t have access to that. But then my question is, well, why do you think it was better? Why do you think your design, your new solution, why was it better for that client? Why do you think it was going to be better? And what gave you any type of signal that it was better?
If you can’t really tell me that, that’s hard. That’s like, but that’s what you’re going to get hired to do to tell me these differences. a lot of grace and a lot of space for people that don’t have metrics, but I want to know why decisions are made. And I think for me, I feel like that’s been the difference between a pure visual or digital designer versus say a product or UX designer. The visual designer that did, yep. It’s beautiful. Why does it look that way? I just.
I love these colors. Cool, that’s great. But for a product designer, it looks this way because we had to structure the page in this way because if we didn’t do that hierarchy, the user was getting lost at this point, we weren’t converting beyond this step, and we were losing business. So that designer knows these reasons why behind things. So I just want to know that signal.
Sarah Doody (09:08)
Yep. Yeah.
Context is everything as the saying goes.
Jared Tredly (09:12)
Yeah, yep.
So don’t don’t stress too much about the metrics. You can still
Sarah Doody (09:16)
Right.
Jared Tredly (09:16)
give a lot of signal as to why you should be spoken to as a designer, as an applicant, without having hard and fast numbers sometimes.
