Check our UX design & research examples, get inspired! 4. She is the founder of, Use InVision Freehand to brainstorm your way to powerful solutions, Information Architecture for the Worldwide Web, a review of the BART ticket machines in San Francisco, how we might put an end to texting and driving, why Twitter should let us save or bookmark tweets. Types of UX Design Projects 1. Employers want to see a portfolio site that explains why you made the decisions you made rather than just seeing the final deliverables. Luckily, I chatted with tons of UX recruiters and designers over the past few months to find out their tips for building a UX portfolio full of innovative projects that truly stand out and showcase your abilities. (Use InVision Freehand to brainstorm your way to powerful solutions.). For this project, think about a problem that exists in your target industry that could be solved by a simple (or complex) app. As a part of those projects, I simply baked in UX, whether they asked for it or not. Understanding the Implications of UX. Not to be confused with the overall project plan (which is usually owned by a project manager or program manager), a UX project plan helps you think about how UX work will integrate with the broader project … Niya Watkins. ... UX Project Checklist — Why I made it and what’s next. By creating a project plan, you will have clear dates and deadlines for yourself—keeping the project on track. Get ready because this won’t your average surface-level problem to solve. The School of UX design courses (5% off with code UXPC5) About Accept that and show your best research work. For example: ... To create this we need both the design and the UX to be seamless. UX was the perfect field for me because it was such a balance of left and right brain thinking. Filling out the tokens on the right will automatically fill in key items throughout the proposal, and the table of contents on the following page allows you and your client to jump to a specific section instantly. For this project, come up with a real or fake client and consider how your design can showcase relevant information about the product and move visitors from the discovery phase (search engine, social media marketing) to the conversion phase. They are great for communicating a design, for evaluating a design (for example via usability testing) and for generally showing … Learn about our graduates, see their portfolio projects, and find out where they’re … Get a hands-on introduction to UX with a free, 6-day short course. Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect between what a brand wants their webpages to look … For example, do they understand basic engineering to know whether or not taking out that big wall in the living room would be possible. At UX Design Mastery, we have created a simple and not overly complicated series of portfolio projects or practice projects, that will test your skills and help you create a well rounded UX/UI portfolio project that a recruiter will … UXDA is a leading financial user experience and user interface design agency for banking and FinTech that executes design … Olivia’s portfolio does a great job of this, as you’ll see in her Routr case study. This is a bad idea! Problem: “I need more projects for my portfolio”, Goal: “Find more problems to solve so I can get more experience”. User Experience design is big business, and there is money to be made.In fact, Andrew Kucheriavy reports in Forbes that on average, the return on investment for user experience is 9,900%. I already had paying freelance clients for graphic design projects, so I instead of working for free, I figured out how to get paying UX clients, keep reading to find out how I did it. Describe the thing you are creating in a paragraph or less. Step 2. For this project, you’ll identify a business client and design a series of four emails for them, designed to convert new subscribers or trialers into paying customers of their product. Or, did they just remove the wall in their design software and not even consider the structural impact of that? The simple answer is that you should focus on what interests you most, and Sarah is committed to helping people learn to think like a designer. What makes Olivia’s UX design portfolio so great? While you might think that the availability of thousands of DIY blog templates available on platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace makes the need to design a beautiful blog from scratch a thing of the past, think again. 7 Projects You Should Include In Your First UX Portfolio, DIY blog templates available on platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace, (analytics firm Flurry clocked people at a 5-hour daily average in 2017, How to Talk User Experience (UX): 10 Key Terms to Help You Talk the Talk, The Best Places to Find UX Design Inspiration Online, Exactly What You Need to Know to Become a Front End Developer in 2020, The Remote Work Mega Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Working From Home in the Age of COVID-19, The 25+ Best Sites For Finding Remote Work Online in 2020, Should You Learn to Code With Codecademy? At the time, that was mostly just user-flows and wireframes—I hadn’t learned to do research at the time. The point is that I see too many UX people thinking they can get hired with a portfolio of three “mock” projects, with zero other experience and little UX education. Make the project reflect what you would do if was a real-life client. You need to treat this UX project like a real project. Subject to both personal preferences and trends, the term aesthetics is painfully vague—which means the overall user experience is even more important. Step 3: Go to a UX professionals meetup and get feedback on the work you have done. For this project, you should choose a client in an industry you like (you can either make up a fictional client that sells a product you’re passionate about or choose a real client whose ecommerce site you think could benefit from a redesign) and design the product search, product detail, and checkout pages. Based on YOUR strengths, should you be a designer? Pendar Yousefi. It will help you stay aligned with your business goals, understand your user, and avoid costly mistakes. What I knew for sure was that my little static marketing/brochure websites and banner ads (yes, I used to design banner ads) for the software company would not help me get the job I wanted. A Codecademy Review, Finding a Remote Job: A Step-by-Step Guide, The Guide to Landing Your First Web Design Job. The Best UX Designer Portfolios – Inspiring Case Studies and Examples. Do not feel like you have to go through all of these steps start-to-finish (eg. Doing UX design for non-profits is a way to contribute to a cause you care about while impressing employers that care about … This resulted in doing work for a few startups in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, all through word of mouth and my personal network. While metrics are a key focus of any good ecommerce site, you should also try to create a compelling and unique visual look for the site to differentiate it from the millions of other ecommerce sites on the web. It allowed me to work on a content site, something I hadn’t done yet. If it were me, I would want Designer A because they’ve worked on real-life houses. I ended up writing about some of the problems I spotted, for example: I can’t stand texting and driving. I had my eye on roles at Nike and Wieden+Kennedy—they had just started working on the Nike Plus running products, and it was my dream to work on them too! Here are some of our projects … UX design case study of how online banking user interface should work. The UX project plan helps you ask, “what work goes into designing a great user experience?” A UX project plan is your blueprint for how you’re going to conduct UX activities. But by stating some parameters for the project, it helps recruiters and hiring managers have more confidence that you would do that on the job. I wanted to tackle problems that also integrated business problems, because I knew that would make my portfolio stronger. Here you'll find top 20 hand-selected portfolios that will inspire you when building your own. They even filmed the very first Nike Plus commercial literally right outside my apartment Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District. But I knew I didn’t just want to give facelifts to popular websites. UX/UI portfolio projects for beginners #3: Travel App May 19, 2019 May 21, 2019 by Calvin Pedzai This practice project/Client brief is the third one in this series from UX Design Mastery after the one for a Blog website and an eCommerce project. Use this free UX-UI Proposal Template to pitch your design services to your next client. I won’t say this is impossible, but I would say it is rare for someone like this to actually get hired—and they’d likely be a “natural” at UX. Become a qualified UX designer in 5-10 months—complete with a job guarantee. As an aspiring UX designer, your portfolio is the most important asset you have in your job hunt. This page will need visuals of the product, compelling text to explain product features, and any other tools to sell people on the product, like user testimonials. Step 3. For this project, you’ll need to design a homepage, category page, and article page. Another set of eyes on your portfolio will catch spelling or grammar … The anchor principle also supports long-term cross-communication among teams as anchor people are periodically rotated. And the team at UXPin – the UX design app – have scoured the internet for some of the best examples that illustrate these points below.. Cyber Monday deals: see all the best offers right now! ), Sarah Doody is a User Experience Designer, Entrepreneur, and Educator. And once you create an initial prototype, review your designs with users (this can be friends or mentors), watching how they interact with it and iterate accordingly. For an ecommerce project, you should focus primarily on maximizing conversion rate for visitors to the website (meaning: the number of people who convert from visitors to customers), with a product search page that makes filtering and searching simple and intuitive, as well as a product detail page that makes it easy for visitors to gather information about the product and purchase it. It breaks down into two parts: Here are the steps to follow as you work through a problem you spot in your life or surroundings. I did freelance work, and I got paid. First, let me tell you what I did not do. One of the simplest but most impactful UX projects you might work on for employers and clients is designing a simple landing page with the sole purpose of converting visitors into signups or leads (a.k.a. Also consider what information they’d be most interested in learning before being convinced to “convert.” You’ll need to create the landing page with the email capture, a compelling reason for someone to sign up, and some sort of thank you message. As a user researcher, it’s okay if you are not good at experience design. But, one problem: I didn’t have much UX experience. This helped train my “problem-spotter” muscle, but also generated a ton of problems for projects I could have set out to solve. For this project, think about problems you encounter in your everyday life and how a simple app product could solve those problems. It’s selfish and inconsiderate. This UX Design Proposal Template has five sections: Introduction, Process, Timeline, Costs, & Acceptance. If you feel like trying to get your first, or next, UX role is a lot harder than you thought, then please know this one thing: you’re not alone. For this project, come up with a client in an industry you’re passionate about and think about the type of information you’d need to gather from a visitor to convert them to a lead—like their name, email address, location, or product interest. Mobile app design is one of the most popular UX/UI specialties—and for good reason. Talk to a program advisor to discuss career change and find out if UX is right for you. Your job is to design a page that maximizes the number of visitors who submit their information and become leads so the client’s sales team can follow up with them afterwards and try to convert them into paying customers. Learn how to code & how to use your skills to get a new job in this FREE, 60+ page ebook! Sarah Doody is a User Experience Designer, Entrepreneur, and Educator. I didn’t just open up Photoshop and start re-designing things with disregard to any potential business problems or goals. A storyboard is an idea borrowed from the movie industry. In 2011, she created the curriculum for and taught General Assembly’s first 12-week UX immersive, the genesis of their popular UX programs which are now taught worldwide. Companies are putting more and more money into content marketing (creating written content that’s used as a lead generation tool for acquiring inbound traffic and email addresses), and most content marketing is tied directly to a business’s marketing budget and growth. For this project, design a simple onboarding flow, as well as the in-app screens and user dashboard or profile. However, as a UX designer, it is crucial to base all of your design decisions on research and to constantly iterate based on user feedback and usability testing. A front end developer? We will also need to make sure the frot-end developers understand how important speed is in these features. Also, I hadn’t attended any UX bootcamps—in fact, those didn’t exist back then. If you’re a user researcher for example, and you want to showcase more research skills, then do that. A good portfolio is made up of relevant, well considered detailed design projects. By now, hopefully, you have a few clear ideas of what you easily do in your everyday life. View details. To help this make sense, let’s continue using my example of the problem I spotted. This might be a UX project type that you’d normally skip over, but multiple employers said that being able to craft a unique digital blog or content site is a critical skill to showcase. 11. While a branding campaign or icon design project might be difficult to tie back to specific results, all of your UX/UI work will likely be directly tied to specific KPIs that your client or employer will use to determine whether the designs are successful at achieving their goal. Read more about Product Design for Sustainability. And the solution? Typical work responsibilities include collaborating with developer teams, managing visual design, consulting with clients, and staying up to date with technology trends. With the goal of finding more UX problems to solve, I set out to find problems. How did I get more UX experience so that I could develop my UX skills and eventually have a stronger UX portfolio? A version of this article previously appeared on RookieUp. Please, for your own sake, have realistic expectations for your UX career. UX design for Non-profits. [Sender.Company] is a design agency providing bespoke UX design solutions to brands in many industries… What do you do once you identify UX problems to solve? In 2013, my experience using the BART (San Francisco’s public transit system) ticket machines was very hard and complicated. Your final deliverables should include sketches, wireframes, and a working hi-fi prototype (Pro tip: UX designers should learn to code) of the final site including a basic Style Guide. Every employer and recruiter I’ve talked to told me the number one thing that makes them pass on a portfolio is a lack of explanation or context. I see too many designers do this, and it can actually end up hurting you. Practice projects that you do on your own are a great way to get more experience, practice, and showcase skills for your portfolio. idea to working prototype) for every problem you solve. The way you reach a solution will likely be different than how anyone else would. Sarah also created the popular weekly newsletter, The UX Notebook. Every little detail of the major design elements adds to the UX in some way, including the layout, graphics, aesthetic, user interface, and even the colors of the landing pages. After a Twitter exchange with Jack Dorsey, I wrote an article about, I entered design competitions. Similar to a lead gen page, a marketing website is a customer-facing site that a business uses to promote and explain their product and to convert visitors into customers or trialers. Here, I've highlighted the main characteristics of a solid portfolio. So it proves to me that they don’t just have the vision and the skills to use the software to make renderings, they have also been through the design process. Why FinTech Outcompetes Banks by Betting on User Experience. After you do this project, you’ll then need to write it up as a case study for your portfolio. Your final designs should include personas and use cases as well as sketches, wireframes, and a final prototype beautifully mocked up. But if you are an UX design expert with many years’ experience, see if you can include as many as 20 examples of your design work to give a broader picture of your skills. Three user personas are defined to present different users' needs. 7 Projects You Should Include In Your First UX Portfolio 1. ... Read more about When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods. This is generally done via signup forms or simple user registration widgets. Circle D Design used a variation on this, designating an "anchor person" for each project's UX communication. She does this through online and in-person courses and workshops on topics including user research, storyboarding, and rapid prototyping. Check out the FAQs, or email us at hello@skillcrush.com. Each UX Design project is different, so some projects will be bigger or smaller than others. Managed 2 Development Teams with Design & UX (25 Team Members) onMulti-Million Dollar AutoTrader Project RIGHT As you can see above, backing soft skills with examples makes up for … This could be as basic as a productivity or reminder app or as complex as a social network. Designer B may have a great-looking portfolio, but I would be nervous that they might not understand all the details. Get a complete list of UX design & research templates to use in Miro. Why? No matter what stage you’re at in your UX career, at some point you’ve had one of these thoughts: “How do I get more UX experience if no one will hire me?”, “Is it true that recruiters look down on UX bootcamp projects?”, “Should I do UX work for free to get experience?”, “I’m frustrated with daily UI challenges, they’re so surface level. Come up with a product that these users have trialed and think about the flow of information they’d be receiving over the four email series, with a focus on moving them into buyers. A word of caution: projects aren’t a replacement for skills. I told everyone I knew that I was available for freelance web design work. The market for User Experience and User Interface Design jobs is booming and there’s never been a better time to become a Web Designer or Product Designer. If you’re studying Visual Design, your final portfolio might be a bit more abstract, with designs based on your moodboarding, ideating, and sketching rather than deep industry research and usability testing. The Project. UX Designers make sure software products are user-friendly and completely functional. But in the absence of real-world experience, you must work even harder to show your process and document your projects if you want to provide enough evidence that you stand out to recruiters and hiring managers. © 2012 - 2020 Skillcrush, Inc. All Rights Reserved. They know how to collaborate with general contractors and tradespeople like plumbers and electricians to solve the inevitable problems that might come up during the redesign process. In the early 2000s I was working as a web designer at a large software company in Portland, Oregon. I became a prolific problem-spotter. Great! She is a contributing author to InVision, UX Magazine, UX Mastery, UX Matters, and has been published in the New York Times. Year 2: Digital Studio Practice, and Media Specialist Practice, followed by the Final Major Project. But if you’re just starting to learn User Experience and User Interface design, you might be wondering what sorts of projects you should be working on to get a job as a junior UX or UI designer. Throughout the past two years of researching, prototyping, and optimizing my UX Portfolio Formula program, I’ve interviewed hundreds of UX professionals at all stages. I’m self-taught, so I didn’t have projects from any education program to rely on. Depending on the kind of user experience and user interface project you are writing a proposal for, you can always customize this template and make an accurate and compelling proposal to catch the …