Is it okay for a UX professional to use Wix for their portfolio?
Having a portfolio is a critical part of getting a UX design job. Most hiring managers will spend more time reviewing your portfolio than your resume. This happens for the reason: portfolio demonstrates your actual work instead of just listing responsibilities and top-line accomplishments.
Your portfolio is a story about you and your work . The bottom line is that you need great UX portfolio if you are going to stand out from the crowd. In this article you will find everything you need to know to create a great UX portfolio.
The 6 Characteristics of Great Portfolio
Before you start creating a portfolio, it’s important to find what’s required for great portfolio. Great UX portfolio is more than just a set of screenshots. It should:
- Demonstrate the depth and breadth of your abilities as a UX designer.
- Showcase your thought process.
- Give potential employers insight into what it might be like to work with you.
1. Know Your Audience
The best way to present your work is to start with your audience. Clarify what your audience seeks and accentuate how your expertise and skills exceed their needs:
- Who are your target audience?
- What information do you need to convey to them?
Many designers leave answering these questions until the end because they’re more interested in layout and aesthetics. But it’s important to have answers early on in the project because they will determine the design. Answering the above questions will tell you which samples to include, and which tone to use.
2. Use Case Studies to Present Your Work
The case study approach is one of the best ways to structure the portfolio. Case study structure describes each project’s design process before showing the final design. Case study also showcases your problem solving and storytelling abilities.
3. Select Only Best Works
Your work is the most important piece of content in the portfolio because it is what most visitors have come to see. Usually it’s tough to decide what to include and what to leave out and you first reaction might be to include every project you had ever done, big or small, but I suggest to avoid this temptation. Keep in mind that quality is what matters. Nothing is worse than a vague portfolio of random images with no context or explanation. Thus, select 3–5 projects for your portfolio that align with the kind of work you want to be doing and provide context for each project.
4. Frame the Problems and Define Goals
Designers are a problem-solvers. Show that you can clearly frame a problem, establish goals for success, and explore solutions in a way that inspires confidence:
- Clearly articulate both the business and user needs.
- Describe specific challenges that you faced.
5. Present Your Solution and Show the Process
Tell the story about how your design solves a problem in the context of user goals. Remember that the story behind the design is often more compelling than the design itself:
- Don’t show the polished product, show your process — the paper sketches, lo-fid/hi-fid prototypes, deliverables and other artefacts you produced along the way.
- Talk about what worked and what didn’t work.
- Demonstrate your ability to communicate concisely with words and imagery: showing the what and telling the why.
6. Prioritize information
Remember, respect the time and attention of your audience. Balance breadth and depth. Prioritize what information your reader needs and focus on the vital moments of the project that make it interesting.
Great UX designers get to the point quickly.
Building Your Online Presence
When hiring managers or clients ask for your portfolio, they usually expect to receive either a PDF or website. While PDF portfolios are ok, there’s nothing like a website. You can show much more things through website by guiding the viewers through your work in an interactive and more in-depth manner.
1. Buy a domain
Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the age of the individual, you have to be your own brand. And more than anything else, a domain name can increase awareness of your brand. If your domain name matches your name, it reinforces your brand, making it easier for visitors to remember and return.
2. Choose a platform for your website
Your online portfolio is basically the visual language that describes who you are and that determines how others see you. That’s why it’s so important that you portfolio look professional and present your work well. Of course if you know how to code you can build a portfolio website by yourself. But without any knowledge of coding it is hard to create a good looking website from scratch. Even if you have coding skills creating a website seems to be complex, long and expensive task. But don’t worry, today you don’t have to be a developer to create a beautiful web portfolio. Wix was designed to eliminate the challenges of building websites.
There are two ways to build a website using Wix: ADI and Wix Editor.
Wix ADI
Wix ADI makes it possible to create stunning portfolio almost instantly. ADI works by asking users a few simple questions, which it uses to return a website Wix. The system asks who you are (your full name) and what you do (what do you want to create a website for). Next, it learns what you need and where are you located, and … creates a website for you!
It works like magic. ADI crawls the web for information about you and your works (your works, articles with your name, customer’s feedback), which it then tells you about in case you want to include it in your website. Once ADI is done, a ready-to-use website is offered to visitors.
If they’re not impressed, you can also dig into the design and customize it yourself.
Wix Editor
If you prefer more traditional way of creating a website you can use Wix Editor. Simply select the most relevant theme from the list of available templates.
And customize the layout. You can change anything in the layout by simply clicking on it and editing it’s properties.
Does Wix limit design choices?
Absolutely not! The fact that system creates a website for you does not mean that you should let Wix take all design decisions away from you. As a UX professional you should still design the way information will be presented on each page. You, not Wix, are responsible for the presentation of your work, and there are still choices to be made for any designer.
7 Steps to Make Your Online Portfolio Better
Your website is more than just descriptions of your work — it is your work. In a lot of cases, the site alone may determine whether or not you get hired, so do everything you can to make it perfect.
1.Ask for Feedback
Before making your portfolio available online, ask an experienced UX designer to review it.
2. Make Navigation Simple
Just like any other website, simplicity and navigation are fundamental. The prospective clients or hiring managers don’t want clunky or complicated interfaces to bog them down with unnecessary searches.
3. Make Portfolio Visually Appealing
Don’t ignore the visual presentation of your portfolio.
Looks sell
It’s easy to spot a beautiful portfolio that’s why the ability to make something that looks good matters.
4. Show How Your Product Work
Sometimes words and pictures are not enough.You have to demonstrate how your product works using either video or interactive prototypes. You can either link or embed videos that explain about the product as well as including working prototypes (inVision, Marvel, or other interactive prototypes) that the viewers can play around anywhere at any time. With Wix you can simply go to the App Market, choose “HTML iFrame/Embed” and place this element on the page where you want your users to see the prototype.
5. Add a Personal Touch
Most employers aren’t looking to hire a sheet of facts and statistics. They’re looking for a person. Give your opinions on your work and your industry. Even if employers don’t agree with you, they’ll still have a better idea of who you are as a person. Feel free to stray away from business topics and include some of your hobbies, favorite movies, music, etc. to make yourself more memorable.
6. Optimize for Search Engines
If you’d like your images to appear in search results, adding image descriptions and captions allows Google to understand what your pictures are of. Image captions are also used as alt text, making your site more universally accessible.
7. Use Analytics Data to Improve Your Portfolio
Same as for your project, it’s important to improve your work based on users feedback. By inserting a tracking code within your website, you can visualize:
- Who has recently visited your website
- How long they stuck around
- Which specific projects they looked at
All these rich and useful information that you can get from analyzing the visitor data can help you make changes to the layout of your website and present your projects better.
Using Wix it’s really easy to add analytics to your site. Simply copy your Google Analytics tracking ID and submit it in Wix form. That’s all!
Conclusion
Your portfolio is an opportunity to paint a rich picture of yourself. Treat designing a portfolio is like any other project. The time and care will be reflected in the final product. I hope this article was helpful and will inspire you to create their own unique portfolio website.
