How to write UX/UI case studies for your design portfolio

Hey friend, let's have a conversation, one UX designer to another. You're probably familiar with this scenario. You've just completed this awesome project and you've been finding it difficult to put your design solutions together in a good case study. Because of this, you've been procrastinating and your portfolio never gets updated. Trust me, I've been there. And in this video, I'll be taking you through how you can create a UX case study that can make you stand out and keep your audience engaged. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Samuel. And I'm a senior product designer based in London. On this channel, I'll be providing UX design tips, techniques, and tutorials that can help designers improve their craft and stay ahead of the competition. This is the first video from my UX design portfolio series, and it applies to anyone that is looking to create engaging case studies, either from personal projects or from real-life projects. The principles that I'll be talking about in this video can be used to create great case studies that can attract recruiters and get you that interview. There are 2 basic principles to keep in mind before you start writing your case studies. The first principle is to know your audience. The major audience that you are trying to appeal to when you are putting your case study together is design managers and recruiters. These people are looking through hundreds of case studies including yours, so you want to ensure that the moment they get to your case study, you are able to attract them instantly, and I will be talking about how you can achieve this later in this video. The second principle is to document your processes. This is one of the most important advice that I can give to any designer. Make sure that you're constantly documenting your processes as you are solving a problem. You don't have to wait till the design project is completed before you start documenting, because when you do that, you're at risk of leaving a lot of important materials behind because you failed to document during the design, right? So all the research insight, all the discovery, all the explorations, all the ideations that you've performed, and even the photographs from workshops— all of these are relevant to the design process, and you want to make sure that everything is documented. You could have a Google Doc or a Notion where you are constantly documenting everything that you came across during the design process. So document as you go. Whenever I'm writing a case study, I typically follow a structure by telling a story from the project title to the outcomes and results. So typically my case study follows this structure. It goes from the project title to the overview to the problem statement and goals to the design process, and then I have the outcome, results, or learnings. Of course, your own structure can be different, but make sure you're telling a story from the beginning of that case study to the end of the case study and finish your case study with results, outcomes, or learnings depending on the type of project that you are working on. Something that I also do is to write down this process on a piece of paper and I start to scribble content that I feel like I need to go into each of these sections. So while scribbling, I mean, they don't have to be complete, but at least I have an idea of what I'm trying to put into each of these sections. To also make it easier, I have created a Google Doc template where I have each of these sections and examples of the kind of content that can go into it.

So here's the template detailing the structure that I follow whenever I want to write case studies. Like I said, it's broke— it's broken into different sections. So we have the project title, we have the overview, we have the problem statements, we have the design process, the solutions, and then the outcomes and learning. In the project title, I try to ensure that the title is brief, concise, and straight to the point. Personally, I like approaching my project titles from a solution standpoint. By highlighting the problem that my design solves in the fewest words possible. So for example, something like improving movie recommendations on product X. So that way the design manager or recruiter knows, has an idea of what you did just from looking at that title. And that can also pique their interest or make them more interested in looking at your case study. Secondly, you have the overview section which should summarize the entire project in 1 or 2 paragraphs by providing some background on the project. It could be, it could contain the target users, your role, and the outcomes in the fewest words possible. For example, Product X is a streaming service popular amongst millennials and Gen Z. I was responsible for redesigning the movie recommendation experience on Product X. The solution was a redesigned mobile app that enables users to find new movies easily. So this way you've spoken about what product X is, you've spoken about the target users for product X, you've spoken about what you did, and then you've also spoken about the solution just in one sentence— so just in 2 sentences. So this also helps the recruiter to understand the impact that you had on the design before even going through your entire case study. Then you have the problem statement. Which should present the problem that you are trying to solve in a very clear manner. A lot of problem statements that I see in case studies are not clear. Your problem statement should be clear and concise. It should go straight to the point. And the reason why a lot of problem statements are not clear is because people do not actually have proper research that actually back up this problem statement. Also, make sure that your problem statement is spotlighted in a way that recruiters can easily identify it.

Then you have the design process.

Design process should contain all your research findings, your design experiments, and relevant artifacts from your design process. So here you're going to include the ideation artifacts that you had, all of the explorations that you did, all the user journey maps, personas that you had.

And one thing that you should notice here is that you don't necessarily have to add everything that you did.

Try to find things that are most relevant to your problem solving. The things that help you to arrive at your solution fastest are the things that you should include in this ideation phase. I'm seeing case studies where they have information architecture, there's a user flow, there's persona, there's empathy map, there's user journey. There's just so many things here and there. And then that way the recruiter just knows that you are, you are not an experienced designer. Make sure that your design process is clear. Right? It tells that you are experienced as a designer. Then you have the solution. You'll find that the solutions is going to be included in this section. So here you have your high-fidelity prototypes and all those, um, fancy screens. Make sure that the prototypes and images that you are adding are high-resolution images. Don't add blurry or pixelated images because that could really, really ruin the quality of your case study. So then you have your outcomes and your learnings. The final outcomes of your design solutions would come into this section, and this includes like the impact of your solution and the results. It could be something like this: we found out that 25% of our users found new movies based on recommendations from their friends one month after launching the new Product X app. In cases where you're not working on a real-life project and you're not able to come up with outcomes, or maybe you were not involved in the user testing of that particular solution and you don't have outcomes. Another thing to have is your learnings. So what did you learn from following that design process? What did you learn from solving the problem? So if you don't have outcomes, you should definitely have learnings that you can introduce in that section of the case study.

The visual design of your case study is as important as the content itself. Remember that the attention span of your recruiters and hiring managers is very, very short. So you want to attract them as much as possible, and visual design is one of the ways that you can do that. Also, visual design is one of the most important skills that a UX designer should have, and a lot of recruiters will be assessing your case study by how it looks visually. If it's not visually appealing, there's a high chance that they might drop off and go to the next portfolio. One of the ways to make your case studies more visually appealing is to leverage design elements like typography, colors, and spacing and use them together in a way that it makes the case study good to look at. It makes it attractive. Also, whenever you are adding images or design artifacts into your case study, make sure that they are high definition. Lastly, present your design solutions in appropriate device mockups and add some interactions that can help your design to stand out. A lot of people do not add interactions or GIF animations on their portfolio, and this can be a way for you to stand out of the lot. So here's an example of a case study in my portfolio.

As you can see here, this is the project title at the top here, which shows what the project is about and who the project is tailored to. Also at the header here, I have a mockup that shows some screens that sort of depicts what the solution is. And then this is the overview section. As you can see, there are 2 paragraphs here, 2 paragraphs with a couple of words or short sentences that also explains the background of the project and what my role was. Then it goes into the research phase. The user research helps me to identify what the problem is, and that then helps me to understand how to clearly states the problem. So here I speak about the research, I put the research questions and then the answers to those questions and some data from my survey as well. I have them on this side. Then I go into the problem statement. In my own case, the problem statement was more of an opportunity, so that's why it is tagged an opportunity here. And I have this green background here because I actually wanted to call out the opportunity because I feel like it's an important part of the case study. It then goes into the ideation, and in the ideation I'm basically speaking about the key problems that I want to solve with this ideation. And I listed the problems out here in just 3, 3 problems that I, 3 key problems that I want to solve. So I'd done other things. I'd done customer journey map. I'd done, I had obviously had personas and I've done all of that, but I wanted to focus on one of the most impactful artifacts that I used during the ideation process. And it was this crazy ideation technique because it helped me to develop quick ideas that can solve the problems. that I had established at the opportunity or problem statement phase. Then I go into the solution and I focus on, I think I focused on 3 or 4 solutions majorly. Yeah, I focused on 3 or 4 solutions. So I have solution number 1, which is journaling on the go. And I have the screens that show that exact solutions. Like I said, it is in a mockup. And then I also have solution number 2, finding a therapist. I have screens that actually show that solution. Then I have solution number 3. I have screens that show that solution, and then I have the learnings. Because this was a personal project and it wasn't a real life project, I have learnings instead of outcomes. So I was able to also say that, oh, these are the things that I learned from this project rather than say that this was the impact that this project had on real life users or real life customers. So that's an example of a real life case study from my portfolio.

I hope you find this video helpful and will be creating a lot more case studies with a lot more confidence from now on. I'm definitely rooting for you. Don't forget to share this video with your friends, like and subscribe to my channel so that you can see more videos from me as I upload them. See you in the next video.

Bye!