The UX portfolio presentation that got me hired at Deliveroo

There's a chance you clicked on this video because you're getting ready for the portfolio review stage of a UX design interview, or you're putting your design portfolio together. Well, if you plan to present your portfolio like this or like this, please abort mission. In today's video, I'll show you how to present your UX design portfolio in an interview. This presentation technique got me 4 offers in top tech companies including Deliveroo, an online food delivery company in the UK, and Backbase, a fintech company in the Netherlands. There are 2 important questions you need to answer before putting your presentation together. The first question is, how much time do I have for this presentation? This is very important because in most cases recruiters would let you know how much time you have for a presentation. They will tell you you have an hour for the presentation, or sometimes they might tell you 30 minutes, but in most cases they give an hour for your presentation. If you have an hour for your presentation, you need to be able to manage your time effectively. You shouldn't use the entire hour for your presentation because you can bore your audience. Instead, what you can do is to present in 40 to 45 minutes and leave 15 to 20 minutes for feedback, questions, and conversations with the interviewers. This helps you to understand the number of projects that you can cover within that time frame. For example, if you have 1 hour for a presentation and you want to present within 40 to 45 minutes, then you can have 2 projects. And you can take 20 to 25 minutes for each project. The second question you need to answer is, what type of company am I interviewing with? This is equally important because you need to understand the kind of products or services that the company that you are interviewing with offers. This helps you to know the types of projects that you should put into your portfolio. It's important to have projects that actually resonate with your audience so that they can follow along and they can easily link it back to the problems that they want to solve. And that makes you a good fit for a UX design role in their organization. For example, if you're interviewing with a consumer-focused company, a company that develops mobile apps that helps consumers to solve a particular problem, then it makes sense to have consumer-focused projects in your portfolio. Likewise, if you're interviewing with an enterprise solution company that develops solutions for other businesses, then it makes sense to have enterprise solutions in your portfolio as well. And you could be interviewing with a large company that has consumer-focused products but also have internal tools that they need to manage and they need a designer for. Then your design portfolio can have consumer-focused product or mobile app design, and then you could also have enterprise tools as well as one of the projects that you present in the portfolio. What's important here is to make sure that whatever project that you're putting in your portfolio presentation resonates with your audience. This would help you a long way. Now let's go through the exact presentation that I used to get get those offers. There's a link in the description to a Figma template of this presentation available for free. You can buy me a coffee if you're feeling generous. With that being said, let's get into it. So here's the COVID page for presentation. On this page, you can provide like a background of yourself. In my own case, I just said, hello, I'm Samuel Fabayo. And then currently I'm designing solutions that keep kids and families active and connected at Explorer. Prior to that, I led the design of payments, invoicing, and data products for large organizations Adventure Garden Group. So this is basically like a summary of what my career has been before that interview. And on this cover page, you could go in a different direction. It could be as simple as possible, but don't spend too much time on this page. I would suggest that you spend maybe 30 seconds on this page just providing a background because you've most likely spoken about your background in the interview before you got to this portfolio review stage. Then on the next slide, you can speak about your work experience or your education, and then what you do as a UX designer and outside UX design. In my own case, I wanted to speak more about my education because I think it is very, very—I think it's quite unique to the role because I have an architectural background, and I wanted to be able to speak about how being a trained architect helps me be a better UX designer. I also have a master's in UX design from Kingston University London, and then you could also speak. About what you do as a UX designer in your current role, and then other things that you do outside work. At that time, I was a UX designer at Explorer. I was designing experiences that keep kids and their families active and connected. And then I was also doing some mentorship on ADP List. I didn't have this YouTube channel at the time. If not, I would have included it here. Also, I was really interested in curating music playlists and also producing music, which I was very, very bad at. I was, I was a very, very poor music producer. Um, and I've given up now. Then on the next slide, I then start to speak about my personal design philosophy. I think every designer should have their own personal design philosophy, something that helps them to be a better designer. This was what mine looked like a year ago. Some of these have changed now, but my design philosophy were 4 things. First of all, I believe that everything is a system. So whenever I'm solving anything, I don't like oversimplifying any problem. I make sure that I dig past apparent problem to the root cause. Then I don't stop iterating. Whenever I have new ideas, I always try to see how I can bring it back into the project or into the product. And then I try to seek clarity always by making sure that I ask a lot of questions and I don't like to assume. Now, your design philosophies could be different. I think it should be different, but make sure that you have some things that are like guiding principles for you as a designer. And you can put that on this slide to introduce yourself as well. Then on the next slide, you can get into your case studies. The first case study is a project called Trustfolio, an app that enables cryptocurrency adopters to track and measure the performance of their crypto portfolio in one place. What I try to do on this particular slide is to make sure that I capture what the app looks like, what the solution looks like, what the prototype and mockup of the app looks like. And I also spoke about the status. Has it been shipped? Is it in beta? Has it been retired? And then what my role was. Did I work with other team members? Did I work alone? And then the duration. It's very important for you to have this kind of Slide before you get into your project, and you could spend about one or two minutes here speaking about the project and then giving a background to it. Then I go into the project background itself. This is where I start to speak about the information that I have collected when I was conducting secondary research or desk research, or how I even came about this problem that I want to solve. Or sometimes it might be the client's brief that you got, or your product manager's brief, or the product brief. It might be what you include. Into this particular screen. Basically, it is to provide a background for the project so that you can start to set the tone for the project and make sure that you carry everybody along. Then on the next slide, I start to talk about the user research where I speak about the research objective. If interviewers do not see anything on this slide, at least they are able to see what the objective of your research is, which is how do users track their portfolio correctly. And you want to be able to call out what your research objective is because they understand that if If you have a research objective, then you know what you're doing. You know what you're trying to find out in the research. Then in the next slide, I go into the user research analysis. Basically, the key findings from the user research analysis. What are the key things that I found out from there? One is the cryptocurrency pinpoint. The second one is mental models for portfolio tracking. Basically, how people track their portfolio today. The third one is the type of users that you have. 4th one is other technologies, which could also include competitors. The 5th one is exchanges and wallets, and then how people— and then holdings, basically how much cryptocurrency people hold in one exchange at a time. All these findings were gotten from user research, user interviews, and surveys. The next slide, I go into the personas that I was able to identify while working on this project, and then the journey maps for those user personas. Here you want to spend a little bit of time to make them to understand the person or the people that you are actually designing this solution for. Solution for and the journey that they are likely to go through while they try to use your app or how they even come to need the solution that you're developing. Then on the next slide, I start to get into ideation by understanding what the problem is and how we might solve that problem. I was able to identify 3 major problems here. The first problem is that cryptocurrency adopters can't track the performance of their portfolio across multiple exchanges. Second one is that users spend a lot of time tracking their portfolio manually. The third one is that when users can't track their portfolio, they tend to make bad investment decisions. And I speak about how I was able to come up with ideas that we could use to solve those problems using how might we questions. And the how might we questions were basically 3 questions. How might we save crypto users portfolio tracking time? How might we enable users make better crypto trading and investment choices? And then how might we keep users' portfolio data safe and secure. Then on the next slide, I get into more ideation on how I was able to come up with ideas for this project using the Crazy 8 Ideation technique. This is where I met other members of the team, and then we started to brainstorm together to sketch ideas that we can use to solve the problems that we've identified based on the answers to the how might we questions in the previous slide, right? Here you start to identify some key features using this way of, um, using this way of sketching. And here you could also spend some time to talk to the interviewers about how you've been able to use this craziest ideation to solve this problem. You're walking them through your problem-solving technique and your skills as a problem solver. And then in the next slide, I spoke about the key features that I was able to identify from the ideation process. Um, here I have 9 features. If you want to introduce this kind of slide, it's always good to spend some time to speak about one or two important features here just to make sure that you're carrying everybody along well. The next slide is the design principles for this particular project. This is something that I find very, very helpful personally in my own projects as a designer. Whenever I'm working on a project, I like to identify some key design principles that are like no-brainers for me that helps me to move the project forward in the right direction. In this case, I was able to identify 3 key principles, and these are not just principles that I just made up from anywhere. It is based what I had found out during the research. The key principles were number 1, familiarity, number 2, productivity, and number 3, security. These principles are important because familiarity helps you to design an app that is familiar with users, so you're not exactly introducing new design patterns that user— that is going to get users confused. Productivity is important because the main goal of developing this app is to ensure that you are able to save users' time and you are able to make sure that users spend their time effectively by being able to track all their cryptocurrencies in one place so they're not jumping from one app to the other. And then security is also very, very important because of course this is a financial product and then security is very important for that because you want to earn users' trust. So this helps me to get into the prototyping phase because I now understand the things that becomes important for me to solve for when I'm prototyping. Then I get into the solutions. Here I start to show what the app actually looks like, what the mockup looks like, and I describe the solution that I'm trying to show on each of the mockups for each page. You could have like maybe 1, 2, 3 different solutions. In this case, I had about 3 different solutions and I tried to explain what those solutions look like. Then the next slide, I introduced the walkthrough, a video walkthrough of the prototype for about 30 seconds, just showing how users get to navigate it. This brings a lot of life into your presentation. So you're not just presenting still stuff. So at this point, the interviewers can see how your product actually works and how your solution actually works, how users can actually get to navigate it. And it just creates a little bit of breathing time for everybody to just, you know, take a moment to step away from seeing static things, then to now start seeing things moving around. It could be very, very interesting and it could help you to spice up your presentation. The final slide for the first project is like an assessment slide. What went well in the project and what didn't go so well. Basically what I said here is that this project is in beta phase and this is what went well and this is what didn't go so well. For what went well, I spoke about the user interviews uncovering a lot of user behavior that steered the project in a meaningful direction. And then I also spoke about number of users in the beta phase. has increased significantly since the first week, which is what, which is what worked well. Then what didn't go so well? Focusing on too many features for the MVP and then also realizing that the cryptocurrency space is very fast-paced and we didn't see some things like NFTs becoming so huge because we had underestimated it. This project was done in 2022, so you could understand how huge NFTs were and ignoring it just affected the progress for this particular project. Before I move on to the next slide, one question that came up from this particular presentation when I was presenting was that, um, how come I didn't speak about some of the other solutions that I explored? So it's also good to have multiple solutions that you explored but didn't eventually use or didn't eventually develop and speak about why you chose one solution over the other. That is not in this template, but that's just a tip for you. The next project is more of an enterprise solution. Like I said, I wanted to be able to show the interviewers that I have worked on a consumer project and then I've also worked on a business-to-business project as well. So for this enterprise solution, it is an electronic billing and invoicing and payment solution where I was the lead product designer. Again, it's important to show the status. The status of this project is that it has been shipped. And then the team as well. On this project, there was a product designer that took a more active role in actually designing, and my role here was making sure that the project is moving in the right direction, and then also making sure that we're making a lot of progress, and also making sure that all the design processes that we're supposed to follow in ensuring that we uncover all the user problems and solve for them, making sure that we follow all those processes. On this slide, talk about your role, how you were involved, and the things that you did in the project. Here again, speaking about the background, this particular project is an invoicing and payment solution that was designed to help large organizations with their invoicing needs. And here it was also important for me to make sure that I showed how important this project is by showing the impact. So I said that the project has processed transactions worth over $1 billion and over 1 million invoices using, using this particular project. So in this particular case, the first project that I spoke about was a 0 to 1 project. Meaning that the solution didn't exist before. So we are basically coming up with an MVP. The second project that I'm talking about now is an existing product that we want to improve. So it's important to put out the current data of the project. How is this project performing currently and what are you looking to improve? On the next slide, I also go into the problem. Here we're able to identify 2 major problems that we wanted to solve. Number one, there's a high margin of error when businesses create an invoice on The platform. Secondly, the visual design of the user interface is old, is inconsistent, and outdated. Again, all of these problems are backed up with stats. What do we mean by high margin of error? What is the margin of error? One out of every ten invoices created has one error or the other, and then competition products have better looking interfaces. This is what the screenshot of the interface looked like. So always good to show like the before as well. How this interface looked before. We started redesigning it. This helps to create a lot of context, a lot of background, and helps them to know what kind of progress has been made on the product. Now, what is our goal? The goal that we're trying to achieve basically is to reduce the margin of error for created invoices to less than 4%. This is where numbers become important because you then start to see how you can track your results or track your progress because you already have a set goal, numbers that you're trying to hit. Now in this particular case, we are trying to ensure that the margin of error is less than 4%, which means that not more than 3 invoices should have errors for every 10 invoices that are generated. And then we also wanted to redesign the interface with a smoother experience for users. On the next slide, we have the research questions, basically speaking about the questions that we asked during research and then what users are saying about the products based on what we found out from the research. Here you can spend some time to speak about what you found out from your research. And here I spoke about why users are creating invoices with errors, because users can't preview invoices while entering invoice details, because invoices don't get reviewed before it's approved, because users don't get appropriate error feedback when entering invoice details, and then transaction categories are easily mixed up. Again, design principles similar to the first project. I have design principles for this as well. As you can see, The design principles for this project is different from design principles for the other project because they are different projects and because the insights from the research is different. Also, the problem that we are solving for is different. So here we are designing for accessibility. We are designing for efficiency. We want to keep it as simple as possible and we wanted to provide feedback. Then in the next slide, I speak about the design system that helped us to redesign this product. One of the things that was important to do before embarking on a redesign was to have a design system. So in cases where you don't have a project that is dedicated to a design system in your portfolio, you could introduce this within any of the projects that you are presenting. So it makes the interviewers understand that you also understand how design systems work and why design systems are important and how to actually use them in a project. So in this particular case, design system, a design system was developed for this project. And I also spoke about the design system, how we came about it, and how we were able to use it to redesign the product. Then go into the solutions here. I spoke about the solutions for creating and previewing invoices in live mode, which is basically being able to create an invoice and preview it at the same time so you can know if you're making any errors rather than just creating and then sending your invoice with errors. Then secondly, redesigning the entire dashboard so that the entire look and feel of the products is different. It looks newer and it looks fresher. And then thirdly, being able to add new customers easily when creating an invoice rather than going through a long process of adding a new customer while creating a new invoice, users can easily add new customers. And then to wrap this up, I spoke about the business impact of this project. When was it launched? It was launched in August 2020. And what were the major results that we got? The margin of error is less than 6%. We were not able to hit the goal of reducing margin of error to 4%. But some things that worked out was that there was faster invoicing. The average time it took to create an invoice reduced by 33% from an average of 9 minutes to 6 minutes. And then lots of the users reported positive reviews. Clients and users gave very positive reviews about the redesigned user interface. They reported that the user interface is easier to use and it is familiar, which is one of the design principles that we wanted to go by. Now for the very last slide, it's always good to introduce your final pitch. Which is why do you want to join this company? When I did this presentation, I didn't have this, and I realized that it was very, very important because after the presentation, one of the interviewers asked me why I wanted to join. And I figured that if I had that in this presentation, that question wouldn't have been necessary because I would've spoken about it. So here, what you want to do is you want to introduce the company name. For example, why Meta or why Google, and then pick maybe 3 or 4 values from what you've read about the company and how it aligns with your own personal values and your personal goals. Once you do this, you can be able to have your last pitch and speak about why you want to join this organization. So that's how I present my portfolio in a UX design interview. Your own presentation doesn't need to look exactly like this. You can refine it based on the project you've worked on and the role that you're interviewing for. Thank you for watching. Watching, and don't forget to like this video and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. I'll see you in the next one.