Learn more about creating a case study for your portfolio project
You’ve finished the final designs for the mobile app you’ve been working on for the past few courses. Congratulations! What a great feeling. Now, you’re ready to showcase your designs to future employers and other designers by creating a case study in your portfolio website. Your case study should include these ten things.
State your role in the project. In the real world, you’ll mention the team members who collaborated on a design project with you and list the role that each of you played in bringing the designs to life. But for your project in this course, you covered the design process from beginning to end on your own! You should express that in the case study you’re creating.
State the purpose of your project based on your findings from the research.
Describe the users you tried to solve a problem for or help through your design project.
State the challenges. Some common challenges include things like budget or time constraints.
Mention the details of the research study. What research method did you use, and why did you choose it? What issues did the data reveal that led you into the study? How did the research study look?
Outline your design process and the decisions you made that contributed to that design. This is a good place to back your decisions with data from any research findings or results of a usability study that informed your design thinking.
Show visuals of your design. This includes paper sketches, wireframes, and low-fidelity prototypes of your design.
Discuss the results of user testing. At this point, you want to help others understand why the issues occurred and what the usability tests showed as a result. In other words, what did you learn?
Showcase your design. You’ll include a mockup or high-fidelity prototype of your design here to wow your audience.
State your conclusion and possible next steps. This is your chance to talk about what you learned throughout the design process and to touch on the future direction for the product or possible iterations.
Update your portfolio
You began creating your portfolio in the first course of this certificate, and hopefully you’ve been revising it along the way, as you created new assets and completed important hands-on activities. One of the biggest things you should keep in mind as you create your case studies is showing potential employers how you learned and adapted through the iteration of your design. Employers value a UX designer’s ability to manage the input from stakeholders or users.
Learn more about adding a case study to your portfolio website
As you think about how you’re going to prepare your case study, you’ll want to do some extra reading.
- This article from a designer breaks down their design process into a case study for inclusion into a portfolio: Trip Tribe: A tale of UX auditing and designing through gifs.
- Get an in-depth walkthrough of how to write a UX case study, including examples of good and bad case studies, from InVision.
- If you need help thinking about how to organize your case study, you can review this Case Study Template and Example from AdobeXD.
Below is an example of how one designer distilled their design process down into a case study, check out this portfolio example from a Googler:
- A case study for the design of an app by Shabi: Scapes
Sources: Google UX Design Professional Certificate
Coursera | Create High-Fidelity Designs and Prototypes in Figma
