The best UX designer portfolios: inspiring case studies and examples
A considerable amount of time and painful effort goes into building a stellar UX designer portfolio. If the right type of content is chosen with great UX, it will be a worthy investment.

What makes a winning UX portfolio? As UX portfolio tips and best practices show us, telling a compelling story is key. Recruiters and others who may be evaluating your work are busy-you only have a few minutes to engage them before they decide whether or not you made the cut.

A long list of relevant skills, the tools you use, and how many years of experience you have is of no real benefit to your visitors, or to your presentation. It’s more important to outline your user-centered design process-how the problem was solved.

Be explicit about your skills, the process you use, and the kinds of projects you specialize in, but be mindful of presenting too much information. UX portfolios should not be a retrospective of ALL past work. Choose projects that are specific, recent, and outstanding, and present them as a design process.

Hiring/UX managers want to see: user research, research reports, sketches, wireframes, user flows, wireflows, user stories, customer journey maps, prototypes, user-testing, and the final product. If possible, it’s also good to include analytics tools used to see how successful the product was.

Here are a few other points to remember:

Beware of technical jargon and splashy imagery-simple project descriptions and visuals are more effective. Wireframes are not pretty, so emphasize your structural ability. Share the process! Write clear project summaries. Make them easy to read-not too much text! If there are no confidentiality issues, link to live examples of your work. (If there are confidentiality issues blot out company logos and/or blur areas of the images. There is no bigger turn-off than encountering a page that is password protected. That is bad UX.) Include a few stakeholder testimonials. Conclude each project case study with what you learned.

If you’re a UX designer, your UX portfolio should demonstrate exceptional UX.

A UX designer’s portfolio is more than a showcase of skills, it’s an opportunity to create an enjoyable user experience so designers need to prioritize good work, tell an engaging story, and demonstrate their UX mastery!

Ten Inspiring UX Designer Portfolios

Karolis grew up in Vilnius, Lithuania and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is a product designer at Stripe. Aside from many other interesting, self-initiated projects, he is the co-founder of Anchovy, a free, extremely simple iPhone app that turns your words into beautiful color gradients that can be sent as real paper postcards to anywhere in the world or shared with friends on Facebook Messenger.
['Miklos Philips']
['Portfolio', 'Design', 'UX Design', 'Designer', 'UX']