How to create a portfolio to suit everyone

I've never seen anything so affected by the 'Dunning-Kruger effect' as the UX & Product Design hiring process.

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Portfolio Advice from people who know little about your industry

Everybody has different advice and many students and designers waste months and years making it shorter, longer, more detailed, less detailed - Ad Infinitum...  

It's a continuous loop of everyone telling you to change your folio back and forth, and it literally takes weeks to completely restructure your portfolio and adjust all the content accordingly (one portfolio iteration) - only to get conflicting advice soon after which seems to indicate it should be the way it was before!!!

BUT the real problem is that many of the audience have no clue whatsoever about UX Design (they often incorrectly think it's UI/visual/aesthetic design, and judge you on that)...

It's really unfair as a UX designer who designs experiences a.k.a 'the functionality of a product' to be judged as a visual designer by someone who doesn't recognise, their own blindness, but that's the way the industry is right now.

The rookie recruiter wants short, lots of cool looking visual design, doesn't read about the UX Process AT ALL and doesn't understand it - and will tell you to CUT OUT all that stuff...

.... whereas a UX design lead - will scan the UX case study and will jump into parts of it in detail to understand your thinking and process, BUT what if you just cut all that stuff out on some duff advice?

Well, you don't get further in the hiring process because you took advice from an idiot.

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My advice is to have a short case study page with all the 'bling' for those on the 'inexperienced' end of the scale, and a longer one for the people who actually know about design where you talk through your process in detail and present research findings, research analysis, detail the process applied for this project, and link out to the live website (as proof)

The experienced readers will also appreciate well structured pages with nice visual design, and it will grab the attention of all the other gatekeepers prior to that point and keep them happy, as they mistakenly judge you on the wrong attributes.. It's not OK, but it's what you have to do to get past them.

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The rookie recruiters have no idea that UX is not the same as UI, like lots of pretty things and animation. The people who work in UX or Product, like to understand your process thinking with longer pages and explanations and stats and data.

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Each project is different and you'll need different buttons or concertinas for each project, depending on the type of project. I'm still writing up my portfolio, but you can get the idea on this Sydney University project page (short version)

This page needs all the 'bling' to be added (I'm working on it..) like an animated header, video feature walkthroughs and clickable prototypes to be added, but check out the buttons, and how much information each button leads to - this is essentially the way to 'hide' the complexity for the inexperienced audience type, yet still explain the basics of the project and impress with the visual design.

And for those knowledgeable about UX, who need to see the proof that you know what you're doing, give them access to all the fine detail any way that you see fit - buttons out, consertinas in-page, 2 different versions - any way that allows the project to be viewed simply AND in detail, depending on the viewers preference.

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In essence, the first view of any project should be treated as a summary cover page with all the impressive stuff condensed into it - animations communicating the user experience you designed, impressive impact statements, infographics condensing research & analysis, video walkthroughs of main features...