CloudApp brings screen recording, screenshots, and GIF creation to the cloud, in an easy-to-use enterprise-level app. Just capture, share, and accelerate your workflow.
CloudApp brings screen recording, screenshots, and GIF creation to the cloud, in an easy-to-use enterprise-level app. Just capture, share, and accelerate your workflow.
How to Create a Case Study for your UX and Product Design Portfolio
I meet with a lot of designers who are unclear how to promote their work. They create beautiful apps and web sites and work hard on a project. Then have trouble summarizing them into a clear concise case study, and in the end, they sell themselves short.
I want to help designers breakthrough this case study funk. So I put on my detective hat, and asked them: “What is difficult about creating a case study?” Some replied they have trouble condensing information into a short concise page. They also struggle with:
“Case studies are hard. We want them to be interesting and not overwhelming. They take time and it’s tough to tell a story.”
Lukasz Lysakowski, Design Director at Peek
Most UX and Product Design case studies contain too much information. Designers should summarize their projects into clear, concise statements instead of showing us this 10000px long document with endless examples of how they accomplished something, with no clear understanding of what the product is.In this article, I will teach you to put together your case study without overwhelming people.
How to Structure your Case Study
As a designer, it’s important to find what works best for you. Here is one way to organize your case study.
Landing Page
Create a success story for your project. Summarize the product, skills, the challenges, highlight features, and explain the outcome.
Explain your Process
Explain your process in a separate section of your site. Or, you can write a public or unlisted Medium post and link to it from your portfolio. Hiring managers want to understand how you solve problems. Your process includes wireframes, strategy, user flows, design thinking and anything else you feel is necessary to communicate how you achieved a result.
Part 1: Design a Case Study Landing Page
For this article, I’ll focus specifically on designing a case study landing page.
Think Like an Ad Agency
Advertising agencies win clients because they know how to sell their work. Every project begins with a creative brief and ends with a case study. The creative brief outlines the scope, the unique selling point, target audience, goals, deliverables, and schedule. When the project is complete, the agency publishes a case study to summarize the project, show the outcome, and its effect on the business.
Case studies tell a story with big beautiful graphics, clear objectives and metrics.
We should take hints from well-respected design agencies like Frog, IDEO, and DesignIt. They tell the story of their work with big beautiful graphics, clear objectives, and metrics. They make it easy for the client to understand the project and grasp the outcome.
A light bulb went off when Barrington Reeves, a Graphic Designer in the UK, gave me the idea to look at ad agencies for case study examples. I Googled top agencies around the world, took screenshots, and dissected them. Hold on tight because this is awesome. Here’s a breakdown of what I discovered.
Case study breakdown
Common patterns include:
Project Summary
Objective
Role and Services
Product Features
Images
Animated screenshots
Screenshots
High-resolution photos of people using your product
Metrics
Testimonial
Call to Action
1. Write a Project Summary
Describe your product and explain how it works in a few sentences.
Jean-Marc Denis, a Multidisciplinary Designer, explains the product features and his role in designing Inbox.
2. Define the Objective
The objective explains an overview of the product, who the user is, what problem you are trying to solve, who was involvedand provides background information and technical details or specifications.
Who is this project for? What is the challenge?
Mackey Saturday, Product Designer at Facebook, describes the challenges he faced while designing the Oculus logo.
Student Projects
If you’re working on an experimental project and don’t have a real client, explain your intent for the project, the challenge, and the solution. I’ve listed a few examples but will go more into detail in a future post.
Example 1:
“I designed a system for NYTimes readers to cater to their busy schedule. They can select quick-read articles ranging from 2-5 minutes and receive smart notifications based on their Google Calendar.”
Example 2: “As a Slack user, I wanted to make the mobile app as good as the desktop. I analyzed in detail what could be revised and proposed a redesign concept.”
3. How did you Contribute to this Project?
This is where you show off your skills. List everything you accomplished to bring this project to life.
Designed user interface for the mobile app
Branding and graphic design
Front-end development
User Interviews
Extensive Market Research
Customer Journey Maps
Affinity mapping
Asher Blumberg lists the platforms and disciplines with a few words.
Odopod’s list of services
Capture your process with 1 or 2 photos
Provide an overview of your process, but don’t go into too much detail.
4. Take Animated Screenshots of Your Work
Use motion and animation to get attention and bring your design to life.
You can use motion capture tools likeCloudAppto capture screenshots, record animations, and annotate on the fly.
5. Highlight Product Features
Odopod captures their work in an animated gif to show you how they redesigned their booking process for Hawaiian Airlines.
Show off product features while explaining your design process
Yet another example from Asher Blumberg’s portfolio. He rocks!
I made up this example to show you how you can share product features and your process.
6. Capture Gorgeous Hi-Res Photos of People Interacting with your App
Frog Design shows humans interacting with the product, which gives people more of a real-world experience.
DesignIt, a strategic design firm, captures humans using the product.
7. Use Metrics
Measure the effectiveness of your design. How did it impact the business? Did it increase sales? Did you recruit new customers? Were you hired for a job? Keep it simple. Define the metrics and measurements used to evaluate a project’s success.
Examples of metrics:
Increased Sales
Increased Signups
Customer retention
New visitors vs. repeat visitors
Create awareness
Improve brand perception
Prompt a specific action
Retain customers
Metrics are important because they give a business case for you to get hired. A design is successful when you are able to increase sales or grow a customer base.
Frog Design made a huge impact on sales and shows you with data.
Work and Co’s results from Virgin America redesign
8. Gather Testimonials
9. Add a Call to Action
ABC –Always Be Closing. Finish each case study with a call to action that inspires the viewer to get in touch with you for future projects or employment opportunities.
Conclusion
A well-designed case study demonstrates your talent, skills, describes an overview of your process and makes a business case for your work. Get clear on what you’ve created, and simplify it. It might take a while to summarize into brief statements, but you can do it! Write it down, edit, edit, edit and keep editing.
Do yourself a favor, and spend the time to design a beautiful portfolio that shows the value of your work. Invest in yourself because you’re worth it.
More Resources for your Reading Pleasure
How to Create and Write a Case Study (+ 12 Case Study Examples)
G2 crowd assembled a list of effective methods to sell your skills through case studies. These don’t relate directly to product designers, but are still useful.
About Andi Galpern Andi Galpern is a UX Strategist at CloudApp. She is also the founder and producer of Cascade SF, an experience designorganization in the Bay Area. Her events provide a go-to space for product designers to learn new skills, connect with industry leaders, mentor, and stay ahead of the job market. Everyone works together toward a more fulfilling career.
Since 2011, Andi has organized hundreds of design and technology events to bring communities together. She regularly works with designers around the world to help them create presentations and become leaders. Follow her on Twitter @andigalpern.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Additional Cookies
This website uses the following additional cookies:
(List the cookies that you are using on the website here.)
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!