Today's video is sponsored by Bokksu.
I'll talk about them more later in the video.
I'm in the process of updating my portfolio.
And let me tell you, it is not a fun process.
It is not something that I enjoy and look forward to, which is why
I thought doing a video on how I write my UX design case
studies would be helpful for some of you who feel the same way.
I don't know a single designer who doesn't dread writing their case studies,
but we can conquer procrastination and overwhelm when we let go
of the expectation that our case studies have to be perfect from the get go.
One of my favorite books on writing
called by "Bird by Bird" talks about this idea of crappy first draft.
Once you get your first crappy below-average draft out of the way,
then you can make some tweaks and get a good enough second draft,
and then your third draft will actually be great.
So today we're going to stop browsing other designers'
cool portfolios and work on our own case studies together.
Remember, done is better than perfect.
Let's first cover the basics that will help
you get started on the right foot.
When you're writing your design case study,
it's kind of like writing a blog post for your project.
So whenever you write a blog post, you have to think about
who your readers are and what they care about.
Your audience for your design case
study is going to be design managers and recruiters primarily.
They're not really looking to see the fanciest website out there.
They're really looking to see if you have the skillsets of a designer
that they want to hire.
Some of the skills that you want to demonstrate
are product strategy, that comes down to having a good problem statement.
Are you working on the right product that has impact on the business?
They also want to see interaction design, visual design.
They're also very busy people.
They're going to spend
maximum 5 minutes on your portfolio, browsing through your case studies.
5 minutes is still very generous.
I think on average, people spend about a minute per portfolio
and they're really quickly scanning through your design case study.
You also want to stand out from all the hundreds of portfolios
that they're looking at, and especially if you're a junior designer one
way that you can really stand out is by having good visual design,
because a lot of junior people lack visual design.
A lot of bootcamps don't really teach you visual design so
make sure that the designs you're showing don't look like they're from the 2000s.
I have seen a lot of those case
studies and yeah, I don't want to hire them.
Aside from great visuals,
another way to differentiate yourself is by not using the cookie
cutter approach that a lot of bootcamps and classes will teach you.
What they'll often say is you got to have the problem statement, UX
research, personas, sketches, wireframes, and then your high fidelity mock ups.
That is not a design process.
That's just putting down
your design artifacts and writing what you did in the project.
You want to talk about the "whys" and the "hows".
One more thing I want to add
is if you have personas in your case, studies, consider leaving them out.
Personas are very general and they don't really provide
a lot of value to your project nor your case study.
A lot of beginners tend to insert personas because they feel like they have to,
and that's what they've been taught.
But in actual projects, you rarely use personas.
So I always like to have a narrative structure to outline my case study.
This is a framework that I use for my design case studies.
It's very similar to the UX design process that I explained in my previous video
where you go wide and explore your different design
solutions concepts, and then you narrow down
and ideate on a few design concepts to come up with the final solution.
Knowing that your readers don't have a lot of time to spare
make sure that your case studies are easily scannable.
Don't write long essay.
Write concise paragraphs and use minimal font styling.
I've seen a lot of case studies where there's 20 different styles going on
and it really reduces the scannability of the page.
I like to break down my process into two parts.
The first part is the writing portion,
and the second part is the designing portion.
When I write down everything on paper, it ensures that my case study progresses
in a meaningful way, in a structured way that has a storyline.
But if I try to do both writing and designing at the same time,
I feel very overwhelmed.
It's very easy to lose focus, and so I always separate out the two.
I start with writing my case study, and then I figure out
which design artifacts to put into my case study.
Writing it out also makes it super easy to figure out which details to put in,
what kind of visual assets I need so it just makes the process
a lot quicker and smoother as well.
These are the components of the case study.
This is not rocket science.
You probably know these things already, so try not to overthink it
and write two to three sentences maximum per section.
Don't go more than three sentences and timebox yourself
or 25 minutes and just write whatever comes to mind using this template.
You want to have a product title, a project overview where it summarizes
the project, the problem and the solution.
You want to also talk about your role and the duration of the project.
Then you want to talk more in depth about the problem goals,
user business goals, and the design process.
So this is where the meat of your case study is.
You want to go wide in your explorations.
Talk about why something works better than the other explorations that you've done.
Then you want to also narrow down those iterations based on UX research
that you did or team feedback and explain the decisions
that you made along the way to get you to your final solution.
And then lastly, you want to talk about results.
You want to talk about any success metrics that you'd look at.
And even if you don't have any success metrics to show it is okay.
You can just talk about the conversion rates
or some of the metrics that you would pay attention to
in order to gauge and measure how your designs made an impact
and how your designs improved the business problem
and the user problem that you were set out to solve in the beginning.
So after spending
25 minutes, my brain is usually fried.
So this is when I like to give myself a little treat, a little break.
And here I have with me my snacks from Japan because I can't go to Japan.
So I need to experience my Sakura season through this snack box.
Bokksu is a monthly subscription service that delivers premium Japanese snacks
straight from Japan to your door, and we're going to open this together.
Each month there's a different theme, and this month's theme is Sakura season,
if you couldn't tell.
And as you can see, it is packed with all sorts of limited edition
cherry blossom themed snacks.
I went to Japan during the Sakura season a few years ago and it was beautiful.
I love cherry blossoms.
If you want to have your own Sakura box to accompany
you while you write your design case studies, use the link in my description
and use coad CHUNBUNS to get $15 off your order.
Okay, let's try out some of these snacks.
This is so cute.
Mmm. I really like these chips.
That's goood.
Mmm. Oh, this matches my outfit.
After you write your case study it's now going to be so much easier
for you to figure out which design assets to include or exclude.
So you want to include any visualizations or designs that help
the reader understand the content better.
And you want to exclude anything that sort of distracts
the reader from focusing on the main storyline.
So if it's a sketch that you kind of want to add because it looks nice, but
it doesn't really go along with the main structure of your case study,
then it's best to just take that out.
Some things to keep in mind when you're designing your case study,
you want to have the best designs at the top.
Most people don't have the patience
to scroll all the way down to check out your final designs,
and they're mostly going to bounce out of your portfolio
if they're only seeing sketches and wireframes in the first few scrolls.
People have the attention span of a goldfish, so remember that.
In that same vein, 80% of your mockups should be high fidelity mockups.
Now, some people might disagree
and say you still have to show your design process,
and it's not all about the final solutions,
but I don't think those two are mutually exclusive.
You should show your design process, but also show it with compelling visuals.
If I'm only seeing wireframes and sketches, it's really hard for me
to know the output of the designer and what they can actually deliver.
So I always err on the side
of showing more high fidelity mockups than my work in progress designs.
You also want to show both breadth and depth of work.
So for breadth, you can show your user flows, journey maps,
variants of one screen, all the edge cases that you've designed for.
For depth of work you can zoom in to one of the pages and call out
some of the details on the page that help solve for a specific user problem.
There are some low effort things that you can implement
that will help your design case study look a lot more polished than before.
One of them is putting phone devices over your screens
instead of just sharing your high fidelity screen mockups alone.
If you put a phone device over it, it just makes it look a lot more realistic
and polished.
If you don't want to do that,
an easier thing you can do is round the corners and drop a shadow,
and it's going to make it look a lot more polished for some reason.
It's all about the illusion, right?
It just looks a lot better than your standard rectangular screen.
One thing you should avoid is screenshotting portions of your figma file
or raw data of your UX research sessions.
If you're really crunched on time, it's totally fine, but that's the perception
people have when you just share screenshots of something.
It just seems very low effort.
Last but not least, I think it's important to include some kind of animation
or prototype, and I always prefer gifs instead of videos or clickable prototypes.
Because as a reader, it's annoying to have to click
something to make something work.
So just create a gif that loops automatically
and they could just briefly look over it without having to move a finger.
I have to go back to writing my own case studies now,
but I really hope that this video has lessened
your anxiety and the stress that comes with trying to write up a case study.
If you want to check out my work they're at chunbuns.com/portfolio.
Remember that done is better than perfect.
I'll see you my next video BYEE