32.  What should I put in my portfolio?

Joe Marcantano: Drew, Welcome to another episode.

Drew Freeman: Hello, Mr. Marantano. How are you doing?

Joe Marcantano: I am doing well. We are switching things up today. We're recording on a Monday. it's a holiday, at least for me, so I'm off work. So we're recording and, knocking out this episode here today, whereas it was.

Drew Freeman: Not a holiday for me. So I'm doing this after, a day of work. So apologize if the bring is a little bit worse than usual.

Joe Marcantano: Well, Drew, we're going to do the best we can on this one, and I'm hoping to lean into you a little bit. you, I suspect, have made more iterations of yours than I have of mine. But the question for this week is, what should I put in my portfolio?

Drew Freeman: This is a great question, but I'm not sure that your hunch on I've put more iterations into mine is accurate. I made one when I was transitioning from my previous software testing job into full time uxr, but I've maybe updated it once since maybe.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, I'm actually in the same boat. I'm pretty vocal about this. I've posted on LinkedIn on this before. I don't think that portfolios are the right way to evaluate UXRs. Having said that, I would never give somebody the advice to not make a portfoliouse they're just too many employers out there who require them.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I'm kind of with you. They're not the way that I would choose to evaluate potential hires, but I understand that they are the way for people. I don't. I'm not against them as a tool to help evaluate someone, but they shouldn't be the tool.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. My suspicion on this is that this is a little bit of a holdover from kind of when research was really just a part of design and not really its own profession or its own specialization. That's interesting because portfolios are extremely common for, for designers, and I think that probably that's the right tool there.

Drew Freeman: It certainly makes more sense to me for designers than it does for researchers.

Joe Marcantano: So why don't we back this up just a tiny bit, before we get into, like, what should I put in my portfolio and start super broad? Drew, what is a portfolio? When we say that what do we mean?

Drew Freeman: So at its most basic, a portfolio is essentially just a compilation of work stories and work case studies that you have as a researcher that you can present to people who might want to hire you to show them why they should hire you instead of anybody else. Anything that you would add to that or does that kind of COVID it at the basic.

Joe Marcantano: At the basic level, that kind of covers it. I think that they can come in many forms. The most common are the PDF or deck style or the website style. I don't think either one is wrong or better than the other. people just have both or one or the other and that's fine.

Drew Freeman: Yeah, I don't. As someone who occasionally does look at portfolios, I don't care what format it's in, as long as it's done cleanly. I'm not even go goingna say, well, just cleanly. Like I'm not looking for someone who is necessarily a wizard when it comes to aesthetically designing slides or can work their way around website creation really well. Like that's not what I'm looking for in a researcher.

Joe Marcantano: So let's start with the kind of basics of, you know, you said it was a collection of stories. What if I'm sitting down to create my first portfolio or maybe I'm starting over, I want to redo it entirely in the outlining process. What are the sections? What are the things I need to put in there?

Drew Freeman: That's a great question. So the way that mine is set up, and I'm not trying to say that m. I have the best way, but the way that mine is set up is I've got a couple of slides right at the beginning about who am I as a researcher and just telling my story a little bit, you know, a little bit personal, but also like, these are the skills that I think make me unique, or these are the skills that I want to highlight to you. But then the meat of it is really those like work products, those case studies, and those are really

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Drew Freeman: to try to highlight work that I'm really happy with and show potential hiring managers. I've done this work before. I can do this work for you too.

Joe Marcantano: The first thing you said that I want to touch on just very briefly is, you know, you said you'll put a couple of slides about you and I do the same thing. I have a little like, meet Joe. You know, this, is a really good time in your portfolio where you can say and outside of work interest. But keep in mind that like, this is still a Job interview or a tool for a job interview. So mine says, you know, hi, I'm Joe. I live in, Denver, Colorado. I love hockey and hiking.

Drew Freeman: Right. I wasnna say. It's like a sentence or two.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. And I don't go deep. And I also don't pick any kind of thing that could be, quote, unquote, controversial. Right. I try to keep this fairly bland in this section.

Drew Freeman: Right. I'm not even sure what mine says, but I think I might say something along the lines of I like to curl the sport curling, and I volunteer with a cat rescue. Like, you know, something like that. Really the goal of that in my mind is to try to make m me more memorable as we're going through the process. So, you know, as someone who's on the other side occasionally and is part of the hiring process, I can go, oh, Joe Schmo. Oh, yeah. He's the one who likes xyz. It's just a way to try to stick in that person's head a little bit better.

Joe Marcantano: Yep. I had one time, an applicant put in that, their fun fact was that they were a, accomplished bagpiper and had a picture of them in the full regalia with a set of bagpipes. And that stuck in my mind.

Drew Freeman: I was going to say, that's perfect.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah. Every time I thought of this candidate, that was the image that I had. And that was a great way to stand out without, you know, going so deep and saying something like, I'm twice divorced and I have a kid. And like, those kind of personal details you don't need to get into just yet.

Drew Freeman: This is not a dating profile.

Joe Marcantano: Exactly.

Drew Freeman: Okay, so then I think where you should spend the most time, both in terms of length of material, but also in terms of the thought that you put into this is putting forth your work product, essentially. And I think that can look. I mean, you can do that in a multitude of different ways. The way that works for me, like the way that my brain thinks about it, is basically trying to tell a little mini story of this was the situation, this was the problem. Here's how I went about trying to solve it, and here were the results. That's how I like to format my little stories.

Joe Marcantano: The warning that I always give people when they're picking, you know, which study or, which cases will be in their portfolio. Because in a way, these are case studies, but not entirely. You don't want to essentially copy and paste slides from your readout deck number one. You don't want to put Proprietary company information in there. But number two, these are two different audiences. When you're telling a story to your stakeholders, your goal is to impact action and decisions. So you may not go into in the readout. We launched this survey and the results were there were high numbers of fraudulent responses and we switched platforms and got a different panel like your stakeholders. In that case, that's not the plot they're looking for. Me as a hiring manager, that's exactly the kind of story I want. I want to know how things went wrong, what you did to course correct or adjust, and what was your decision process in that course correction. So remember, you're telling two different stories here.

Drew Freeman: Absolutely. And we should be used to doing this and thinking this way as researchers, but you absolutely need to be thinking about your audience and thinking about what information is important and valuable for them to hear.

Joe Marcantano: Yes, I am. Probably. I'm probably a little bit on the extreme here. When folks present me case studies, I don't actually care about the results of the research. I want to know why they did the method they did, what problems came up, how they adjusted. I want to know how they tailored their readout to drive impact. I want to know less about the study specifically. In fact, if you never told me the topic of the study, I would not complain. I want to know about you as a researcher and your process and your decision making.

Drew Freeman: I was going to say, as someone who occasionally looks at these from the hiring side of things, the only part of the results that I

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Drew Freeman: care about. Well, I guess there's two. One, I'm a researcher and I always want to, like, I always want to learn more. So scratching that itch is good. But most importantly, the only reason I care about the results is that or the thing about results that I care about is how did you get people to take action from what you learned? That's what I want to know. An effective researcher is not only someone who can get answers, but can then take action or drive action based on those answers. So that's the part of results that I want to know about.

Joe Marcantano: While we're on that topic of kind of results and impact, let's talk about instances where you're working for an agency, so there might be NDAs involved, or maybe you're an internal researcher and you want to put together a case study, but there's company proprietary data. How do you navigate that? How do you. How do you tell the story without talking about things that you shouldn't or aren't allowed to talk about?

Drew Freeman: I think that goes into what you were talking about earlier when you said as a person who's doing hiring, you don't really care about the results. And that's great and perfect for you to remember when you're creating your portfolio. Because often it's those kind of nitty gritty, detailed results that can get you into the most trouble when it comes to confidentiality, NDAs, that sort of thing. So keeping that kind of results conversation at a really high level and focusing more on what those results like, what outcomes, what changed based on those results, that's one more valuable. And two, keeps you out of the most danger when it comes to confidentiality. To give a, you know, not an exact example, but you know, you can say things like, our customers told us that they struggled to find and struggled to work through the online shopping process. So as a result of that we redesigned the website to better meet their needs in terms of shopping from their phone as an example. None of that is particularly proprietary, confidential and should be safe for that level of detail. Should be safe for a portfolio.

Joe Marcantano: The general advice I give folks here is if it is something that is done and deployed and public facing, much safer, much safer. If it is something that has not been deployed or your changes have not yet been implemented, or maybe it's implemented but it's an internal thing, it doesn't face the public.

Drew Freeman: Tread with these real caution.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, these are the areas you need to be really, really careful because these are kind of the things that can quote, get you in trouble. Now having said that, I don't know of anyone who's ever actually gotten in trouble but you know, you still don't want to violate any confidentiality. I know as an interviewer that was always a real turn off for me.

Drew Freeman: That's exactly where I was going to go as even if you don't get in trouble from your company that you currently work for or have worked for in the past, it's not a good look to potentially violate an NDA or confidentiality to that potential hiring manager who's thinking about hiring you. Because if you'll do that for a past employee or employer, what's to say you won't do it for them?

Joe Marcantano: There's one more thing I'm thinking about when it comes to portfolios and I'd love to get your take on this Drew is know, let's say my portfolio is on a website. I've got a personal website, you know, Joe Marcantano, uxearcher.com, whatever. And either my website serves as my portfolio Or I have a link to it on there. What are your thoughts on putting your portfolio behind a password?

Drew Freeman: I don't think that that is something that I would do personally, but it's also not something that I've given a ton of thought to, especially if it's on a website. I wouldn't do it because it's just an extra step I'm thinking, I suppose mine is in slide deck form and I suppose you could say that that's password protected because someone needs the actual shared link to get to that. But I would make the same argument for someone really kind of needs you to give them the URL to your portfolio, your website based portfolio. So I guess I wouldn't hide it behind a password.

Joe Marcantano: I fall the other side of that O and not strongly so. only because I have seen multiple stories posted and talk to people where this has happened to them, where someone will take their

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Joe Marcantano: portfolio, their stories and just slap their own name on it and present it as if they've done it. I talked to one person, I guess this was about six or seven months ago, I talked to this other researcher and they were telling me this story about how somebody had essentially stolen their portfolio. And the only reason they were able to, the person who stole their portfolio got caught was because the employer, rather than turning it in as a PDF, they turned it in as a Google Slides and the employer saw the edit history and saw that they had essentially changed their name in there. And so that's why I fall not strongly, but I do tend to fall on the, you know, if you have it in a deck and it's a link you have to send out, that's cool. But not just having it like active as your website that anyone who Googles you could just find.

Drew Freeman: That's fair. Is there anything else that you would want to talk about in terms of like what content should be in a portfolio or kind of that bigger level, that higher level, the strategy of a portfoliouse. Otherwise I think we can end with some like really low level, detailed, concrete best practices that people can use.

Joe Marcantano: No, as far as the story that goes in your portfolio, I think that we've kind of covered the high points. You know, there's kind of the logistics of like what format it takes and thinking about your audience, remembering that like this is not an instance where you're talking about the study, you're talking about your decision making, your process and the impact that you have.

Drew Freeman: Exactly.

Joe Marcantano: Why don't we go into a little bit of kind of nitty gritty what are some things that maybe some mistakes you've seen or some best practices that you have in mind when building a portfolio? What do you think about or what.

Drew Freeman: Do you do from like a building blocks standpoint? The thing that I would say first is keep it shorter than you think you need to. So that means limit the number of case studies or examples that you use. For a junior researcher, that might only be one really good one, you know, and by really good, I mean really illustrates your process. Not that it went perfectly because Joe's already mentioned that seeing how you recovered when the project went sideways can be excellent for a hiring manager as you get more experience. I think I would still limit it at like three or four max, and really try to use those to highlight the diversity of methods or tools or whatever that you can provide.

Joe Marcantano: I tend to agree. I treat it like my resume in that, you know, my quot unote master copy of my resume is about four pages long and I remove the stuff that's irrelevant, if I'm ever turning it in for a job to cut it down to two pages. And I have the same mindset for my portfolio, you know, I have four or five studies in there, but I think for any given job, I don't know that I'd ever turn in more than two. You know, I'd ask some questions in the initial chat or screening about what kind of research they do, what kind of questions they typically tackle, and then I would give the two projects or the two stories that kind of fit into that best.

Drew Freeman: I do it slightly differently, but I will, I will agree that your way is probably the empirically better way to do it. I try to just really limit my, like, source of truth copy to be and treat it as if it's more generalized than it sounds like what you do. But I will readily admit that your way is probably the better way to do it.

Joe Marcantano: Any other good tips?

Drew Freeman: So I think along the lines of keep it short. Not only does that mean the number of examples that you provide, but I think also keep the examples quick, like I would never do. The way that I've got mine set up. Each example that I have is three slides. One that says this was the situation or the problem, one that says, here's how I thought about the approach that we were going to take. And the third says, and here's how, like, here's the result of it. That's. I would never go more than that. Personally.

Joe Marcantano: I agree. I would. I would maybe take this moment to remind folks that your Portfolio is not the same as if a potential employer asks for a case study presentation.

Drew Freeman: Very good.

Joe Marcantano: Because then they are wanting at that point, a little bit more of the nitty gritty, how you did stuff while you're doing

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Joe Marcantano: stuff, and they may even ask you to present it. That's different than your portfolio, which, you know, often a prospective hiring manager is going to review kind of in a vacuum on their own.

Drew Freeman: What about you? As someone who's been a part of many hiring processes? Do you have particular things that you're looking for or particular things that make you think less of a candidate? Because they included.

Joe Marcantano: So a few things. the first is, and Drew, you know this. The folks listening don't. But, I'm pretty colorblind. And so I have had folks turn in portfolios or attach portfolios or case studies where the color contrast was such that I could not read it or I really struggled to read it. So that's something that I look for. The other thing that I really look for is I think that it's much like a resume. Right. You want to stand out, but not to the point that it looks overcompicated, over engineered. Kind of draws my attention to the wrong things. Right.

Drew Freeman: Forced would be the word that I would use.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, exactly. So I want to say that it's probably better to stick closer to a template than it is to, like, completely strike out on your own and design something totally new. You know, there are folks who have turned in resumes and. And, man, they look sharp, but, you know, the layout isn't familiar to me. It takes me too long to find stuff on there. Sometimes sticking to the stuff that's tried and true does work best.

Drew Freeman: I think this is absolutely true for resumes, and it's the example I'm going to use, but I think it holds for portfolios as well. I would much rather have a simple bulleted list. Like, I'm talking actual bullet points in a word doc. I would much rather have that if the candidate gives me good information, rather than a very slickly designed resume that doesn't have the skills and the experience that I'm looking for. Translating that to a portfolio. Keep the aesthetic design simple. Like, I wouldn't just do black and white slides, but it doesn't, you know, any of the PowerPoint or Google Slide Deck or Canva, whatever, any tool that you might use. Just pick a simple template that you think looks good and you'll be totally fine.

Joe Marcantano: Agreed. You know, if you're somebody who's a little more aesthetically and design minded. You can certainly, make it look.

Drew Freeman: Sharper and you can use that to show that that's something that you bring. But for me, as a researcher who doesn't bring that, I am not venturing into that territory because it will only go badly for me.

Joe Marcantano: Yeah, I'm the same way. I really, you know, I don't have that mindset and so I don't expect it. Like you said, don't give me just a black and white bulleted list of bullet points. but, I'm not expecting designer level quality from the aesthetics in this.

Drew Freeman: No, I much. It's much more important to me that you can clearly communicate and present information well.

Joe Marcantano: Anything else we want to cover in this one?

Drew Freeman: I don't think so. I think where I would like to leave it is reminding people that. Reminding people of the purpose of a portfolio. The purpose of a portfolio is to present yourself. You and your experiences are the product and you're selling that product. Remember that. And remember who is reading these and remember why they're reading them and what they're looking for. And everything else will flow more easily from there.

Joe Marcantano: I would tell folks, do not spend 80, 100 hours.

Drew Freeman: Oh, gosh.

Joe Marcantano: Portfolio. Your portfolio will not get you hired.

Drew Freeman: No.

Joe Marcantano: Now, a bad portfolio could keep you from getting an interview, but just keep in mind, it's the interview that's going to get you hired.

Drew Freeman: Yes, I think that's a really. I think that those are two really good pieces of information that if people take nothing else, take those two.

Joe Marcantano: Awesome. Well, I think that that's gonna wrap it for us for this week then. Love to thank everybody for joining us. if you like the podcast and you want to share it with a friend, please do so. Give us, a like or a subscribe wherever it is you get your podcasts and then send us your questions. We want to talk about the things that you want to hear about. So send those questions over to inside uxrmail.com and if you'd like to support the show, there's a link in the show notes where you can do that. I'm Joe Marantano.

Drew Freeman: And I'm Drew Freeman and we'll see you next time.

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