Early-Career Designer Portfolio Review - Isis Atena

Connect with Isis!
/ isisatena
bento.me/isisatena
Some takeaways:
- Love that Isis leans into using a new technology! Isis uses a Bento “link in bio” as their portfolio link because they can include links to their visual design and fine art projects as well as to their UX/UI design work. Love that (and I created my own bento because of it!)
- Notion is a cool idea for including a lot of information about a project and organizing it. However, the need to interact with many minimized dropdown accordions makes it unlikely for people to find information organically. This layout ‘hides’ information that is critical to the storytelling in a UX project case study. A suggestion is to make things more visible and allowing users to minimize information if they need to.
- LOVE the on-page navigation for sections and parts of the project! That’s super helpful documentation that is almost never included in a case study!
- There is no storytelling applied to this case study, so it’s hard to hold the threads of how different parts of the project connect. It made for a really difficult process of moving from top to bottom that should have been a little bit easier.
- Don’t just use fancy words, help readers of your case study to understand what’s going on.
- This project feels like a visual design project that has had a sort of UX process retroactively applied to it, which will likely make hiring managers - once they figure this out - walk away. It’s not meeting the needs of what a company typically hires an early-career UX designer for.
- If you’re not able to do real user research, don’t include it in the case study. The user research included in this project feels like fake user research done after the fact to support the design decisions that were already made. With such limited responses, there’s no meaningful data that can be gained.
- The questions that drive research need to be meaningful. These user research questions don’t feel like they were thoughtful or meaningful to the process. What was the ultimate research question that helped you make a decision? It would be appropriate to review these questions with a senior researcher to make sure they are worded appropriately and will get responses that help you make design decisions.
- The pain points discovered did not seem to be related to the actual user research conducted. So, this sends the signal to hiring managers that you’re doing fake user research or are not sure how to conduct appropriate user research - but you’re telling them that you DO know how to do it. This does not give the hiring manager confidence that you’re going to be able to self-start effectively.
- Don’t make user personas if you don’t have real user research data.
- Don’t use a user journey map if you aren’t actually updating what the real journey is. The two user journey maps displayed looked exactly the same, which sends the message that these are fake user journeys and after a couple of instances of fake user research with fake user personas…now I have lost confidence that this case study is worth my time as a hiring manager.
- Consider if a journey map even needs to be made - for this project, Isis is just making a single-page website landing page promoting an app. I would honestly rather have looked at a low-fidelity project that demonstrates some user research work and attempts to design an app rather than a high-fidelity design for a single page website. How much journey is required on a single page website? Not a lot.
- LOVE that Isis included accessibility considerations! That’s a fantastic specialty to lean into as a UX designer - we are not going to see a need for LESS accessibility in the future.
Get your portfolio reviewed - free! bit.ly/UX-PortfolioReview
Hey Team! Today we have another in the series of Early Career Designer Portfolio Reviews, where I conduct a kind of UI assessment called a Cognitive Walkthrough. I review an early career designers portfolio and resume and give feedback for ways to improve it as they look for a job in the UX industry.
I'm a Sr. UX Designer with 9+ years of experience in UX design and a passion for helping early career designers as they make a career shift into tech. You can find out more about me at maigenthomas.com
Also, you can find out about me at www.patreon.com/maigenux where I hope you'll join an awesome crew of folks as I provide motivation and mentorship, build an apprenticeship agency to employ early-career designers and teach UX as I do UX.
If you're up for a portfolio review, you can sign up at this link: bit.ly/UX-PortfolioReview You don't have to agree to allow me to post it on the channel but it's appreciated if you're willing.
Thanks for joining me!

[@user-lk5ii2uv1p]

Thank you so much for your review! I will follow your advice; there is still much to grow! ✨🚀