The Unnecessary Vanity of UX Portfolios
Like many other user experience designers out there, I started my career in the arts. In order to get into my arts college in the subject of music, I had to submit an audition CD recorded in our upper loft in Tokyo. This was before the days of simply messaging over a Spotify link or YouTube video. Once accepted, I flew to Seattle and auditioned once more live and in person. It wasn’t anything special per se. If I were a visual artist, I’d have a body of work to show. I’d simply turn in a bulky folder of pastel and charcoal drawings. If I were attempting to try out for a basketball team, I’d submit my team stats from previous years in high school sports and then play in front of curious scouts. They’d judge me based upon my performance right then and there. My audition would be built around my competence shown in the moment as well as my body of work in years prior. Across a large swath of careers exist the standard resume: a few blocks of text and that is supposed to be the big ticket. For many other professions, it’s the portfolio. Hire me as a producer and songwriter by sampling a few of the songs I had already composed and written. Look at my credits to see I had arranged the horns on this particular song. If I’m a photographer, look at my photographs. If I’m an interior designer, well, the same thing. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that your work should speak for itself. Is it there? Then yes, you may assume I did it unless otherwise specified. We look up the credits after a movie to see who had directed it, acted in it, and so on. The examples are endless, but enter the strange career of UX. It’s the only career I’ve seen where we must convince the hiring gatekeepers of our process rather than the end result.
Perhaps the argument is, “Well, UX is not art!” and to that, I’d fully agree. I even wrote a blog on such a matter. If you’d like to be a designer, then you can be one completely separate from the task of building products with users at the center. At the core of our profession then, we are listeners. We are observers. To add to this, the design process is never done. So whatever we display as our “case studies,” or proper “portfolio projects” become rubbish anyway in the context of time. We are supposed to show why we made a design decision but within a span of months, that design decision could be completely useless due to iterations that would have been adapted to in the moving market. As a career focused entirely around observation and listening, I have found that many who place UX within their bios, (who conveniently do not need to show their work because perhaps they are product owners or in social media or graphic design) or else UX designers themselves- love nothing more than to speak on the importance of their job. “It’s very complex. Let me show you how complex it was,” and it’s quite a strange thing to say when the end task is to simplify every decision for the end user. In this instance, the user would be the gatekeeper. We attempted to simplify a complex problem, untangle the mess, and make it as easy to digest. And then for our resume- we must show how complicated the problem was and how we untangled the mess. In no other profession does this need to be documented in order to be taken seriously.
Authors do not write books on how they wrote the book. If they did, then the book that explained their book would have to be read by the publisher to see whether or not they are qualified to write another book for them. The career that is supposed to simplify everything becomes the most complicated process to be judged by those who want solutions. Isn’t that the truth everywhere though? As I grow older, I realize everything is wrapped in marketing and branding. There’s nothing wrong with that except when it comes to innovation. We trust that various gatekeepers know what they are looking for when they allow the select few in, but they are merely trusting that “said professional” is acting in good faith. It’s the same theory in pricing. People do not trust a cheaper product. They trust the higher priced one, simply because it’s higher priced. In blind tastings, experts might rave about a certain product but realize it’s the most generic product out there. The problem with the UX portfolio is that the ultimate incentive is to showcase how complex your job is when it should be judged simply by the end product, (just as the case with literally everything else). I have noticed that many make their entire livings convincing their colleagues and upper management of how busy they are because of how difficult their line of work is. In reality, they don’t know how to solve problems. And really… why solve a problem when it’s far more profitable to keep it going?
Just look around the world and it’s not too complicated to come up with a conclusion… unless of course you don’t want to.