Hey folks,
When people ask for help on their portfolios, one of the most consistent pieces of advice I see is that one should document their process. I get the idea, in general.
Is there a specific thing that a process is? When people ask for feedback, I’d like to give something more specific than, “That’s pretty”.
I hope that question is clear enough.
Cheers!
Sure thing.
UX portfolios need to demonstrate the UX and/or design process that a person goes through to get to the final product. That might mean some or all of the stages here.
The best documentation usually includes a clear written explanation in conjunction with annotated imagery.
Does that help?
Process isn’t pretty- it’s ugly as hell and that’s what makes it amazing. It’s messy but it’s also a journey of thinking and raw problem solving. It’s the story of the creation of the design.
I’m not feeling comfortable in providing feedback regarding the design process without a clear context where this process is applied.
IMO when you want to document your own design process you have to define the context where this process is applied.
It’s a matter of fact, the design process established for shipping deliverables within a design agency is surprisingly different from the design process established for shipping deliverables within an enterprise company.
This is what, very often, I actually miss from the candidates, during the interview sessions. They lean on generic concepts/rules/approaches (still valid and precious) without matching those points with the context where they working on.
Piper sees me instructing people to ‘document their process’ as part of the portfolio feedback that I give and she was asking for clarification of what I mean (rather than what that process should be).
Maybe I didn’t carefully read the beginning of the post and my comment was 100% related to the title “What is a process”
My answer comes in that way because, coincidentally, I’m leading a recruiting process and when we ask the candidates about their own design process we always receive very theoretical answers.
If we try to understand more asking their own process according to the projects they are working on they struggle in giving a clear description.
Yes. I think I get that, but I’m trying to understand more. When I said that I wanted to say more than, “that’s pretty” … Right now, at the beginning of my journey with this community, the only feedback I feel comfortable giving is whether something appeals to me or not. There’s got to be more that I can learn to offer people. Does that make sense?
I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Would you be able to offer any other insight without compromising you or your candidates?
@HAWK - Thank you. As always, you’ve led me true.
I hope my comment is not bringing this discussion off-topic.
Anyway, as I said we started a recruiting process to find a couple of new UX Designers with more than 5 years of seniority.
We started the first round of interviews and one of the main questions in our script was “could you describe your design process to deliver a new app/feature?”.
The goal of the question was to give us the change to understand how those people are approaching a specific use-case in terms of design task (designing something new).
Most of the candidates were replying with standard answers as:
Fair enough, afterwards we always asked them “reading your CV your latest project is about building a new app for an e-commerce platform, could you please tell us how you executed the task according to your design process?”.
Well at this stage the panic started!
They were struggling in describing the process and even if they tried the executed process was a way far from the one described before.
We decided to not ask anymore the first question because we believe that very often people are providing theoretical answers that are not consistent with the way how they actually work.
I hope my point is more clear now 
Hey there,
Yes. That makes more sense and is very helpful. Thanks muchly