UX DESIGN

For all the years I’ve been a User Experience Designer, I’ve used Medium to host my UX portfolio. I’ve dabbled with building a personal website, but keep coming back to the power, simplicity, and flexibility Medium offers for a UX Designer to showcase their work. If you’ve found yourself asking:

How do I design a UX portfolio? Or…
Where should I host my UX portfolio? Or…
Should a UX designer have a portfolio?

Then hopefully, this article can help — at least from the perspective of creating and hosting a UX portfolio on Medium.

What a UX portfolio on Medium is:

First, it’s important we quickly establish what a UX portfolio on Medium actually is. Medium is a place to write and read. To say your UX portfolio lives on Medium means it is a collection of stories you’ve written on the platform. Ergo, your UX case studies live on Medium and are available for anyone in the world to read.

You can then organize and group these stories into a publication. This publication becomes the new home for your UX work. Publications have their own unique website address (URL), which you can share with hiring managers, colleagues, and recruiters.

In that way, a Medium UX Portfolio is a viable, sustainable, and competitive contender when stacked up against other options. Oh, and it’s free.

What it isn’t:

You can’t create your UX portfolio on Medium and expect to have it featured on Dribbble or Awwwards — it’s not built for that. Again, I’ll reiterate: Medium is a place to write and tell the story of your work. It’s not a place to “design” the look and feel of a jaw-dropping, award-winning portfolio.

While you can structure, organize, and present your work in a “well-designed” fashion (more on that later), Medium isn’t a design studio for UX portfolios. While there is some fantastic flexibility, don’t come into it expecting to break away from their established style guides — you’re playing by their rules.

Let’s jump in.

1. The magic of using Medium is in the story you tell

UX Designers are storytellers. An exceptional designer brings others along for the journey. One of the most compelling features of hosting your UX portfolio on Medium is that the platform is designed specifically for storytelling. You can connect the reader to both your process and personality in your writing.

Medium has all the built-in formatting options needed to structure a case study in an elegant, legible, and digestible format. Your case studies can flow from introduction, to climax, to resolution using headings, links, images, paragraphs, alt-text, and more.

People who read your case studies are looking for a reason to care about your work. They need to know they could hire you to their team and you could do similar work. You can tell the story of how you learn, resolve conflict, and how you brought delight into the lives of others, simply through the story you tell.

Medium lets you do that.

2. Getting lost in the design details

I don’t want to diminish or discount beautifully designed portfolios, nor am I suggesting Medium is the perfect place for every designer to publish their work — It’s not. Designers with coding, UI, interaction, and animation expertise will feel horribly constrained on Medium if they’re also trying to showcase those skills.

It’s all about the reader and what you want them to know about you. If you need to let hiring managers know you can build a website, by all means, go build a personal portfolio website and show your talent. If you’re feeling ambitious, have both — a personal website and one on Medium.

But if you’re like me when building your own site, I tend to get lost in the details when I want to focus on the story of my case studies. Medium forces me to abide by their formatting styles, thus freeing me to write. There’s freedom within those constraints to focus on the journey of the work, rather than which colors, fonts, and breakpoints to use.

3. You can still make it pretty

As mentioned above, there is freedom within the constrained style of the Medium platform. Many designers fear that if they publish on Medium, their own abilities as a designer won’t shine through. Again, unless you’re trying to win a coveted design award, Medium is surprisingly flexible and capable of letting you be in the spotlight while they hang out in the background.

Here’s a screenshot from the homepage of my UX portfolio publication:

Remember, a UX case study is the culmination of your design process made accessible to the reader. You have the ability to weave images in with your words. You can architect the narrative flow of your product design process in compelling, rich ways. Medium lets you include as many images, screenshots, and design deliverables as you’d like.

Show off your work. Let us see your wireframes, sketches, and high-fidelity mockups. Walk us through how you design a logo and include examples along the way. Spice it up with moments when you failed and how you recovered. Give us a glimpse into how you organize research data. Show us your personas and empathy maps.

We all know design gets messy, but it doesn’t mean the story has to be presented that way.

4. Medium is an SEO powerhouse

During our job search, we give our portfolio website address directly to managers and recruiters. In that way, our work is easily found because they go straight to it. But what about when you want your work to be found otherwise? Unless you understand how to optimize your site for search engines, it’s difficult to know who is finding and engaging with your work.

If you’re hoping your work is visible amongst the massive world of existing case studies, Medium can help with that. While it might not always be your goal to have your case studies rank in popular Google searches, Medium has a lot of muscle when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization).

With their high domain authority (95 out of 100 as of 2021), one could argue it should be a no-brainer to host your work on Medium — that is if you want it to be found. And, there’s relatively little work you need to do.

There are ways to improve the chance that your work will be found, such as through engaging headlines, relevant keywords, and external links. But for the most part, Medium does the heavy lifting to rank your work when people search the web for similar topics. Pretty cool.

5. On Medium, you’re a part of something big

170 million readers big (as of 2021). That’s a huge audience. The second you publish a case study, it’s available to them. Sure, you’ll need to grow your own audience which takes time, but your work is available in an instant. What’s more, Medium provides you with a massive network of UX Designers, design publications, and other product practitioners who are right there in the trenches with you.

In your case studies, you have an opportunity to link to other articles, cite the work of colleagues, and tag them in your story. You can link directly to other Medium profiles and quote leaders, authors, and product visionaries. It shows humility. The reader is able to see that you’re not afraid to admit you don’t know everything.

Little by little, the connections you make, links you include, quotes you bake in, and authors you reference help you stand out as a designer on the platform. To further your presence, you can engage in thoughtful, meaningful conversation by commenting on the work of others.

It doesn’t take long to realize you’re a part of something big on Medium, yet you have the potential, even within a single case study, to connect at a personal level.

Words of caution

At the end of the day, Medium works wonderfully as a hosting platform for UX portfolios. That being said, there are a few drawbacks and words of caution.

You could lose it all one day.

Should Medium decide to close its doors tomorrow, your content would go along with it. Poof…gone! Luckily, you can download a .zip folder of all your content at any time in the ‘Settings’ area of your profile. Whew!

Mobile app, mobile web, and desktop aren’t the same.

I wish what people saw on my desktop portfolio matched the mobile experience in the app, but it’s far from what I want. In the app, it’s more a stream of content rather than a responsive mobile web view.

You’re at their mercy.

Medium could decide tomorrow to change how publications display. They could change fonts, colors, and layouts in one release. At the end of the day, it’s another reminder that you play by Medium’s rules and have to abide by their design. If you’re on board with that (which many are), then you’re good!

Give it a shot

Interested in getting your UX work on Medium? Here are the top things you should start working on today:

• Look at other Medium case studies for inspiration and ideas for formatting and telling the story of your work
• Research what’s needed to tell a good story (Google: “Pixar Make Me Care”)
• Practice writing on the platform and using the formatting features
• Begin now to document your case studies as drafts on Medium as you go, rather than trying to remember everything later
• Take pictures of projects and add them to your case study
• Allow the case study to breathe, meaning, don’t overwhelm the reader with too much text or too many images — have a healthy dose of each
• Make it accessible w/alt-text so those with impairments can fully enjoy your case studies
• Use headline analyzer tools (like this one) and write intriguing, emotion-filled headlines to resonate with your audience and increase traffic to your work
• Follow UX designers and design publications — there are tons of them!
• Comment on the work of others and let them know what resonated with you