Now you have gotten a few UX projects under your belt, do you feel stressed because you have no idea just exactly how you should structure your case study?

Someone might have told you your case studies just don't seem like “real” work experience. Maybe you applied to a few jobs but were rejected because “your UX portfolio isn’t clear or lacks depth”.

Perhaps you even landed an interview, but you know it didn’t go well because you stumbled at the very first step of presenting and answering questions on your project.

If I coached you a few years ago, I may have thought these were just problems of bad UX writing, uninspiring projects, a lack of solid UX storytelling.

No, now I know, those are not the root cause of your problem.
Your real struggle is no one has systematically taught you the right way to prepare and structure a UX case study. If I have coached you for a portfolio presentation, you know exactly what I mean.

Think of yourself as an aspiring chef amongst hundreds if not thousands of chefs trying to win a cooking competition. How likely do you think you are to win, if you have never ever read a single cooking recipe.

The answer is winning will be near impossible. Even if you managed to create a tasty dish through countless trials and errors with some movie protagonist plot armor, you are still likely to lose the offer to someone else because the time and energy you wasted will be immeasurable.

Doing UX design in 2022 is that competition, people recognize the value of UX which means there are more opportunities, but the number of applicants is way higher than ever.

Therefore for aspiring UX designers, and design students I coach, I always emphasize the importance of mastering the recipe first before cooking your own UX case study dish. That is the secret of how I was able to help so many students find success at FAANG interviews. (You can read more about that here)

So take my advice as a recipe, feel free to add your own flavor and tweaks to it, but truly understand the ins and outs first before experimenting.
The below advice is generated from over 100 hours of my own research talking to UX candidates one-on-one, reviewing the portfolios of students I coached, and hearing feedback from surveying design managers and recruiters working with FAANG. (Happy to share more on my sources and data with you)

Here is what this article will cover:

What is the real purpose of creating a UX case study

What a successful case study needs to cover

The right level of detail in your case studies

The real purpose of creating a UX case study no one has told you about…

UX design boot camps, both American and ones targeting International(Chinese) have taught you wrong. They emphasize industry-sponsored portfolio-ready case studies as their main marketing, but that is not how you want to approach a case study.

A case study should reflect a meaningful, learning or growth design experience where you worked with real stakeholders and created something of value for the customers.

If you are creating case studies solely for the purpose of populating your portfolio, I guarantee those won't be competitive enough.
So please don't think of a case study as content for your portfolio, think of it as content for your interview. At UXGO, we always teach our students to create interview-ready case studies where you show not only the design process but how you worked with real FAANG stakeholders. Reach out to me or any of our other coaches on LinkedIn if you want to know more about our case study courses, or past student examples.
Once your case study is interview-ready, putting it back on your portfolio should always be a walk in the park. What a successful case study needs to cover…

What a successful case study needs to cover

Case studies should be customized for each inidvidual problem and challenge, using a one size fit all solution is only recomended for begginers. However, like I said, learn the rules before breaking them. The below structure is the correct way to formulate a case study to be both interview and portfolio ready…

A competitive case study must have these below sections clearly highlighted and structured in a similar order:

1. Overview
2. Your roles and responsibilities
3. Your partners and stakeholders
4. Problem statement
5. Users and audience, how you defined or clarify those
6. Your Scope and constraints how you defined or clarified those
7. Your chosen design process, and why you chose to design this way
8. Your testing process, and why you tested this way
9. Outcomes and results, how you measured success, and why it is meaningful
10. Reflection, lessons, or next steps

Notice the key difference of why students I coach create way more successful case studies than their peers? I put the emphasis on clarifying and justifying.

The key to success isn't following this cookie-cutter recipe, anyone can follow a template. What I try to help my students learn is how to set up your case study in a way that helps explain why you did what you did.

As a UX designer, your main job is to offer the why behind the designs and the product. That is why a successful case study always leverages good research, good logic, and tight-nit design reasoning. This applies to existing case studies you have done as well.

Take a look at this example…

Yvette is a recent maser's student I just coached. She has a strong visual design background graduating from one of the top art schools in Beijing China.

However, when she came to me for interview prep, she was very stressed. She wanted to know if we could use one of her past “industrial design” case studies in the interview.

She told me many other UX designers told her using an industrial case study for a UX interview is not allowed, which I told her was not exactly true.

Take a look below. The importance was justifying her logic through following a good UX structure. I taught her how to show the design process, how she identified the customer, how she solved her customer needs, how she used good data to make design arguments, and how she created an impactful design solution. The content was all there, the key to success was crafting the UX structure and UX logic.

The fact that it's a physical product? That does not make it a bad UX case study. There are tons of physical interaction products in our world. What mattered was explaining to her audience why a physical product here is the right choice, not a digital screen.

A final note here, see how we anticipated questions when crafting a case study? If you don't anticipate questions when creating your case study and don't offer those insights into why what you did was the best design approach, I guarantee any good recruiter or design manager will easily pick your case study apart when you present.

Finding the right level of detail…

Balance in all things…
No, but seriously, a good case study it's all about balance. When I was applying for my first design internship 5 -6 years ago, I understood the importance of documenting my design process, but I shared absolutely every little detail to try to justify my decision-making.

One of the first-ever client projects I did for Nio back in 2018 was so long, every case study project was around 70–90 pages long of a pdf. This obviously was bad. Using our cooking example, this is overkill, your chicken is burnt.

However, from my experience, most students I have coached, more commonly suffer from undercooking and serving the dish raw. Meaning they are not putting enough detail in their case studies. Which just like serving a raw dish is always a worse offense than serving an overcooked dish. The first is a health risk, the second is just not good flavor-wise.

Crafting a good case study, really demonstrates your skills as a UX designer, because it shows how well you understand what information needs to be surfaced to your audience first, and which details should be digested upon with further inspection.

Just like cooking, there should be layers and levels to it. There should be an appetizer, a soup, a main course, and a dessert to go with at least. Meaning at every step of the case study, you should offer enough context to lead into your justifications, but save all the finer details for later as dessert.

Don't serve everything at once.

Here is an example of a case study I crafted for Google 3-4 years ago. Take a look below, should I show every individual lofi screen on a separate slide?

No, because a lot of these interfaces are throw-away screens and not hero images of my core flow. Showing everything zoomed in will be a distraction for my viewer. However, if you see below, when I am talking about specific feedback from user tests, now I want to zoom in and show my viewer concrete findings relating to detailed features.

Thanks for reading!

Every case study you might come across is different, but if you start paying attention to the successful ones, you'll start to see more similarities than you would have imagined.

Feel free to connect with me on Linkedin. If you are a student interested to learn more about how to structure your UX case study do not hesitate to reach out to me.

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