UX and Product Designers of HN: Can you review my portfolio?

[areeve]

Hi all,

A bit of background... I'm 24, live in Australia, with a background in design. I graduated about 2 years ago, and it's my dream to move to San Francisco and work in a design/product related role at a tech company along the lines of Google, Apple, Facebook, Square, etc. As part of this, I require E-3/H1B sponsorship which adds another barrier.

I'd like to try and make this happen before I turn 25. Would any UX or Product Designers at a company like the above (or anywhere, for that matter), be willing to review my portfolio and suggest some areas that I should focus on? I'd love to hear any and all feedback.

I haven't submitted any applications yet, frankly I'm not sure if my work is up to scratch in terms of UX – so I wanted to see if anyone had any actionable suggestions about how to improve my 'hireability' for one of these companies.

http://areeve.com/

Thank you very much for your time and input,

Alex

[adyio]

Hi Alex,

Had a look and some quick comments:

* If you want to work as a UX Designer, then I think you need more UX portfolio pieces, showcasing your design thinking and how you solved various design problems. Most of your work seems to be campaign or brochureware related, I couldn't see anything transactional or application related for example, so try to get more experience in that area too.

* If you've done anything in the mobile or app space include it in your portfolio. If not find a sideproject you can work on and create a case study which you can include in your portfolio, similar to http://www.repeattimerapp.com/how/

* One of your designs (under construction) looks like it's a Wordpress template - try to avoid showing unfinished work

* Lorem ipsum is verboten, try to avoid it http://37signals.com/svn/archives/001083.php

You might also want to review the following pages, to give you an idea what companies like Google, Apple, etc expect.

http://www.cooper.com/careers/interaction-designer.html

http://www.cooper.com/careers/visual-designer.html

http://www.quora.com/What-do-clients-employers-recruiters-lo...

http://www.quora.com/User-Experience/What-are-the-best-UX-De...

A great blog by Simon Pan - also from Australia - http://www.simonpan.com/how-ux-found-me/ - maybe email him, I'm sure he's got other tips...

In summary, judging from your portfolio only, I think you need to get more experience (agency / startup) before applying as a UX Designer at Google & Co.

Nice cookie rendering btw ;)

[areeve]

Much appreciated – thanks so much for taking the time to review, and for the actionable advice! I'm considering living off savings for the next 3-6 months and really focusing on a few self-initiated projects that allow me to boost my UX creds – potentially an iPhone app, a SaaS tool, etc.

One of the downsides about living in Australia is that there's barely a handful of tech companies based here (that aren't just marketing/sales offices), and most agencies are just churn and burn (Facebook pages and banner ads, etc).

Do you think that having a few (i.e 3-4) strong personal projects where I ran both design and development solo would boost my creds for the likes of Google & Co?

Edit: As an aside – do you think it's preferable to have quality over quantity? I.e. ditch a few of the weaker pieces of work in favor of having say, 4-5 really strong portfolio pieces?

[adyio]

Having additional strong portfolio pieces definitely helps, and yes quality over quantity. Whether it will be enough for Google & Co, I don't know. Usually these companies require more experience, if you want to work as a UX designer for them. But don't let that discourage you - definitely work on your sideprojects - you never know.

Also, it wasn't clear from your post what you want to focus on initially as a designer - more on this topic here: https://medium.com/design-ux/3623c3243aa6

Again, judging from your portfolio only, it looks like you should maybe focus on UI design first, as this seems to be your strong point and find a job in a UX specific agency, so you can see and learn what other UX practioners do, learn more about UCD etc.

I'm sure there must be UX only agencies in Australia or startups - a quick Google search came back with

http://www.stamfordinteractive.com.au/join-our-team/

http://www.lbi.com/au/

If you could work for LBi for example, you could maybe transfer more easily to the US at a later stage.

Other tips:

* Get on Dribbble (that's how some UI designers get hired / headhunted)

* Start blogging about design, what you're passionate about etc - helps later on when recruiters review your portfolio

Anyway, keep us updated...