The new year is a refreshing time full of promise and opportunity. We let go of the old year and old habits and embark on a fresh start. And while you're making New Year's resolutions, here is one more to consider: update your portfolio or resume! Putting off this task as the years go by makes it more challenging. Old projects are often poorly documented, as human memory is limited and fallible. Incomplete and less persuasive material will result in a low-quality UX portfolio and poor job prospects.

If this resolution sounds unappealing, here's an alternative that is much easier but will still help you whenever you decide to update your professional documents — the new year's self-assessment. This approach conquers the outdated-portfolio problem by dividing it into smaller tasks, thus making it more manageable.

In This Article:

Preparing for the Assessment

Follow these steps to prepare for a new year's self-assessment:

  1. Reserve time for yourself. Schedule about 1.5-2 hours for the self-assessment to prevent interruptions. Any shorter interval is unlikely to be enough for evaluating a year's worth of effort. Any longer and you'll get fatigued and lose interest.
  2. Gather last year's deliverables. UX professionals make a lot of deliverables in their job. Don't just focus on high-fidelity prototypes or user-research reports. Take an expansive view of what you created to aid the future storytelling of your process. Include messy bits like sketches, whiteboards, and research notes. Some examples of what to gather:
  1. Gather documentation of other activities. There's more to professional life than just deliverables. Keep track of essential documents that provide context on last year's job or projects:
    • Career-development plan
    • Job descriptions (These oft-forgotten documents conveniently contain your official job responsibilities. Useful for resume purposes, especially if this was your first year in a job or you were promoted to a new one.)
    • Pictures documenting "before states," such as how an experience appeared or functioned before a redesign
    • Pictures from professional events where you spoke or contributed in some way
    • Evidence of completed professional training or certifications
    • Management-related material, such as one-on-one notes, cost-reduction projects, or templates used to enhance you or your team’s productivity
    • Evidence of participation in mentorship programs
  2. Gather last year's important feedback. Understanding your performance requires external feedback. This feedback can come through official documents, like performance evaluations, but it's also frequently sent through everyday communication channels:
    • Emails and instant messages containing feedback (whether positive or negative) from managers, senior leaders, or colleagues
    • Performance evaluations
    • Awards, accolades, promotions
    • Quantitative results, dashboards, or KPIs (customer satisfaction, engagement, conversions, employee retention) reflecting the results of your work
    • Ink-thinking journal containing personal feedback on your past decisions.
  3. Create a presentation file. A simple presentation document is ideal for this activity as it allows you to organize images and text. Remember not to compress the presentation file to preserve image quality and be able to access details later when you need them. You may not know how you'll utilize these images in the future, so keep them in their most flexible format.

Conducting the Self-Assessment

With these preparations in place, start reviewing and prioritizing the various items by asking yourself these questions:

Skills, Tools, & Abilities

  • Did I perform a UX or management technique I've never done before? For example, you conducted your first heuristic evaluation or supervised someone (like the team's UX intern) for the first time.
  • Did I learn a new tool or technology for a project? For example, you successfully used Nvivo to conduct a thematic analysis of qualitative data from several user interviews.
  • Do I have a better or more persuasive example of a technique I’ve used in the past? Here are some example scenarios to consider:
    • You’ve led cognitive-walkthrough workshops in the past, but the pictures are poorly lit or low resolution. This past year you led another one of these workshops and used a high-quality camera to capture it.
    • You conducted usability testing for a project in a previous role, but the project was canceled before release. This past year you conducted usability testing for an app and the product team quickly implemented several successful fixes based on the findings.
    • You’ve created personas before, but you’ve learned better ways of creating them since then. This past year you developed personas that emphasized goals, pain points, and tasks rather than demographic details.

Accomplishments

  • Did I receive an award or bonus for my project efforts? How prestigious was this award? Did I receive notably positive feedback from leaders?
  • Was I promoted last year? What did management say I accomplished that deserved this promotion? Look for promotion-announcement communications.
  • Did one of my projects meet or exceed its stated goals or metrics? What were the metrics and how much did they change? What did I contribute to these projects?
  • Did my efforts reduce costs or improve team efficiency in some way? For example, you reduced user recruiting costs by $20,000 by consolidating on one recruitment service instead of three.

Professional Activities

  • Did I speak at a professional conference or panel event? What was the occasion or topic? How many were in the audience?
  • Did I volunteer or contribute to a UX-related organization?

Career Management

  • How satisfied am I with my UX job? Did I do something I enjoyed this past year or did not enjoy? What was it?
  • How satisfied am I with my company or manager? Do my values still align with my employer's values?
  • How did I contribute to developing UX maturity in my organization? Were those contributions successful or unsuccessful?
  • How did I develop crossfunctional relationships this past year? Did I end the year with more allies than enemies? If not, what could I do to mend fences in the future?
  • Did I accomplish something listed on my career-development plan? What was it? Do I have a career-development plan covering my next 2 years?

Disappointments

Omit your disappointments if you share this file with others.

  • Did a project go wrong or turn out disappointingly? What happened? What did I learn from this experience?
  • Did I receive constructive feedback from my manager? What should I try to do differently in the new year?
  • Think back to your disappointments from prior years. Did you change your approach this past year and were you more successful? (This situation may be a compelling story of your resiliency and adaptability to use when answering future job-interview questions.)

For each slide, add high-quality images to help you tell that story. Write about 3–4 sentences in the speaker notes or on the slide to help you remember the circumstances in the future. Images alone are not enough. You need at least some written content related to the process, collaborators, or project goals to refresh your memory or capture details. Sometimes you won't have visuals, and that's okay.

Remember, you are not trying to create a formal presentation with this activity. Instead, focus on curation, context, and breadth over depth. Time-pressed UX-hiring managers scan portfolios, so portfolio projects don't benefit from extensive prose. Set an overall slide budget of about 30 slides maximum to capture the past year, and don't spend more than 5 slides on a single project or theme.

You should have roughly curated and summarized a year's effort in a single document when finished. In some cases, you'll also have surprising insights into your professional development, which may influence your decisions in the coming year or conversations with your UX manager. This document will be a far more helpful resource for future portfolio or resume revisions than just a scattered collection of work stuff devoid of context. Your material will be ready when you're ready to engage with it further.

What If I Don't Have These Things?

If you're having trouble performing this activity due to missing or hard-to-find material, perhaps that is feedback to change your approach in the new year. Consider some of these tips:

  • Create a personal filing or tagging system to structure your deliverables for easy retrieval. Organizing by year is a good start.
  • Remember to set project goals to determine whether your UX efforts made a difference. For example, did a checkout-workflow redesign increase revenue? Having before and after pictures of the checkout workflow is not enough. To be genuinely persuasive with future UX hiring managers, you must also describe if the redesign achieved a desirable outcome (users spending more money in this case) and by how much.
  • Save feedback emails or instant messages in the app. Use tags or file features to capture them throughout the year.
  • Use your phone's camera to capture physical UX work, such as a wall of sticky notes used for affinity diagramming or paper prototypes. Immediately store these photos with your deliverable documents, especially if you take many personal photos.
  • When participating or presenting at a UX or professional event, ask a colleague to take a few pictures of you in action.
  • Never start a new project, particularly redesigns, without capturing the starting state, either as screenshots or with qualitative or quantitative data.

Of course, always respect nondisclosure agreements, employment contracts, data-security policies, or privacy laws. Some industries like finance, healthcare, or government-related projects have strict rules around some of these materials. Be prepared to anonymize or redact materials to make them portfolio-ready. You may not have the time to perform these redactions during this annual self-assessment, but curating your material is half the battle. Flag these items for followup but resist the urge to skip doing the redactions altogether. Future employers perusing your portfolio may view your sloppy handling of sensitive data as a negative signal.

A Helpful Technique for UX Managers

UX managers can also benefit from this activity. Allocate time for your team to do this activity and then gather each team member's presentation file. Combining this technique with the self-evaluation exercise that typically occurs at year's end is easy. Compile highlights of the most impactful accomplishments across the team. This summary presentation can be a powerful storytelling aid for showcasing what your UX team accomplished last year (and serve as useful material for your UX-management portfolio). It can also be beneficial when making the case to leaders that an employee is ready for a promotion.

Conclusion

The beginning of a new year is typically slow for many companies. Use this annual respite to actively manage your career rather than passively waiting for life to force your hand. An unexpected job loss or new opportunity can cause you to scramble to update your out-of-date portfolio or resume to explain long-forgotten years of work history. Avoid this unpleasant professional headache and start the new year off right. Reflect on your career, collect the raw material you need to tell last year's story, and give yourself direction in the year ahead. Your future self will thank you.