UX Designer
Be employable as a junior UX designer, with a portfolio that shows research, decisions and outcomes rather than mockups.
This is a starting point — make it yours
Use this goal to build your own roadmap — tailored to you and starting fresh.
Foundations and the tool
Enough craft to make what you're thinking visible. The tool takes a fortnight; the thinking takes the rest of the roadmap.
Learn Figma to competence~12h
Frames, auto layout, components, variants, prototyping. Auto layout is the one that separates fluent Figma users from slow ones — learn it properly rather than nudging rectangles.
Done when: you can rebuild a screen from an app you use, responsive, using components and auto layout.
Learn the visual basics: hierarchy, spacing, type and colour~10h
Consistent spacing scales, a type scale with no more than three sizes in play, and colour used for meaning rather than decoration. Most amateur design problems are spacing problems.
Done when: you can explain why a screen feels cluttered in terms of hierarchy and spacing, not taste.
Learn accessibility as a constraint, not a checklist~6h
Contrast ratios, target sizes, focus order, and never using colour as the only signal. Designing accessibly from the start is easy; retrofitting it is a rebuild.
Done when: you can audit a screen against WCAG AA contrast and fix what fails.
Redesign one screen and write why~6h
Pick a genuinely bad screen you use. Redesign it and write 200 words on what problem each change solves. The writing is the assessed part — anyone can move boxes.
Done when: before, after, and a written rationale for at least four specific changes.
Research, which is the actual job
The difference between a UX designer and someone who makes screens. This is the phase junior portfolios almost always skip.
Run five user interviews properly~10h
Recruit five real people, ask about past behaviour rather than future intentions, and never pitch your idea. "Tell me about the last time you..." beats "would you use..." every time, because people are poor predictors of their own behaviour and polite about ideas.
Done when: five interviews are recorded, with notes, and you can name a surprise from each.
Turn interviews into findings, not quotes~6h
Affinity map the notes, cluster into themes, and write findings as claims with evidence: "users abandon at payment because they can't see the total" — not "users found it confusing".
Done when: you have five to seven findings, each backed by at least two participants.
Learn usability testing and run one round~10h
Five participants, real tasks, and silence from you while they struggle. Measure whether they completed the task, not whether they liked it. Watching someone fail at something you designed is the fastest learning available.
Done when: five sessions are run and you have a prioritised list of usability problems.
Learn when to use which method~4h
Interviews for motivation, usability tests for interfaces, surveys for scale, analytics for what happened. Knowing which question each method can and cannot answer is what interviewers probe for.
Done when: you can pick the right method for five different questions and justify each.
Three case studies
Your portfolio is three stories about decisions. Depth in three beats breadth in eight — reviewers read the first two properly and skim the rest.
Case study one: redesign something real with research~25h
A local business, a charity, a university society. A real client with real constraints beats a fictional brief, because the constraints are what make the story interesting.
Done when: research, decisions, screens and an outcome are documented end to end.
Case study two: a flow, not a screen~25h
Onboarding, checkout, booking — something with steps, states and failure cases. Handling the empty state, the error and the loading case is what shows you have shipped things.
Done when: the flow covers happy path, one error path and one empty state.
Case study three: a measurable improvement~25h
Something where you can point at a before and after number — task completion in testing, time on task, error rate. Even small-sample evidence puts you ahead of most junior portfolios.
Done when: a before and after measurement exists, with the method described honestly.
Write each case study as a story with a decision in it~10h
Context, the problem, what you found, what you tried, what you rejected and why, what happened. The rejected option is the most revealing part — it shows judgement rather than execution.
Done when: each case study names at least one option you considered and rejected, with reasoning.
Getting hired
The portfolio is necessary and not sufficient. This phase is about the parts of hiring that aren't the work.
Build a portfolio site that loads fast and reads well~12h
Three case studies, a short about page, contact details. No parallax, no intro animation. Reviewers spend two minutes and read on a phone half the time.
Done when: it is live, works on mobile, and a stranger can find your best case study in one click.
Practise presenting one case study aloud in ten minutes~6h
Portfolio reviews are live. Being able to walk through your reasoning under mild pressure is separately assessed from the work itself, and it is trainable.
Done when: you can present one case study to time, twice, without notes.
Do one whiteboard challenge under time~4h
A common interview format: design something in 45 minutes while thinking aloud. The assessment is your process and your questions, not the artefact.
Done when: you have done one timed run and asked at least three clarifying questions before designing.
Get one experienced designer to critique your portfolio~4h
A design community, a meetup, a cold message. Outside eyes catch the thing every one of your friends was too kind to mention.
Done when: you have received critique and acted on at least two points.