Crafting a Compelling Design Case Study: The Art of Storytelling
Portfolios and presentations are vehicles for your case studies. Both are an integral part of the hiring process for any UX professional and Product Designer role, so crafting compelling case studies to distinguish you and your work is critical.
It’s an opportunity to showcase your design, research, and most importantly design thinking skills. Secondly, it highlights your communication skills and collaboration capacities.
TWO COMMON MISTAKES
🖼 🔇 Show, no tell
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the world of case studies, an image of, let’s say, an affinity map without any explanation to understand context or insights derived from that exercise is not helpful. It’s very important to show and tell. If there isn’t anything worth telling, then remove the affinity map image to avoid committing the mistake below.
🚰 Everything and the kitchen sink
A lot of designers come to me thinking that they need to present everything that has happened over the course of that project to ensure that they’re telling the entire story. Think about your favorite movie. It might be your favorite because it tells a great story. A team took great care to edit that film so that you saw details of foreshadowing, learned important details towards the plot, and maybe even cried or laughed along the way. Learn to leave things in the editing room to let the rest of your case study shine.
The goal of both a digital portfolio and a presentation isn’t to recount what happened, but rather to divulge what problem you solved for, the solution, the key learnings along the way, and the impact of that work.
ELEMENTS OF A COMPELLING CASE STUDY STORY
The heart of a compelling case study lies in storytelling, and it is no easy feat to package your work in a concise yet impactful tale. You need to take us on a journey starting with the context; then dive into the problem; balance business priorities and tech feasibility; explore research, solutions, and design iterations; and share the triumph and learnings along the way to your solution or next steps.
STORY TIME: 🧑💻 vs 🐲
Let’s explore how a case study compares to a fantastical story about a UX professional & a Dragon.
Follow along in the section headlines below.
📖 In a not-so-far-away land where a UX professional worked,…
In order to evaluate the work ahead, there needs to be a bit of context. Depending on how complex or how much of a factor this played in your case study, you’ll likely want to include applicable details about the company, business, metrics for success, product, team, your role, and “the problem.”
Sometimes “the problem” is a prompt assigned to you from the top down. Sometimes it’s something you discovered on your own and worked with a Product Manager to flesh out and prioritize. A vital part of a good case study is establishing context and elaborating on “the problem.” Was it the root cause to solve for or was it merely a symptom? Did you discover that while researching and digging? (Oh! That’s a juicy detail!)
🐉 …there was a dragon.
Once you’ve established that you’re solving for the real problem, tell us what’s so problematic about it. Was this dragon friendly? Was it nice? Was it a terrible, malicious dragon that struck fear into the hearts of children? In other words, what pain points did the problem create (e.g made checkout really frustrating)? Why did it matter (e.g losing customers led to decreased revenue)?
When you impart significance to the problem you’re solving, you also impart significance to your solution and all the effort involved. In turn, this creates space for empathy—to care about your users, your business, your struggle to take down this dragon. If the problem isn’t noteworthy then the solution isn’t either. Do your work justice and convey why it matters.
⚔️ Leveraging insights on the dragon’s weaknesses, the UX professional (+ team) slayed the beast.
Take us on a journey with you. Cut and edit tactfully to illustrate the key steps you took to tackling the problem. If there aren’t any meaningful insights from a step that help us understand your thought process journey, leave it out.
Maybe your research took you to a wizard 🧙♂️ who revealed a new use case, and that newfound knowledge is integral to your dragon-slaying plan! What if you explored multiple iterations of that plan of attack? Or maybe you found a magic carpet design system that supercharged the project by keeping things consistent and efficient. Perhaps you did a competitive analysis on various dragons and learned from past heroic tales of a way to beat this one. If it adds substantial value to your recommendation, it likely belongs in your case study.
Note: When you have less time and space to tell the story, you’ll have to prioritize the most impactful ones.
⛳️ Epilogue: The UX professional learned…
Don’t forget to end your case study with a summary on the results of your work + impacted business metrics and any learnings. Better yet! Don’t just save your learnings for the end of the presentation. If there’s a significant learning that prompted a pivot, be sure to talk about that earlier on as you take us on that journey.
The goal of that dragon metaphor was to illustrate how details and context to qualify your problem as well as the informative, necessary steps you took is important as part of your storytelling process.
Now go slay your own dragons or use them to conquer Westeros! 🐺⚔️
Quick Commercial Break
A SKILL FOR LIFE
Storytelling is essentially a form of communication. What makes it special though is how it can build empathy, galvanize someone into action, persuade them in a direction, etc.
It’s a skill you’ll have with you for life that you can use in plenty of other situations like stakeholder presentations, collaborating with engineers on a feature, interviewing, negotiating, and networking.
SELF-EVALUATION CHECKLIST
If you’re looking for some inspiration or to level up your case study. Expand each question below and see how your current case study fares. Good luck!
-
Can you take your content a step further? If you can’t answer the above adequately for a detail in your case study, it’s likely a weaker link that can be removed or you’ll need to identify the answers to these questions.
What did you do? “I created a sticky navigation bar with a CTA in blue for continuous easy access to next steps in the purchasing flow”
So what? / Why should I care? “Despite the interest users exhibit in their engagement with the demo, they weren’t converting from this page, but this new CTA was used 9/10 times in usability tests.”
Now what? “This design treatment has increased conversion by 35%. We’re adding it to our design system and considering other opportunities and use cases across our website.”
-
Leave a cookie crumb trail to help us understand the connection between the beginning of your presentation (context, research, etc) to the solution.
For example: If you mention research and then later you mention a solution that is directly impacted by a specific piece of research, call that out. Remind your audience that (1) you did your homework and (2) you’re very thoughtful in how you incorporate research into your solutions.
Another example: If your solution is designed with two personas in mind but the former half of your presentation only mentions one, that second persona will likely confuse your audience instead of impress them that you had to factor in the needs of another persona. Integrate them somewhere that makes sense.
-
This goes back to defining the problem and imparting it with significance. Was the dragon terrible and malicious? Qualifying the problem helps to articulate the pain and therefore create space for your audience to empathize with your users.
-
Especially for entry level candidates, little is yet known about your design competencies and strengths. Your case study needs to be a little more exhaustive to demonstrate a level of breadth and a little depth. For example:
Include quantitative details (e.g how many users were tested) to both validate and illustrate your experience.Include steps/iterations/research methods (instead of only summarizing), so you can demonstrate skill.
Call out your contributions in group projects, so your audience can better understand your past role and responsibilities .
Case studies are tough because you know the work too well, making it difficult to discern what to edit and how to explain it for first-time viewers. I combine both an outsider’s perspective with experience reviewing and critiquing dozens of portfolios to help job seekers polish theirs to the next level.