Tips for your UX writing portfolio when you’re starting out

One of the ways I’ve been trying to make a positive difference during this lost COVID-19 season is to hold office hours for unemployed or emerging UX writers. I hear over and over again from writers in other industries—journalists, marketing copywriters, technical writers, etc.—that they’re pretty interested in UX writing but just don’t know how to break into the field.

I get that. UX is an alluring, inscrutable beast that comes with its own set of jargon, terminology, and process. To an outsider, it’s hard to parse at best, and at worst seems like it’s intentionally built to shift goalposts and to keep outsiders out.

One of these big unknowns is, of course, the UX writing portfolio. This is one of the most commonly asked-about topics I’ve seen in my office hours and in the many coffees I’ve had over the years with newcomers to the field.

Specifically, I get asked some variation of these questions:

• Are they (the portfolios) necessary?
• How should they be structured?
• What should be in them?
• What if I don’t have any relevant clips or all my work is under an NDA?

Those are great questions. I tried to tackle some of them in a Twitter thread a couple of weeks ago, but admittedly, that’s a terrible way to get a big idea out. So let’s approach these questions here!

First of all, who are you and why should I listen to you?

Great question! Maybe you shouldn’t. I don’t have all the answers, but I am a sometimes-hiring manager on a small but crack team of UX writers and content strategists at Adobe! We’re responsible for driving (and sometimes writing) the interface language throughout our biiiig varied portfolio of apps. I’m typically in charge of scouting, recruiting, and hiring my team members myself, so I’ve developed some opinions and practices over the last few years.

So are UX writing portfolios really necessary?

I had a great conversation with some friends about this very topic recently, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that they shouldn’t be, but they are.

Why shouldn’t they be?

• Portfolios are impersonal, and an inaccurate way to really get an in-depth look at a candidate’s work.
• Portfolios reinforce the biases (implicit and explicit) of the recruiter or hiring manager. If you approach your work differently than they might expect, they might skip over yours.
• They also reinforce an unequal power dynamic. Big companies often expect your portfolio to be structured in a very specific way that scales for their applicant review process but doesn’t scale for you, the applicant.

But why is a UX writing portfolio necessary, then?

• This is one of the best ways we (hiring managers) can get the qual data to accompany the quant data of your resume. A resume gives us a checklist—years of experience, a relevant degree, keywords of proficiencies (all in themselves problematic, but that’s a different post), but the portfolio gives us a snapshot of how you work and how you solve problems.
• While UX writing opportunities as a whole are plentiful, they come up only every once in a while for my team. That means I get several dozen applicants, and most of them either aren’t qualified or used some sort of bulk-application method to apply. I need a way to filter out those who are serious about the role.

How should I structure my UX writing portfolio?

I think this is a great opportunity to play with the various media out there. To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a link to a “My Work” section of your website, a PDF, a Google Slides deck, or what.

Basically, there are two things that I look for:

• The work itself — a screenshot, a link to a live site or app
• The rationale behind it — the problem you’re solving for, an explanation of a few decisions you’ve made, and any frameworks or process documents you worked on, throughout the project.

Let’s look at an example from what I think is an excellent portfolio. This is from Marina Posniak, a UX writer at Spotify. Of course, one big advantage she has is that Spotify is recognizable to most people—she doesn’t need to take the extra step of giving extra context. But she does a really great job of framing the specific, focused problem at hand: