Mock design projects are just practice.
We've all been there. You're at the start of your UX career and don't have much to show in your portfolio. Maybe you haven't landed your first gig yet. What can you do? You have the passion and want to put in the work, so instead of procrastinating you imagine a scenario for an project that will showcase just how good you are.
In real life
In your career you're more likely to work on existing projects with vaguely defined requirements. How do you navigate legacy features and tight deadlines?
I'm interested in how you deal with the challenges.
In my career I've worked mostly on evolving/pivoting existing products. How do you work with lega
First of all, the requirements are not always well defined, and they will likely change once the project is underway and the depth of the problem becomes obvious.
In big companies you mostly work on evolving existing projects pressed by a tight deadline. Most times, you're probably working in a multi-disciplinary team with many opinions and personal goals. And even after you navigate all of this, the users might reject your solution. What do you do then?
What I look for in a candidate
I write in detail about the three things I look for when interviewing but the short version is:
- craftsmanship: the actual ability to draw elements and combine them to form a cohesive design;
- communication: how well you understand and communicate the problem, how you present the solution, how do you ;
- commercial awareness: here I'm looking for pragmatism. What problems you decided to work on, how much time you spend on them, what features do you cut, how do you validate your assumptions;
When I look at a mock design, I can adequately assess craftsmanship but struggle with the other two. How can I determine how well you understood the requirements if you created them? What skills do you have to advocate for the user when a PM or Dev wants to simplify, remove, or add features? There's no time pressure to tempt you into taking shortcuts. No stakes if you mess it up. And more importantly, no feedback from the user to know if your solution actually worked. Not all is lost, don't worry.
Mock projects done right
I once interviewed a designer with a lot of experience but couldn't show his work due to a contract clause. To prove that he could do the job, he created an app for booking bus tickets in his hometown. But there's a catch: the bus company doesn't offer this functionality yet. Still, he built a landing page asking people to sign up for a waiting list to get the product. He even spent $100 on ads promoting the page. There was some interest, and people signed up. With a list of email addresses, he reached out to all of them, mentioned what he was doing, and asked if they wanted to participate in interviews. Some said yes, and after talking to his actual prospective users, he got a list of their needs. Using this as his foundation, he built a prototype of how the app could work and again reached out to the same people. The feedback was not so great, so he refined the app, brought it to them one last time, and confirmed they liked the third iteration.
Though the project was never shipped, it was enough to convince us to make him an offer. Obviously, we appreciate his ingenuity, but we loved that he was willing to do the work and find actual users, not just test it on his friends who want to support him but would never use such an app. And we valued that when users rejected his first approach, he didn't give up. Instead, he incorporated their feedback, put in the work, and eventually came up with a better solution.
With this story in mind and knowing what interviewers like me look for in a candidate, I would like to pick a mock project you enjoyed creating. What step could you take to show interviewers, and yourself, the value of your work?