In our recent Day in the Life live event with Miro’s Srecko Dimitrijevic, the Product Designer shared some valuable insights into breaking into the design world. With a heavy emphasis on transparency, confidence and communication, Srecko outlined the challenges he has faced in his career and how he overcame them.
However, he believes that designers should never stop growing and learning. Designers should always be looking for new ideas and showcasing their latest work. Srecko shared a list of resources that he turns to for portfolio and case study inspiration.
You can watch our full conversation with Srecko here.
Portfolio inspiration
Whether you’re brand new to UX or revamping your career, your portfolio is one of the most important assets you can have. So if you are on the hunt for a new job or simply want to leave your mark online, take a look at some of Srecko’s favourite portfolios from people working in UX, UI and product design.
Graeme Rutherford is a UX, interactive and service designer who done design work for the Department for Education in the United Kingdom, NHS Digital, British Gas, the United Nations, Riddle and more.
Arjun Mahesh is a product designer with payment app Stripe. In the past, he has teams and shipped products with companies like Kickstarter, Frank Gehry, Google, Amazon, and BCG.
Darshan Gajara is the Head of Design at Hygraph and the publisher of Product Disrupt. On his blog, he shares his thoughts on design and travel, as well as sharing links to his own case studies for different product design projects.
Alexander Kirov is a full-stack product designer and the head of UX in the visual communications department at Logitech. He links to a number of his own design case studies on his portfolio, which had a nice blend of humour, professionalism and simplistic yet effective designs.
Pratibha Joshi is a Product Designer with Google. She has previous working experience with Microsoft and Sprinklr, specialising in social media engagement, social advertising, content marketing, care support and analytics. In her spare time, she likes to experiment with new interactions and techniques in prototyping.
Jonny Czar is the Lead Product Designer at the online shopping community Pepper. His portfolio links to all of the work he has done throughout his career with clients like Bookify, N26 and Itaú , as well as written work on UX topics like design feedback, usability testing and the design hiring process.
Runar Gudbjartsson II is an Icelandic designer who is now based in New York, where he works as a Product Designer with WeWork. His portfolio is as personable as it is professional, teaching us about him as a person and a designer. He shares different case studies from his career, including a redesign for PayPal and an ATM finder feature for PayPal users.
Jeremy Kim is a designer and web developer. Currently, he works on the designs systems team for Messenger and Instagram Direct for Meta. Previously, he worked for Quora and Shopify. On his website, he links to his resumé and – very cleverly – he shares a timeline of his ever-changing portfolio that captures his growth as a professional designer.
Zero is a self-taught product designer who is currently a Senior Product Designer with Soundcloud. He is big on design system advocacy, accessibility and collaboration. While he shares some case studies for their work with Soundcloud, he also links to Figma plug ins that he designed to create more efficient designs.
Case studies
“When you do a certain design, you should have a reason why you did it and that reason shouldn’t be a hunch or something like that. It should be evidence-based reasons,” explains Srecko. “Heavy rationale will anticipate a lot of questions that you’re gonna get down the road and the more you understand, the more confident you will talk about it.”
This is where case studies come in. They detail your design process from start to finish, explaining the why behind every decision and providing that all-important rationale. No matter what level you are at in your design career, case studies are an excellent way to keep track of and to document your work.
Here are some of Srecko’s favourite case studies.
- UX for the Masses is a UX blog run by product design leader Neil Turner. He looks into how we can redesign the holiday booking process by comparing and then redesigning the user journey for people using Firstchoice.co.uk and Thomson.co.uk.
- Abdus Salam asks how might we reimagine the future of television on his blog. As a former Product Designer for TV Guide, which is part of the CBS Interactive brand, he uses flow charts and sketches to assess how people really watch television.
- Taking a quirky approach to the case study, Harry Dry documents how his idea of creating a dating website for Kanye West fans went viral in The Kanye Story. In his full-time role, Harry writes marketing case studies but for fun, he writes case studies about all things Yeezy.
- Erick Mazer Yamashita, a Senior Product Designer with Nubank, details how the design team came up with the concept of the credit card NuConta, a single account that allows people to save, invest and transfer money in real-time. He explains the whys and the hows of this great idea, whereas….
- … Lucas Neumann, Erick’s former NuBank colleague who is now the Staff Product Designer at Twitter, explains how NuBank’s design team turned this new money-saving credit card concept into a reality.
- With a pretty impressive portfolio, Arshad Wala uses a case study on the UX of the Xbox to demonstrate his problem-solving and design skills. In a goal to improve accessibility of Xbox content outside of desktop use, he lay outs the issues that need to be solved and clearly highlights the objectives of his case study.
- Freelance product designer, web designer and webflow developer Dang Nguyen took it into his own hands to do a redesign of Soundcloud. He has never worked for Soundcloud but as a fan of the music streaming service, he wanted to erase the pain-points in the mobile version of the app.
And, finally, Srecko shared some basic resources to help you with your online portfolio. Check out Frank Gaine’s handy UX portfolio template to get you started. And as you are adding the final touches, let Sarah Doody’s words of wisdom sharpen up the final product: you are not the user of your UX portfolio.
