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Are you boring your interviewer by over-explaining context? | by Kai Wong | Jan, 2024
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I was reminded of a common mistake I used to make when I was recently mentoring junior designers with their portfolios.
For designers with only a few projects to their name, I know there’s a temptation to over-explain what you did on them in detail. Nothing might seem more awful than quickly summarizing your work and having nothing else to your name.
But you may make a critical mistake when you do that: you might provide too much background and context.
To explain why this is a problem, let me walk you through how I struggled to talk about one of my first design projects: a Gesture-based Interface for surgeons to coordinate during Laparoscopic Cholecystectomies.
You can never fully explain the context, and it’s better not to try
I’m pretty sure you have no idea what I just said in the sentence above. To adequately explain the context of that project, here are the questions I’d have to answer:
- What is Laparoscopic Surgery, and how does it differ from regular surgery?
- What is a Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy (i.e. Removing the gallbladder)?
- How is the operating room set up for surgeons?
- How many surgeons are in the operating room, and what is their role?
- Why use gestures instead of other interfaces?
- Why are there difficulties coordinating between surgeons?
- Etc.
In other words, that might be like ten slides of explanation of the context before ever getting to what I did as a designer. That is the problem I struggled with, and it turns out that I wasn’t alone.
From over-explaining payer-provider portals to talking about the history of W3C for several pages, I’d see Junior Designer portfolios where they wouldn’t even begin to talk about what they did as a designer until the user scrolled the page 4–5 times.
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