How to use the power of narrative to engage interviewers with your design portfolio.

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.