Highlighting the 'Experience' in your portfolio, and why design is often not seen.
Jarod Spool writes a great article about how all of the hard work that is done on the experience of a website, including the design and architecture, often go unnoticed by the consumers.
When things are going well in a design, we don’t pay attention to them. We only pay attention to things that bother us. It’s like an air conditioner in a conference room. Nobody ever interrupts our meetings to tell us how comfortable the temperature is. They don’t even notice.
He even goes so far as to say we should make our portfolios not just highlight our work, but highlight what our work could have looked like without the experience design.
Yet how does the designer who does that hard work get credit for their effort? It’s possible we need to design a new type of portfolio — one that helps hiring managers see what the design would’ve looked like, had it been poorly designed.
That’s great in theory, but tough in practice – unless you keep some before-and-after screenshots of redesigns, which I often do.