How can you showcase your ability to conduct user testing with urban users in a portfolio?

1 Define your goals

Before you start creating your portfolio, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. Do you want to showcase your skills as a user researcher, a UX designer, or both? Do you want to highlight your ability to work with different types of urban users, such as commuters, tourists, or residents? Do you want to focus on a specific domain, such as transportation, health, or education? Having a clear goal will help you select the most relevant and impactful user testing projects to include in your portfolio.

4 Showcase your insights

The ultimate goal of user testing is to gain insights that inform and improve your design decisions. You should demonstrate how you analyzed and synthesized the data that you collected from urban users, such as using affinity diagrams, personas, journey maps, or scenarios. You should also show how you communicated and presented your insights to your clients or stakeholders, such as using reports, dashboards, or stories. You should also highlight how your insights led to design changes or recommendations that improved the user experience or solved the user problem.

5 Reflect on your learning

User testing is not only a way to validate your design ideas, but also a way to learn from urban users and their contexts. You should include a section in your portfolio where you reflect on what you learned from your user testing projects, such as new user needs, behaviors, or trends that emerged from the urban environment. You should also share how you applied or transferred your learning to other projects or domains, or how you improved your user testing skills or methods.

6 Include examples

The best way to showcase your ability to conduct user testing with urban users is to include examples of your work in your portfolio. You should select examples that match your goals, your format, your methods, your insights, and your learning. You should also provide enough details and evidence to support your claims and show your impact. You can use screenshots, photos, videos, audio clips, graphs, charts, or quotes to illustrate your examples. You should also provide links or references to the full projects or reports if available.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?