Hello, it’s Aneta here 👋 This is issue #10 of UX Design Express and today we’re talking about

Showing your project impact

We all know that highlighting your project outcomes and impact is what hiring managers are looking for. Still, many designers miss on the opportunity to share their achievements in their case studies. They complain about lack of metrics, sunsetted or conceptual projects.

I was one of these designers too. I finished a UX bootcamp with conceptual projects and I worked in a low UX maturity organisation too where some of my projects weren’t implemented. I thought that this is the argument that will explain why I didn’t talk about my impact in my case studies. But it was just an excuse.

Ultimately, I figured out how to talk about my impact in both, my happy and unhappy projects, and I’m going to tell you now exactly how you can do it too. Let’s talk impact!

Let’s dive in 🐬

4 different ways of talking about your impact as a designer

There are lots of ways to shape project retrospectives and talk about your achievements in case studies. When you think about your impact as a designer, you probably think about product metrics. Things like: increased user engagement by 10% or increased conversation rate by 15% and similar. Another common information I’ve seen in UX portfolios included: learnings, next steps or work statistics. However, there is so much more!

1.1. Impact on you - your learnings, work statistics or next steps

Learnings, work statistics, list of next steps or ideas for changes are some of the most common information presented by designers in retrospective sections of their UX portfolios. These are common in junior portfolios because they're easy to put together. Even though they mainly focus on your own impact, they still count as a retrospective. If you don't have time or energy to cover other areas, just share some project learnings. This shows you're a thoughtful designer who reflects on your work, not just creates artefacts.

As always, the more specific, the better. Instead of writing things like “it’s important to test with users” or “we need to advocate for users” that are not unique, think about your original learnings that do not necessarily are connected with users. What if you write about your learnings about business or industry? Or maybe something you learned about yourself during the process. Be creative and concrete.

1.2. Impact on teams - improvements in culture and processes

Your influence on design culture and processes in organisations is important. Leaders usually drive these changes, but in startups or less mature UX environments, you can also help improve UX understanding, streamline design and research processes, and more. This impact can be hard to measure directly but can be visible in positive changes in the way of work of your team, other departments and your colleagues.

Write about specific actions you took to improve processes or culture. For example, creating reusable templates, guidelines or systems to optimize design processes. Even small actions, like building relationships with sales people that benefit the entire design team, count. Reflect on what you did in a project, the results you achieved to tackle process challenges, and how these can be reused by others in your team or other teams.

1.3. Impact on users - improvements in a product

Product impact, which is crucial for individual contributors like designers, is mostly measured through metrics that show how well your product performs. If your project wasn't implemented or was conceptual, then its impact is harder to prove. Though, you can still talk about what you aimed to achieve with hypothetical metrics and how things might have turned out if you had the numbers.

If you have metrics, the situation is simple. But the situation gets more difficult and uncomfortable, if you’re in the same situation as this guy from one of the comments I got below this post

Highlight the most critical user jobs you created. Based on these tasks, define product metrics that measure user value, focusing on categories like conversion, engagement, acquisition, adoption, retention or other product metric buckets. As an example a typical metric for measuring user engagement in B2C apps is stickiness or daily interaction rate. Use chatGPT and Google for inspiration. Then frame these metrics into a hypothetical narrative such as: My potential impact on… or Metrics I would love to measure in this project…

Juicy tip 🧃

Run a user testing using quantitative testing tools like Maze or UXTweak. These tools have free plans and the quantitative research methods can quickly give you an overview of your design success. Use these numbers in your hypothetical statements.

1.4. Impact on business - increase in profit or brand reputation

Beside your learnings, product impact on improvements in processes, there are other areas of impact that you can make as a designer. To find them, you need to think holistically about your work and how your work as a designer impact things that are located further away from your work. These things are usually indirectly connected with your work.

One metric that bothers all businesses is profit. You can talk about increase in revenue or decrease in costs, even hypothetically. Another common example is about brand loyalty and reputation. If you improve an experience of a popular app, customers can start recommending it to their friends. This is an example of your impact.

That's it for today!

Get portfolio support from me ⭐️

There are 2 ways I can support you individually with your portfolio.

1. Let’s do it long-term! The biggest results come from this

2. Hop on a one-time call with me

I’m back in two Fridays with another edition of UX Design Express 👋

Keep designing ✨
Aneta