Curious how you find and interview and hire designers capable of doing real interaction and product design. What do you look for in a portfolio, if you’re perusing many how do you decide which ones are worth looking at, how much time do you spend on them. I personally have strong visual design background (plenty of Dribbble-worthy shit) but almost exclusively do complex interaction work now. Often with the intention of reducing the amount of time users fuck around with a UI. Oracle design leadership is dismissive of that, they have hard-on’s for sexy stuff, so thought I’d get my portfolio together and follow up with a few recruiters who reached out recently. But want to work with teams concentrating on challenging problems not making shit look cool.
How would you define sexy enterprise design?
Watch Oracle Design show and tells. Or look at Dribbble pages, like those generic dashboards. The stuff looks pretty and the animations are supple and seductive. None of its real or has any chance at being real to say the least.
Ah, yes, I’ve seen those. As for product design portfolios, how you portray yourself will depend on your next role. Generally, companies look for analogs to their current products, so it would be helpful to showcase specific projects related to their biz if you have one handy. I would say flashy UI catches people’s eye, but in depth flows/interactions will further pique their interest. It’s about telling the story of challenges and how you got to where you are, while keeping in mind your seniority. Try doing an audit of people’s portfolios at different levels and see how they present their work.
Portfolio should show process and methodology. I look for reframing of problems that show insight about the bigger context of a design solution. Having a portfolio site that has solid design is key. Also overall background (agency work for brands similar to my own would be nice). It is hard to say what makes a Product Designer legit. I think legit = years of experience in multiple industries and types of environments (start-up/agency/big corps) and being a practitioner (not a theorist) in multiple disciplines.
Cool that’s great advice
read about what product design is. it’s a lot more than just interaction work and ui
Yeah I get that. Was asking a general question around how people look at portfolios. I can write in-depth stories about identifying customer problems and how we solved something or simplified a process. It just might look really simple or boring. Guess I was wondering if people read the case studies or just look at the mocks.