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Let’s talk about how to make your online case studies stand out.

As you know, it’s a hard time to be looking for design work.

There are too many designers in the market for the amount of jobs that are available.

Recruiters and hiring managers get inundated with candidates—they’re looking for designers that stand out from the crowd.

Making your case study unique is one way you can grab the attention of a recruiter or hiring manager and get them to take the next step with you.

Unfortunately, most UX case studies blend in instead of standing out.

Here’s one reason why:

Too many case studies follow the same rigid structure

Would an outline of your case study look something like this?

If so, I’m guessing one or more of these may be true for you: 

• Your bootcamp required you to use this structure
• You’ve seen so many of these that you think it’s expected
• Your experience so far has been with technical design skills (not so much storytelling and other soft skills)

So how can you break this mold and get your case study to stand out?

Here’s how, step by step:

Step 1: Ditch the deliverables

Too many case studies are based on what the designer did.

Online case studies are typically structured as a series of headlines with supporting paragraphs of text and visuals.

Like this:

Headline
2-3 paragraphs of text with context. Ex: “I synthesized my research into a persona that modeled the target user”.

[Supporting Visual]

Repeat…

And those headlines match the example outline we looked at above:

Problem
User Research
Affinity Map
Persona
Journey Map
User Stories
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Usability Test
Prototype

Expect hiring managers to quickly scan your case study, pausing at headlines and visuals—if you grab their attention.

Those headlines are crucial.

I see a lot of problems with the deliverables-as-headlines approach:

• This looks the same as other case studies
• It doesn’t seem like a real project (very few follow a process this thorough and linear)
• It’s hard to tell what the designer learned from each of these activities
• We don’t know how these activities affected the final design
• We don’t know why the designer used this process
• The hiring manager has to do a lot of work to see what you did (they have to scroll and read all those headlines and paragraphs!)

It’s not that deliverables or process doesn’t matter.

It’s that they don’t matter enough to structure the entire case study around them.

Instead of making your headlines a checklist of deliverables, move them into a smaller, scannable list at the top of your case study.

This case study has a scannable list of deliverables at the very top.

Step 2: Remove fluff

A hiring manager knows very few real world projects fit the mold that we see in so many case studies today.

So remove sections that aren’t essential to the project, to you as a designer, or to the types of roles you’re trying to land.

“Instead of forcing yourself to slog through every phase of your project, focus on the parts that were important and relevant to you. That’s all we want to know reading it, anyway.”

—Tobias Van Schneider

I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve seen case studies that include the following sections, each with its own headline, paragraphs, and supporting visual:

Sketches
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
High Fidelity Wireframes
Mockups
Prototype

No project that I’ve ever hired for, worked on, or seen someone else work on has ever required all of those steps.

Not a single one.

Remove the fluff and focus on what’s essential for the story. :)

Step 3: Pull out the juicy parts of each section and turn those into your headlines

Instead of “Problem” say “An eCommerce app with an industry-lagging conversion rate”.

Instead of “Usability test” say “Customers were confused about total item cost”

Instead of “Mockups” say “Delivering pricing transparency”

See where this is going?

These headlines focus on challenges, insights, and impact.

That’s what makes your story compelling and unique.

They’re also what most hiring managers are looking for—someone who can figure out problems and have an impact on a business and its users.

Here’s the first 3 sections of a case study outline, written two different ways:

Which do you want to read?

Which tells a unique and compelling story?

What impression do you have of the designer after reading each version?

If you want your case study to get different results than everyone else—you need to do something different.

Restructuring your headlines to make your case study more scannable and compelling is one way to do it.

And you still have the visuals under each headline to show off your deliverables.

That’s all for this week—I hope this gives you some ideas for how you can use storytelling to get better results from your online case studies.

Helpful links

These two articles should be required reading for anyone working on case studies in the current UX market:

The case study factory

The portfolio case study is broken