Your UXR portfolio is a product. Hiring managers aren't looking for flashy visuals; they're looking for evidence of your thinking. The best portfolios prove your value by showing your research process, justifying why you chose your methods, detailing your operational skills (like recruitment and ethics), and—most importantly—demonstrating your measurable impact on the business. We've gathered 9 tips to do this, 17+ examples from researchers at Meta and Microsoft, and free templates to help you build your case studies.
Whether you’re just getting started with UX, actively job searching, or looking to elevate your career, treat your UX portfolio like a product. Think of it as the ‘product’ you’re selling to hiring managers. A great portfolio anticipates their needs and makes it easy for them to say ‘yes,’ just like great UX makes a product easy for a user to love.
In this article we’ll share:
- Actionable tips to make your process, impact, and strategic thinking visible.
- Top UX research portfolio examples from researchers at companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Nuro.
- Ready-to-use templates to kickstart your own case studies.
💚 Ready to land your next role? This guide is packed with portfolio advice. For even more resources—including resume templates, interview tips, and salary negotiation guides—download our free Ultimate UX Research Career Guide. Get the free Career Kit.
9 tips for creating a winning UX research portfolio
Your UX research portfolio should do more than list deliverables — it should demonstrate how you think, how you work, and why it matters.
At its core, a strong portfolio includes a short introduction about you, two to four case studies that highlight your research process, and your professional contact information. But what sets UX research portfolios apart from other disciplines is the emphasis on process, evidence, and outcomes.
UX researchers’ currency is evidence. Your UX research work samples should include research project deliverables that support your argument for being an ideal candidate, including:
- Research study plans
- Tasks for usability tests
- Early concepts and sketches
- Wireframes used in testing
- Short quotes from usability tests or user interviews
According to a research study on UX research portfolios, 54.5% of respondents said the most important point in a case study is your research process. Focus on providing work samples that help you demonstrate your research process.
Here’s what else you should include to build a strong UX research portfolio👇
1. Tell a clear and compelling story, backed by evidence
A strong UX research portfolio doesn’t just showcase your research project deliverables—it explains your research process. But rather than giving a laundry list of details, it’s often more impactful to weave together a memorable narrative that showcases not only what you did, but how you did it and why.
Good storytelling sets your portfolio apart, helping hiring managers see not just your methods, but your mindset. Harrison Wheeler, founder of the Technically Speaking podcast and former Director of Product Design at LinkedIn, said on the Awkward Silences podcast that stories allow you to present your work without being bogged down in details. By framing the problem at a high level and creating an emotional connection with the audience, you build connection and understanding.
Storytelling makes your portfolio compelling—but documentation is what makes it credible. It gives hiring managers the evidence they need to evaluate your rigor, interpret your findings, and trust your conclusions. Without it, you could say your work increased profits 12x—but without a clear methodology or supporting artifacts, that claim doesn’t hold water.
You don’t need to include every little detail, but you should explain your decision-making process as part of the story: Why did you choose usability testing over user interviews? How did your team land on one research framework instead of another? What constraints or context shaped your approach? You can even link to artifacts that make your process visible, like affinity maps, journey maps, interview scripts, or presentation excerpts.
2. Specify your role and methods
Hiring managers want to understand your judgment and the kinds of problems you’re equipped to solve. Your portfolio must show not just what you achieved, but how you did it: the decisions you made, the methods you chose, and how you adapted to the project’s needs.
Be specific about:
- Your research methods and specializations, pointing out which ones you used in each project.
- The nature of your experience: Clarify if it was quantitative or qualitative, remote or in-person, and which methods you used (e.g., usability testing, user interviews).
- The scale of your research study plan: Do you have more experience with large-scale projects or smaller, guerilla research efforts? Did you work independently or as part of a long-term team initiative?
“From choosing a research methodology to picking your sample and sharing your insights, you make tons of decisions as a researcher. It is important to share the decisions you’ve made and the thought processes behind them.” - Eniola Abioye, UX Researcher at Meta in How to Build Strong User Research Work Samples
✏️ Sharpen your skills with our free Research 101 for Non-Researchers course. Sign up for the on-demand sessions and materials.
3. Showcase your operational excellence
Beyond your core narrative, your case studies must show evidence of your operational skills. Modern UX researchers are expected to do more than just moderate sessions and analyze findings. Your portfolio should reflect how you navigate strategy, ethics, and logistics — the behind-the-scenes work that protects participants, aligns with business needs, and keeps research running smoothly. Surfacing this behind-the-scenes work signals maturity, professionalism, and a deep understanding of responsible research.
Hiring managers in 2025 are looking for candidates who can demonstrate proficiency in three key areas.
- Tooling and tech stack
- Recruitment and panel management
- Compliance and ethical guardrails
Tooling and tech stack
Hiring managers are on the lookout for researchers who are tool-savvy, operationally fluent, and transparent, responsible, and adaptable to rapidly evolving tech like AI. But with the sheer number of platforms out there (just look at our 2024 UX tool map), it’s unrealistic to expect mastery of everything.
Instead of rattling off every user research tool you’ve ever touched, focus on integrating them within your story. If your story is about streamlining your workflow, show how you evaluated multiple options and landed on one that achieved that best. If you’re telling a story about speeding up time to insights, don’t just say that you use AI in almost all of your projects (which 28.2% of researchers do, according to our 2024 AI in UX Research report), show you used a tool to generate a screener and save two hours in your workflow.
Recruitment and panel management
Great research begins with great participants. In your portfolio, show hiring managers that you know how to find them. Make recruitment a star of your case study by detailing:
- Your recruitment strategy: Explain how you optimized for speed and quality. Did you improve response rates or shorten the timeline? Showcasing this efficiency proves you can streamline operations and get to product-improving insights faster.
- Participant panel quality and health: Describe how you maintained a high-quality panel. When you show you can prevent panel fatigue and manage data effectively, you’re proving you can generate trustworthy insights needed to build better products.
- Fraud prevention tactics: Detail how you protected your study’s integrity. Explaining how you screened for bad actors shows you ensure that business decisions—from product features to sales strategies—are based on real, reliable data.
- Your incentive philosophy: Explain the ‘why’ behind your user research incentive strategy. Showcasing your approach to fair and strategic compensation demonstrates you can attract the right high-value participants whose feedback can help uncover opportunities to boost sales.
- Your recruitment tech stack: Name the tools you used and explain why you chose them. This demonstrates your ability to leverage technology to streamline the entire research process, making you a more efficient and impactful researcher.
Demonstrating your ability to streamline various parts of the research process through tools like Recruit, our participant recruitment solution, is another key skill you can highlight in your UX research portfolio. Book a demo to learn how you can start streamlining your participant recruitment to focus on the actual research.
Compliance and ethical guardrails
Show that you’re a responsible and rigorous researcher by documenting your commitment to operational and ethical excellence. Building trust with participants protects the business. In your case studies, provide evidence of:
- Panel records: Your system for tracking participant data, including contact history, study participation, and incentive payments.
- Data security: Your process for handling sensitive data securely and in compliance with policies like GDPR or HIPAA
- Ethical guardrails: The artifacts that prove your commitment to ethical and inclusive research, such as consent forms, screeners, and NDAs.
(Tip: If you keep a research audit trail, adding in these details should be easy! Just remember to remove or block any personally identifiable (PII) or other sensitive information when creating artifacts for external audiences.)
4. Make your impact measurable
Transparency goes a long way in a UX research portfolio, but communicating your research's impact is what pushes portfolios from good to great: Hiring managers want to see results. How did stakeholders share, apply, and act on your insights?
Showcase the UX research metrics that measure your success such as:
- Reduced calls to customer support
- Decreased bounce rate from a site
- Increased task completion rate
- Improved Net Promoter Score
- Return on Investment (ROI)
📈 Need help tracking your impact? Learn how to define impact, measure outcomes, and keep a record of your success as a UX researcher.
Aayushi Gandhi’s portfolio is a great example of making business impact visible at a glance. Each project preview includes a clear outcome, even before you click into the full case study. For instance, the preview for her Kamal Products project highlights that the work led to “an 86% positive response from user testing.”
With User Interviews, it's simple to run high-quality research with your target audience. It's the only tool that lets you source, screen, track, and pay participants from your own panel, or from our network. Book a 15-minute demo today.
5. Prove that you’re a leader
In lean or fast-growing organizations without large, dedicated research teams, democratizing the research process is often the only way to keep up with demand. Hiring managers appreciate candidates who scale their impact beyond their own bandwidth—and your portfolio is the place to prove it.
Demonstrating how you’ve enabled research at scale across cross-functional teams—without sacrificing rigor—is a powerful differentiator. It shows that you don’t just execute research tasks; you look for opportunities to maximize your influence. It signals that you’re comfortable sharing ownership, guiding others, and balancing speed with quality. In other words, it shows that you’re a leader.
These efforts might include:
- Creating reusable research templates or study guides
- Reviewing lightweight or scrappy studies before they’re shared
- Building toolkits, checklists, or onboarding materials
- Coaching teammates through their first research projects
- Instituting guardrails to maintain ethical and methodological standards
“Keep in mind that your portfolio isn’t a research readout to your stakeholders, it’s a self-portrait of you as a researcher.” - Preeti Talwai, UX Research Lead at Google in Ask a UXR: Storytelling for UX Research Portfolios
Whether you’re formalizing processes or simply making it easier for others to gather useful insights, these contributions show you’re thinking beyond your own projects. You’re making research more accessible, more sustainable, and more impactful.
6. Understand the difference between research and design portfolios
UX research portfolios aren’t meant to impress with polished visuals — they’re meant to reveal how you think. While UX design portfolios often highlight the final product, research portfolios should focus on how you informed that product: what questions you asked, how you gathered data, and what decisions your work influenced.
That takes a lot of pressure off of delivering a flashy and pristine portfolio. In fact Sarah Doody, Founder and CEO of Career Strategy Lab, suggests shooting for a minimum viable product that you can develop over time based on feedback and needs.
That said, a research portfolio is still a user experience — and it should reflect the core principles of good UX design. Think clear information hierarchy, scannable layout, and easy navigation. Just because you’re not showcasing visual design doesn’t mean your portfolio should feel cluttered or confusing.
In fact, how you present your work is a subtle but powerful way to demonstrate your UX thinking. Replace flashy UI mockups with meaningful artifacts like interview guides, affinity maps, or journey maps — and use structure and flow to guide your reader through what you did, why you did it, and what it achieved.
What’s the best way to present it? There’s plenty of back and forth about whether to organize your portfolio into a slide deck or a website. Sarah argues that a presentation offers a better user experience, especially if you have to go through it during an in-person interview.
Still other UX researchers prefer organizing their case studies on web pages for long-term visibility and flexibility. A website allows for richer navigation and structure, and it’s far better for discoverability — it helps build your digital footprint, shows up in search results, and integrates more naturally into a broader professional presence.
Here’s a simple graphic that outlines the difference between UX research portfolios and design portfolios. 👇
Free UX research portfolio templates
Understanding the principles is the first step. These templates will help you put them into action. There are so many different ways to approach your UXR portfolio, but we’ve compiled a few templates to help you get started.
💚 Love user research case study templates? Head to our library and download all of them for free.
1. UX research portfolio canvas for case study
FernandoComet, a design technologist, conducted some research on UX research portfolios. One important insight he found was that one of the most favored structures for UX research case study examples was: Problem/Approach/Process/Artifacts/Impact/Learnings.
He provides a template based on this structure that you can fill out on your own. You can use any user research case study outline you prefer, but this is a general outline that covers all your research process bases.
📎 Find the template here.
2. UX research case study presentation template
Slide presentations work well in showcasing your UX research portfolio. 52.7% of UX researchers in this survey prefer to use Google Slides or a ppt builder to build their UX research portfolio.
This UX research case study presentation by Val Az provides a good outline for your projects. This template is particularly strong because it provides concrete examples of impact metrics you can include, such as reduced dev time spent on building faulty design, improved user experience by X (or described in qualitative terms) increased signups / activation / engagement by X, etc…
📎 Make a copy of this case study presentation here.
3. UX research case study Google Doc template
We all love a good Google Doc template. This UXR case study template by Nikki Anderson provides a good overview of how to structure your case study.
📎 Make a copy of the template here.
4. UX research case study and report Figma template
This UX research case study template on Figma by Aadil Khan, a design researcher at IBM, includes:
- A responsive template file with autolayout
- 2 examples of the template being used for a simple 1 phase research project and another multiphase research project
- Guidelines and tips for how to best fill out each section and come up with concrete goals for your research project
- A list of prefabs and components to help you customize your template
17 UX research portfolio examples that landed jobs
Now that you understand the anatomy of UX researcher portfolios, let’s get into some real UXR portfolio examples that landed jobs. We’ve grouped these real-world UXR portfolios thematically to help you find inspiration for your specific goals👇
Portfolios that master the case study narrative
These portfolios excel at storytelling, structure, and weaving a compelling argument.
1. Sophie Chen
Sophie Chen’s UX research portfolio features a Vidcade case study that's a masterclass in storytelling. It’s engaging, well-paced, and thoughtfully structured for both skim-readers and deep divers.
She weaves in quantitative insights from Mixpanel behavior tracking data to ground her decisions in evidence, and candidly reflects on how insights prompted her to pivot, showing a balance of strategic thinking and creative problem-solving.
2. Aakriti Chugh
Aakriti Chugh’s UX research portfolio stands out because it doesn’t just describe good UX—it practices it. The site itself is intuitive, visually clean, using ample white space and clear hierarchy to guide the user.
Her case studies are broken up with meaningful artifacts—process breakdowns, user flows, annotated mockups—that illustrate how she thinks and what she contributes at every stage.
Aakriti also includes a Reflections and Takeaways section in each project, where she openly considers what worked, what didn’t, and how she would adapt next time.
3. Alexandra Nguyen
Alexandra M. Nguyen, a UX researcher at Nuro, has a portfolio that demonstrates how to effectively narrate your personal career journey. While her case studies are password-protected, she provides a high-level “Path to UX” that frames each past role as a deliberate step toward her current position, turning a standard resume into an engaging story of growth.
4. Chloe Blanchard
Chloe Blanchard’s UX research portfolio shows the power of using real user quotes to narrate the research journey. By including feedback from real users and stakeholders in each project, she substantiates the impact of her work and brings the reader closer to the human experience behind the data.
Chloe’s design research and strategy portfolio also showcases 5 case study examples that demonstrate her research skills in various industries, from digital banking to a senior companion platform.
If you have experience in various industries like Chloe, highlight the work you did in each industry. You don’t have to show research case study examples from only one industry (unless that’s the only experience you have so far!).
5. Tiffany Yang
For researchers starting from scratch, Tiffany Yang’s portfolio provides a powerful blueprint for landing a first job. She walks through how she created a case study from the ground up, emphasizing the fundamentals: providing context about the problem, explaining her choice of methods, showing samples of raw data, detailing her recruitment process, and demonstrating her ability to collaborate.
Not sure which research method is best? Our free UXR Method Selection Tool can help.
Portfolios that showcase business and user impact
6. Rachel Hanna Green
Rachel Hanna Green’s portfolio doesn’t bury the lede—it leads with impact. Each case study preview on her site immediately highlights concrete results, often including financial outcomes like increased conversions or reduced costs, making it easy for hiring managers to see the business value of her research. It also includes interesting copy that catches attention and draws the site visitor in to learn more.
You might notice that each case study is password-protected. Not a lot of UX researchers expose their UXR case study work for the public to see, which is something to consider when creating your own portfolio.
7. Aayushi Gandhi
Aayushi Gandhi’s work excels at making business impact visible at a glance, proving that documentation doesn’t have to kill the story—it often makes it. For example, she anchors her Kamal Products case study in real user behavior and ties it to clear, quantifiable outcomes like a 100% task completion rate and a 81% SUS score.
8. Devin Harold
Devin Harold’s slideshow portfolio demonstrates how to make complex research timelines engaging and easy to follow. His use of well-designed, creative artifacts—like the project timeline—encapsulates his process and allows him to clearly connect distinct research activities to the final outcome during a presentation.
9. Vy Alechnavicius
In this video by Vy Alechnavicius, an award-winning experience design leader and strategist, dives into a junior UX research portfolio that led to a job offer and explains what worked and what he could have done better.
Vy emphasizes the importance of showing, not just telling, your impact. He advises researchers to use artifacts like experience maps to visually illustrate how research findings led to the identification of key opportunities or competitive advantages.
Portfolios that demonstrate operational excellence and rigor
These portfolios reveal the “how” behind the work—the logistics, ethics, and recruitment.
10. Jae Engle
Jae Engle’s UX research portfolio example is a standout example of operational transparency. Instead of centering only on her findings, she focuses on how she navigated a real-world recruitment obstacle during the pandemic. Walking the reader through her methodical evaluation of recruitment options, she clearly outlines the tradeoffs between using her university’s panel and third-party platforms like mTurk.
Discussing challenges like these may feel risky, but Jae elevates her portfolio by proving she can problem-solve under messy, real-world conditions.
11. Paige Nuzzolillo
Paige Nuzzolillo’s portfolio proves her ability to manage research operations and bring stakeholders along for the ride. For example, her Farm to Table Tours project includes thorough documentation, including everything from whiteboard photos to a detailed content inventory and a list of her recruitment and operational tools, giving a clear view of how she moves from insight to action.
12. Cyd Harrell
For an example of radical transparency in a UX research portfolio, look to the work of Cyd Harrell, a civic technologist. By sharing her UX research project on Github with all the details, she demonstrates a deep commitment to rigor and a willingness to show the reasoning behind every research decision, from framing the questions to executing the study.
13. Mia Eltiste
Mia Eltiste’s UX research case study is a strong example of justifying your methods. For each step documenting the usability evaluation she performed for a local startup, she not only shows which research method she chose but explains why she chose it. This demonstrates a thoughtful, evidence-based approach.
14. Kelly Frost Davis
Building your online UX research portfolio is one thing, but knowing how to present your portfolio (asynchronously or live) for an interview is another skill to practice. This video is a great example of how one UX researcher presented her UXR portfolio through Google Slides.
Kelly Frost Davis’s presentation focuses on a crucial operational skill: preparing for the portfolio presentation itself. She shows how to leverage features like Google Slides’ Presenter View to have speaker notes ready, ensuring a polished and prepared delivery whether the interview is live or asynchronous.
15. Benny Sun
Senior UX Researcher Benny Sun’s portfolio is a simple, powerful reminder to always justify the “why” behind your methods. He clearly explains the reasoning for choosing prototyping and usability testing in his research portfolio and includes real, qualitative feedback from the test sessions to ground his findings.
16. Katie McCurdy
Katie McCurdy’s UX research case study showcases how research artifacts can facilitate cross-functional collaboration. She explains how her hand-drawn diagrams and affinity maps for a project centered on improving the health tracking process for both doctors and patients helped streamline communication with developers, proving her ability to translate complex findings into accessible formats that drive action.
17. Theo Johnson
Theo Johnson, Senior UX Researcher at Microsoft, has a research portfolio that’s a masterclass in structured transparency and professional self-assessment. He provides a clear blueprint for a rigorous case study, detailing everything from the problem statement and team structure, to how he created artifacts like customer journey maps and developed a research repository. What truly elevates his work is the inclusion of a dedicated retrospective section where he shares what he learned and what he would do differently. This practice demonstrates a commitment to continuous process improvement—a core tenet of operational excellence.
Tools + websites to create your UX research portfolio
Whether you’re creating a research-focused portfolio for the first time or sprucing up your existing one, consider using a tool to make a visually engaging and easily navigable for hiring managers.
Here’s a list of tools and website builders to help you create a winning UXR portfolio:
Additional UX research career resources to help you along the way!
- How to Build Strong User Research Work Samples—with Examples by Eniola Abioye, UX Researcher at Meta
- How to Land a UX Research Internship – by User Interviews
- Your UX Career is a Product – with Sarah Doody at Career Strategy Lab
- Exploring UX Research Career Options – with Marieke McCloskey of LinkedIn
- The Ultimate Remote UX Research Job Board – by User Interviews
- Leveling up your UX research Career – Spotify podcast playlist
- Common UX Research Job Interview Questions & How to Answer Them – by User Interviews
