Enhancing Portfolio Creation on Behance for UX designers to increase engagement

Intro

This case study was part of a UX challenge where we wanted to focus on solving the UX problems in our favourite or frequently used products. The aim of this exercise was to understand how UX can have an impact on resolving main business requests or user pain points through extensive research and ideation. 

As a UX designer and a frequent Behance user we wanted to understand why users find the current portfolio creation process on Behance time-consuming and unintuitive, leading to lower portfolio creation rates and see if we can resolve it through UX improvements.

It All Began with a Struggle…

Why UX designers are no longer interested in Behance to showcase their portfolio?

A majority of UX designers these days are not interested in using Behance as a platform to showcase their UX case studies and projects for different reasons. Senior designers prefer to have their personal website or work with more advanced and premium platforms to update their portfolio and Junior designers find Behance too basic and don't like it since it doesn't provide any specific feature for UX designers.

Voices That Shaped the Problem 

Turning Questions Into Clarity

As an initial research step, we launched a survey in a couple of public channels specifically for UX & UI designers and we collected around 120 responses. The respondents were a mix of both junior and senior level designers who belonged to one of these 3 categories: 

Key survey insights

Digging Deeper Through Conversations 

To dig deeper into the real struggles behind portfolio creation, we conducted 6 in-depth interviews with designers at various levels of seniority. Some used Behance, giving us firsthand insight into platform-specific pain points, while others used different platforms that helped us uncover broader challenges that UX designers face when building their portfolios, regardless of the tool.

Key insights from interviews

One Goal, Two Perspectives

No matter junior or senior designer, both group felt like that Behance wasn’t built with their needs in mind 

After synthesizing the data found from the user research stage, we noticed 2 patterns of usage when it comes to portfolio creation on Behance. It seemed to us that the needs and motivation between the senior and junior profiles are distinctly different. As a result we defined two user personas as follows: 

Where the Friction Begins

How these 2 designers interact with Behance?

To put ourselves in users’ shoes and gain a clearer view of how our personas navigate Behance, we created a user journey map that outlines their main pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Learning from the Competition

A closer look at how others are solving the same problem

Before starting our ideation session we were curious to know how other similar platforms are solving the problems that we found during the problem identification stage. We decided to focus on these following platforms as they seemed to be widely used within the UX design communities: 

Ideas Take Shape

Turning Pain Points into Opportunities

Based on our data from user research, we came up with these HMW questions as an starting point for our ideation:

Bringing Ideas to Life

We improved the onboarding experience and introduced new tools to simplify project creation.

Based on the ideas that we selected earlier, we redesigned project definition process on Behance and added some elements to the editor exclusively for UX designers in order to use in their case studies. Here are our design solutions:

1. Project definition and Onboarding

2. Advanced page builder for UX design projects

4. Customizable element for page builder

5. Templates

Designers can also choose a template at first step to create their case studies from predefined templates.

User feedback

Did we actually solved the problems?

After conducting a round of usability tests with 5 participants, we realized that the onboarding process for designers was a little unclear, particularly when they were deciding whether to use the templates.
They didn’t know exactly what the difference is between using the templates and not using them. Additionally, the position of the "Create Project" button confused users, as it was placed before the templates. Therefore, we decided to improve this step by breaking it into several steps with clearer UX writing for users.