Product Design
UX heuristics, research, interface craft and systems thinking — ending in the only thing a design portfolio is actually judged on: a case study that shows how you think.
Finish this and you can research a real problem, design a solution against constraints you can name, build it in a system rather than as one-off screens, and defend every decision in a portfolio review.
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Design principles
BeginnerThe perceptual and cognitive rules that make an interface feel obvious. Learn them as constraints, not decoration.
- 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design Forty years old and still the checklist every usability review starts from. Memorise these ten.
- Laws of UX Fitts, Hick, Miller and the Gestalt principles, each with the research behind it. Short enough to read in a sitting.
- Human Interface Guidelines Read for the reasoning, not the components. Apple explains why a pattern exists better than almost anyone.
- Material Design 3 The counterweight to Apple's guidelines. Where the two disagree is where the interesting design questions are.
Build this
A heuristic evaluation of something you use daily
Pick an app you use and dislike. Walk one complete task through all ten of Nielsen's heuristics and document every violation with a screenshot and a proposed fix.
This is a real deliverable that working designers produce. Doing one properly is more persuasive than three redesign concepts.
Done when: An annotated evaluation with severity ratings and specific fixes.
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Research basics
BeginnerHow to find out what people actually do, rather than what they tell you they do — with a sample size you can realistically get.
- GOV.UK Service Manual — User research The most practical free guide to research there is, written by a team doing it under real constraints and public scrutiny.
- Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users The article that removes the most common excuse for never testing anything.
- Nielsen Norman Group — Articles Decades of evidence-based UX writing, free. Filter by topic when you have a specific question rather than reading front to back.
Build this
A usability test with five real people
Write a test script with three tasks. Run it with five people who are not designers, recording where they hesitate rather than what they say afterwards.
Then synthesise: what failed, how often, how badly. The gap between what people say and what they do is the whole lesson.
Done when: A test script, session notes, and a prioritised findings summary.
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Figma craft
BeginnerAuto layout, components and variants — the mechanics that make a file editable by someone other than you.
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Typography, colour and accessibility
IntermediateThe three craft skills that most visibly separate amateur work from professional — and the one legal obligation among them.
- Butterick's Practical Typography Read "Typography in ten minutes" today and the summary of key rules this week. It will improve every document you produce, not just designs.
- WebAIM — Contrast and Color Accessibility The contrast ratios, why they exist, and the checker you should keep open while choosing any palette.
- Designing for Web Accessibility The designer's subset of WCAG — focus states, target sizes, not relying on colour alone. Short and non-negotiable.
- Material Design — Color system How to build a palette with roles rather than favourites — the approach that survives a dark mode requirement.
Build this
A palette and type scale that passes in both themes
Build a semantic colour palette — surface, text, border, accent, states — and a type scale, then prove every pairing meets contrast requirements in both light and dark.
Most portfolios show a colour swatch grid. Showing the contrast matrix instead demonstrates you understand what the palette is for.
Done when: A documented palette and type scale with a passing contrast matrix for both themes.
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Design systems
AdvancedTokens, components and the documentation that makes them get used. Systems thinking is what the job becomes past junior level.
- Atomic Design Free in full online. The vocabulary — atoms, molecules, organisms — is now standard in the field, whatever you think of the metaphor.
- GOV.UK Design System Every component documents the research behind it, including what was tried and rejected. That is the model to imitate.
- Shopify Polaris A commercial system with unusually good content guidelines. Read those sections even if you never touch the components.
Build this
A small system, documented like a real one
Build eight to ten components with tokens, variants and states. Then document each one the way GOV.UK does: when to use it, when not to, and what you rejected.
Ten well-documented components beat forty undocumented ones in every portfolio review.
Done when: A Figma library plus written usage documentation for every component.
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Case study writing
IntermediateThe portfolio piece itself. Hiring managers skim the pictures and read the reasoning.
- UX Portfolios — guidance What reviewers actually look for, from research with people who do the reviewing.
- Google — Technical Writing Courses Not design-specific, and that is the point: most weak case studies fail as writing, not as design.
Build this
One case study, on real constraints
Take the problem you researched and the interface you designed and write it up properly: the constraint, what you tried, what the five users broke, what you changed, and what you would still fix.
Include the version that failed. A case study with no dead ends reads as fiction, and reviewers know it.
Done when: A published case study containing at least one documented failure and what it taught you.
Not sure this is your path?
A path is only worth the hours if it is the right one. The counselling session tests the direction you arrived with rather than simply agreeing with it.
Find your directionClose, but not quite yours?
These nine are fixed on purpose — complete, sequenced, and ready today. If your direction sits between two of them, we will build the path around you instead.
Ask for a custom path