How to write it
The portfolio link is the most important element on the page
Put it in the header, next to your email, and make sure it resolves without a password. A design resume whose portfolio link is missing, broken or gated behind a request will be discarded, because the reviewer's entire process depends on it.
If your work is under NDA, the portfolio still needs to exist — describe the problem, the process and the outcome, and blur what you must. A password-protected case study with the password printed on the resume is acceptable; nothing at all is not.
Research you ran, not research you read
The clearest divide in design hiring is between people who make screens from a brief and people who find out what to build. Naming the research you conducted — how many interviews, what cadence, how many participants a year — puts you firmly on the right side of it.
"Redesigned onboarding end to end after 22 user interviews" is a different claim from "redesigned onboarding". It says the design had an evidentiary basis, which is the argument every design leader is trying to make internally about their own team.
Measure what shipped
Designers systematically under-quantify. The metrics are there — activation, conversion, task completion time, error rate, support ticket volume, retention — and quoting them makes the difference between a portfolio of pretty screens and a record of product improvement.
Usability testing gives you numbers even when the business metrics are someone else's: "cut task completion time 43% in usability testing, from 5m20s to 3m02s median" is a real, defensible measurement of your craft.
- Activation, conversion or retention, before and after
- Task success rate or completion time from usability testing
- Support tickets or error rates reduced
- Design system coverage, and teams adopting it
- Research volume — interviews, sessions, participants
- Accessibility conformance reached
Design systems are operations work, and they're valued
Building a system that other people use is the most leveraged thing a designer does, and it's evidence of the qualities hiring managers can't test in a portfolio review: consistency, documentation, and the diplomacy required to get adoption.
Quantify coverage and adoption rather than component count. "Covering 80% of the product surface, adopted by 3 squads and the marketing site" says the system is real. "Built a design system with 120 components" might describe a Figma file nobody uses.
Show that engineers wanted to work with you
The most common complaint about designers is that their work isn't buildable. Counter it with evidence of technical collaboration: handoff practices, tokens shared with the codebase, prototypes built in code, an understanding of what's expensive to implement.
Listing HTML and CSS is worth doing if it's true, not because you'll be writing it, but because it signals you know what you're asking for. Accessibility knowledge does the same job — it's the part of design that's closest to engineering constraint.