Case study template
Placeholder — one line on what the work was
- Client
- Placeholder client
- Role
- Your roleSecond hat, if any
- Year
- 20XX – 20XX
- Discipline
- Product Design
PLACEHOLDER. What was broken, for whom, and why it mattered. Write the state of the world before you touched it — concretely enough that the reader feels the friction. Avoid "the client wanted a refresh"; say what users could not do.
Section one — the setup
PLACEHOLDER. What you inherited, what the constraints were, who else was involved. If someone else set the visual language or led another part, credit them here explicitly — it costs nothing and it makes every other claim more believable.
Section two — how you worked
PLACEHOLDER. Research, exploration, the options you weighed. This is where process artifacts belong: the rejected direction, the map, the thing mid-thought. Most portfolios skip this and it is the single most-requested evidence in senior design postings.
Section three — the key decision
PLACEHOLDER. The strongest thing you can say. Pick one decision, state what you did, what it cost, and why it was right. A decision with a tradeoff you can name reads as judgment; a decision with no downside reads as marketing.
Section four — the hard part
PLACEHOLDER. What nearly went wrong, or the thing that turned out harder than expected. Include a number if you have one. Writing down what failed is what separates demonstrated rigour from claimed rigour.
Section five — the system
PLACEHOLDER. How it was made repeatable: components, tokens, documentation, handoff. If it shipped as code, say so and link it.
Section six — what happened
PLACEHOLDER. The result in use, with real figures where you have them. Adoption, speed, scale, or a specific behaviour that changed.
