If you’ve been in UX, you’ve seen it.

Behance is a portfolio website to show off visual design work. It is an asset for any visual designer, wanting to visually communicate a visual design to employers and peers alike.

UX projects are a dime a dozen on Behance’s website - each portfolio piece more beautiful than the last. Heck, some of them even have user research as a part of the larger story they are telling. Some are unique projects, but many are redesigns of corporate entities.

But you know what really unites most of these projects?

Context. A lack of it.

There are all kinds of beautiful websites, apps, and tools created and posted on Behance, showing off how good a person’s UX skills are. But despite the wonderful visual design of each of these things, they are completely devoid of any actual implementation.

There’s a seminal work in the area of game design called “Why Your Game Idea Sucks”. Originally published in 2009, this article goes into detail that unless you can back up your idea with implementation, no one really wants to hear it. It’s not that it’s inherently bad… it’s just that without the realistic constraints applied by business and technology, and the idea is too loose to be valuable.

Now don’t get me wrong - I am just as guilty of this as the next UXer - my portfolio page is full of school projects devoid of implementation or context. There is still value to these visual ideas. They show an understanding of the design process. They show drive to make something work and look good. But the more time I spend in a real company performing real research and design work, the more I’m convinced that without real constraints to work under, a portfolio piece can only ever show an idea of your abilities, rather than what you would deliver in reality.

Let’s take an example from my own portfolio: Kupima Angani. This was a smartphone app designed for rural farmers in the Acholiland of Uganda. It was designed under the instruction of a professor of mine who spent years of her life performing ethnographic research across eastern Africa. It had a ton of research go into it, a ton of thought behind each decision made. Though the designs are dated at this point, the functionality was thought up and confirmed as useful when compared to the ethnographic research done by my professor.

We had no desire or ability to make this application a reality. Any value that the app may have provided was completely divorced from what we created. That’s a problem. We had no idea how something like this would be developed. Consider the following challenges:

limited access to wireless 3G: without connection, cannot download app or update weather.
uncertainty about integration with various services: with no plan on what weather, mapping, and news services, there was no way to actually understand how data would be populated into the app

I’m not saying that a UX designer needs to understand the nuts and bolts about every type of integration possible. I’m simply recognizing that in my experience, there are always hidden constraints that no amount of user research can turn up. Those still need to be considered by the UX designer.

What Behance has done is make it all too easy for a UXer to think up an idea, make up a survey (ew) or do a quick google for existing research, throw some interactions together in Adobe XD or Figma, and upload to Behance, all the while thinking “I’m making good things here” without recognizing the limitations of the exercise they just performed.

It’s not just Behance. It’s the whole mentality that UXers can create good products without getting to production. That’s not a full picture of UX. UX goes from ideation through implementation. If you stop early, you’re missing some of it.

So what should an early-career UXer do? For one, keep making designs without context. It is good to do this to stretch your abilities - just restrain yourself from putting everything on Behance.

Next, I would recommend reaching out to a non-profit or local business. Offer to do some UX work for them at low or no cost. Don’t just take time to understand their users; understand the tech stack that they are working on. If their website is built off of WordPress, you have different constraints than a fully customized site. If their app is a white-label app, you have different constraints than an app built ground-up. These are the projects that will give you a true appreciation for why a holistic approach to UX is so valuable - when a designer understands business and technology, they can advocate for users better.

And after all, isn’t that what it’s all about.?