TL;DR

Portfolio creation is a challenging, ongoing process for designers.

To simplify this, ownpath, in collaboration with Akshay Kore, completed an AI-based industry project with their Product Design Fellows. The project culminated in a demo day showcasing unique and practical solutions, with participants receiving holistic feedback.

Meet the Fellows with the winning presentations!

Blank Page Syndrome? 

As a platform for designers aiming to accelerate their careers, ownpath sought to help designers overcome their resistance to working on their portfolios. From the daunting blank page to the nuanced articulation of design processes and outcomes, what if there was a way to make the entire process easier?

We wrapped up another industry project, this time in collaboration with Akshay Kore. Over four weeks, our Product Design Fellows worked in teams to create an AI-Based Portfolio Co-Pilot for Designers. The project aimed to transform the portfolio creation process, acting as a creative partner to help designers articulate their vision and showcase their work effectively. The teams had multiple touch points with their mentor through the duration of the project, culminating in an exciting demo day where they presented innovative solutions.
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The Brief

Crafting a compelling design portfolio is challenging, from facing blank page syndrome to articulating design processes and outcomes, to keeping it updated.

Problem Statement: Simplifying this experience using an AI-based tool designed to help designers efficiently create and refine their portfolios, thereby keeping them job-hunt ready.

Target User: Designers at all career stages, as well as design mentors and educators, with the need to overcome initial inertia, balance content, enhance communication, and streamline iteration.

Key Functions and Outcomes: Prioritising a user-friendly interface, adaptive AI learning, privacy, and cross-platform functionality and including key features like AI-driven draft generation, creative communication suggestions, real-time feedback, and tools to highlight project outcomes.

Success Metrics: User engagement, portfolio completion rates, and the tool's effectiveness.

Solutions

It's not every day you get to solve a product problem where the end user is yourself.

Each of the six teams worked on the project end to end, beginning with concept development and the design of the AI framework, followed by prototype creation, and concluding with targeted user testing and feedback collection.

Each team took a unique approach to the project. The solutions varied, from a SAAS platform offering AI services that could be integrated into platforms like Notion and Figma, to a dedicated portfolio building tool leveraging AI to minimise clicks and streamline the process. Another team proposed an IDE solution tailored to designers familiar with coding, sprinkled with keyboard shortcuts. As yet another creative alternative, one team experimented with text and style chat-based AI flows compared to a mood board-based approach.

The best performers built on a key insight: users don’t want to adapt to a whole new platform.

With this in mind, they devised solutions that seamlessly integrated with popular existing design platforms, making user adaptation easier and less challenging.

For instance, Natalie proposed a prompt-based AI feature embedded directly into Figma, generating the desired layout, content, and themes within a portfolio.

Ultimately, the win was secured by Avirup and Pranav, who proposed a Framer plugin serving as a portfolio creation assistant on the platform. This plugin addresses common frustrations such as the initial blank screen fatigue, font and theme selection, while also providing personalised assistance and real-time feedback.

While the ease of adaptability for users, solution feasibility, and prospective speed of execution were defined as success parameters, participants also received holistic feedback not only on their design solutions but also on their presentation flow, storytelling, and communication skills.

As important as the ideas are, how you communicate them and how the audience understands them remains key to the success of your product.
- Shreyas Satish (Founder, ownpath)

The project was a win-win for everyone involved. Aside from receiving a surprise cash prize, the winning team is now working with ownpath to implement version 1 of their proposed solution. This success would not have been possible without Akshay, whose insights and guidance significantly impacted our Fellows' learning journey!

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If you're looking to make a career transition, or level up in product design, learn more about ownpath's Product Design Fellowship.

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