I review hundreds of product design case studies every year.

Most of them make a crucial mistake:

They spend 80% talking about process.

- Sketching
- Wireframing
- Personas
- Double Diamond
- Lean Design
- Styleguide
- Handoff

Showing some process is fine, but it should be a supporting element rather than the leading actor.

Here are 4 steps to create more compelling studies:

1. Don't just state the problem — explain why it's a crucial problem for the business. Think of it as your hook: if you don't make us interested from the get-go, reading the rest of the case study will feel like a chore.

🔴 "We wanted to improve the design of our onboarding flow."

✅ "More than 10k users used to go through our onboarding flow monthly, but 35% dropped off before completing it due to friction. We were losing many customers who were interested in our product but never got to use it. Here is how we navigated this..."

2. Reduce the process to a simple and concrete overview. As hiring managers, we care about the team structure, the research you did, the insights you generated at a high level, and the steps you took to solve the problem.

🔴 "Here are our 4 personas" (scrolls through 4 custom-designed persona templates with irrelevant information)

✅ "From previous research, we know that our users are time-poor and don't easily trust new services. By speaking to them, we realised their biggest gripe with our flow was that we were asking for sensitive banking information."

3. Instead of jumping to the final design, show some of the different iterations along the way. It's a great way to show how you make design decisions and adapt your thinking.

🔴 "Problem → Final design"

✅ "Initially we thought of reducing steps in the flow. However, through some quick tests we realised that building trust was much more important. To tackle that, we redesigned some steps in the flow around asking for sensitive data."

4. Start and finish your case study with the impact it had. Ideally, that should be a key business or product metric; this shows you can connect a business problem to a user problem and understand the impact of your decisions.

✅ "The new flow reduced drop-off to only 18%, significantly reducing our CAC. Users praised the updated onboarding experience, stating how seamless and intuitive it was."

What else would you add?

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