Many blogs on what makes for a great user experience portfolio orient the conversation around design aspects of the portfolio, such as simplicity, brevity, and selectivity of content. This article touches upon the long-term process of portfolio creation and serves as a brief to-do list to create a designer’s portfolio.

In March, I left my first job as a UX Designer. Being on the market in Silicon Valley made it clear that User Experience is currently a tech industry hotcake. But aside from working hard while gaining street cred throughout the years prior, I learned that a portfolio is pivotal to getting your foot in the door.

Portfolios are the crux of a designer’s job candidacy. They are your first chance to make a lasting, and often remote, impression and a testament to your skills. They also raise the meta question designers should be asking themselves: how do I design a great user experience for my UX portfolio?

1. Deliberately Practice Design

A portfolio is zilch without good work. Challenge yourself with projects that excite you and exercise the capabilities you want to hone. Research shows that no matter the profession, to become an expert, experience and deliberate practice rules. This makes sense. To become a chessmaster, play a lot of chess. To become a user experience expert, design user experiences. But one must practice deliberately. In other words, mindless and routine performance will only make your skills plateau; the secret is in the intention.

2. Document As You Go

Establish a sensible process when doing work. As you go through it, take quality photos of whiteboarding and post-it note sessions, scan sketches and flowcharts, and save early iterations to have plenty of material available to beautifully construct your portfolio pages later.

3. Design and Build

This is the most fun and difficult part. Adham Dannaway’s workflow is rather solid. Here’s a brief checklist:

• Plan out your portfolio. Be on the prowl for sources of inspiration, identify your shtick, and craft the vision of your online portfolio. Research other portfolio sites and extract the ingredients for good navigation and storytelling. Recognize that this is about managing and forming impressions around your special sauce.

• Assemble your finest work. Quality over quantity. Four great pieces is better than eight decent pieces. Gather the projects that showcase the best parts of you and explain each project’s context, purpose, functionality and your role, process, and rationale in producing them. Describe the decision making tree. Be cognizant of possible improvements. Walk your audience through an engaging story via concise text and meaningful graphics.

• Sketch wireframes and generate mockups. Pen and paper are your best friends in this stage. Develop the information architecture of your portfolio: list, group, and prioritize each page’s elements. Draw simple visual plans of what information goes where for a desktop or mobile experience. Then move your wireframes into pretty, high-fidelity mockups in Photoshop with a clear style guide and a responsive grid.

• Build your site. Whether hand-coding HTML5 and CSS3 or utilizing a Content Management System like WordPress or Squarespace, ensure fit and finish in the end. Heed potential browser and screen size variations with images and surrounding text. A custom domain name is highly recommended.

4. Test and tweak your portfolio.

You’re almost there! Check how your website appears across all browsers and devices. Design is an iterative process so chances are you’ll need to go back and fine tune some elements. Go the extra mile and set up Google Analytics to gain insight to your visitors, such as their locale, source of traffic, etc.

5. Launch and share it to the world.

Reaching this stage is a laudable feat. Congratulations! Show it off to your friends, share it on LinkedIn or any other social media site, print it on a business card, and be proud to have partaken in the artist’s rite of creating a portfolio–and a knockout one, at that.