ux case study builder

• mindful design
• student success
• product design
• ui/ux design
• watch me work
• design careers
• design inspiration

7 Best UX Case Study Generators (and how to use them)

If you're looking for UX case study ideas, topics or challenges, these UX case study generators can help you create portfolio pieces and improve your UX/UI skills. Here are some of the best ones and the pros and cons of using them.

What is a case study generator?

A UX Case Study Generator is a tool that serves up hypothetical UX design project ideas, problems, challenges or exercises that you can complete on your own to practice your UX skills or use to create UX Case studies and projects for UX/UI portfolio.

UX Case Study Generators

1. UX Challenge

UX challenge provides prompts and exercises that allows you to practice your problem-solving skills and create one-off projects for your portfolio. The Challenges presented here have been created by UX Designer Yachin and are based on real-world problems.

You can browse through a few different industries or categories on the homepage and then view the details of the project brief.

With more than 15 millions prompts available, there are lots of UX/Product Design prompts to choose from. To start, click on 'Product/UX' and then Click ‘New Challenge’. If you like certain elements of the brief you can lock those in place and then click New Challenge again to regenerate the unlocked parts until you find something you like.

3. Designercize

This fun arcade game-like interface lets you choose the level of difficulty and gives you a timer so that you can test your speed. While this tool doesn’t allow you to select a specific category, you can regenerate exercises until you find one that appeals to you.

4. UX Tools Challenges

If you need practice creating specific UX deliverables or applying certain user research methods this is a great option. You can browse through a number of UX prompt cards and click on a UX challenge to view a hypothetical scenario, instructions and tutorials on how to approach the challenges.

5. Uplabs Challenges

Uplabs hosts open design challenges that you can enter for prizes. They have deadlines in place and submissions are reviewed via voting. Check out their active listings to see on-going challenges and see the submission details and requirements. You can also view past challenges and try using them as practice on your for use as UX case study ideas.

6. 100Daysofproductdesign

100 Days of Product is a series of design challenges that help you learn to tackle specific problems that arise in UX and product design roles (such as running a design sprint) and prompts you to create deliverables around them. There is also a separate set of whiteboarding challenges that you can take in preparation for interviews.

7. DesignerUp

Our Product Design course is home to one the best UX and Product Design case study creators you can find...yourself! You get to ideate on original concepts yourself from scratch, is completely unique, perfectly suited to who you are as a designer, shows your process and ensures you stand out from the crowd. You also get free access to our portfolio builder for Notion that has helped our students easily create product design case studies and land their dream roles!

UX Case Study Usage

There are 4 main ways we recommend applying these generator prompts and challenges based on your goals:

Option 1: Self-Practice - Use these as practice for yourself to develop your problem-solving skills, thinking on your toes, learning to manage your time and refining your workflow. You don’t need to show it in your portfolio but you can share it on social media and other places to get some feedback and get into the hang of doing projects and getting to know your own timing and process.

Option 2: UX Case Study Creation - Use these for your UX portfolio to create UX case studies . Give yourself a deadline, deliberately choose a project and document the process as you go. Be mindful of the projects you choose and make sure that they align with your own unique positioning as a designer and with the opportunities you want to attract.

Option 3: Whiteboard Challenge - Work on the prompts in 45 min sessions using a whiteboard like Figjam to show and tell your process. Record your screen so that you can replay it and share it with others for critique. This video could even be an incredible addition to your portfolio to showcase how you think and solve problems on the fly.

Option 4: Take-home Exercise - To simulate an interview take-home challenge or test, you can tackle a prompt or brief over the course of 8-10 hours.

Pros and Cons of Using UX Case Study Generators

There a few pros and cons about using case study generators that you should know about:

If you can do them, so can everyone else

Firstly, remember that if you have access to these design challenges and briefs so do all the other designers. That means that there is a good chance your work might end up looking similar to their work if you’re not careful. If you want to stand out, try customizing the prompts and challenges and adding your own unique spin.

Treat them as real UX projects

If you plan to feature these UX case studies in your portfolio, make sure to treat them as real UX projects; not just hypothetical exercises. Conduct actual research, analyze your findings and document your process. This will go a long way in helping you differentiate yourself from those that simply complete the challenge at face value.

Not consider real-world experience

Keep in mind that these generated UX case study projects and prompts are not considered 'real-world or ‘real- work experience’ by employers, but rather self-directed projects. They are a good first step for new UX designers to start practicing their problem solving skills on their own and refining their UX design process, but you'll have to go the extra mile if you want to use them in your portfolio to impress during interviews.  

Choose the right one

If you are looking to use these ideas as UX Case studies in your portfolio, I reccomend reading this article on how to choose which case studies you should do and how to Create a Magnetic UX Case Study that will actually get you noticed and hired.

Move into doing real projects

These projects are also no substitute for doing real-world projects such as things you design and build yourself, freelance jobs, client work or open-source projects. Generated prompts and challenges cannot introduce the ambiguity of business requirements, changing stakeholder needs and team dynamics that are most sought after in a hirable UX designer. So think of these as a stepping to help you jump into the real thing as soon as possible. Here are some examples of stellar UX/UI and Product Design portfolios that we love!

The best design resources, in your inbox

Tips, tricks, articles and freebies. It's all happening in the DesignerUp Newsletter. View the archives →

We'll only send the occasional email and promise not to spam.

© Copyright 2022 DesignerUp. All Rights Reserved.

How to Craft an Outstanding Case Study for Your UX Portfolio

Writing case studies for your UX portfolio can feel opaque and overwhelming. There are so many examples out there, and often the ones that make the rounds are the stunning portfolios of top visual designers. It can be inspiring to see the most beautiful work, but don’t let that distract you from the straightforward format of a good UX case study. 

At the core, a UX case study relies on excellent storytelling with a clear, understandable structure . This article breaks down the anatomy of a UX case study to help you tell a simple and effective story that shows off your skills. We’ll start with some general guidelines and structure, then break it down one piece at a time:

UX portfolio overview

What is a ux case study, general guidelines, how to structure a case study, how to fill in the details, defining the problem, understanding your users, early or alternate ideation, final design solution, next steps and learnings.

• Final thoughts

1. Before we get started

Before we dive into all the art and science of the case study, here’s a quick refresher on what a job-winning UX portfolio looks like. In this video, pro designer Dee analyses various design portfolios to pick out what works—and what doesn’t:

Simply put, a case study is the story of a design project you’ve worked on. The goal, of course, is to showcase the skills you used on the project and help potential employers envision how you’d use those skills if you worked for them.

A case study is typically written like a highly visual article, with text walking readers through a curated set of images. Curated is an important word here, because it should be short and sweet. It’s a chance to share what you want potential employers to know about your work on this project.

With that in mind, case studies are really a UX designer’s secret weapon in two ways. First, they get you in the door by showing more about your work than a resume and a top UX cover letter ever could. Another benefit is that they’re really handy in job interviews. If someone asks about a past project, you can walk them through the case study you’ve already created (this is sometimes a requirement anyway).

I mentioned that UX case studies are about storytelling. I’d actually say they’re about stories-telling, since they need to tell two intertwined stories .

The first is the story of your project. This answers questions like what problem you solved, who your users were, what solutions you explored, and what impact they had.

The second story is about you as a designer and your process. This is more about which methods you chose to use and why, how you worked within constraints, and how you worked as a member of a team (or without one).

So what are the steps for an effective case study? Well, like most things in design (and life), it depends. Every case study will be different, depending on what stories you’re telling. The six-part outline below, though, should guide you through an effective format for any UX project story. Here’s the outline (we’ll dive into each component in just a minute):

• Defining the Problem
• Understanding your Users
• Final solution

It’s worth it to add a few general notes before we dive into each of the list items above. For each section, include 1-2 short paragraphs and an image of a deliverable that visually tells the story your paragraphs explain. A reader should be able to either just read or just look at the images and roughly get what this moment in the story is communicating.

When choosing images to include, focus on quality over quantity.  Choose your best deliverables for each stage and briefly relate them back to the larger narrative. It can be tempting to overload the page with everything you created along the way, but these extra details should stay in your back pocket for interviews.

Lastly, make sure your case study is scannable . In the best of circumstances, people don’t read word for word on the web. Make sure your text is reasonably concise, use headers and strong visual hierarchy, and use bullet points and lists when possible. If you need a refresher on how to achieve this, check out our guide to the principles of visual hierarchy .

Ok, let’s take a look at each step in a bit more detail.

2. Anatomy of a UX case study

Like any story, the introduction sets the stage and gives much of the necessary context readers will need to understand your project. This is one section where people actually might take some extra time to read carefully as they try to discern what this case study is about. Make sure they have all the details they need.

Some key questions to answer are:

• What is your company and/or product?
• What user problem did you try to solve?
• What was your role?
• What tools and methods did you use?
• What are the major insights, impacts, or metrics related to the project

After introducing the project, dive more deeply into the problem you tackled. You touched upon this in the introduction, but this section is an opportunity to make a strong case for why this project exists. Did a competitor analysis or market research demand a new product? Was there past user research in your company that suggests a needed redesign of the product?

Remember that you’ll want to create a through line in the narrative, so try to lay out the problem in a way that frames your design work as a solution.

Deliverables that work really well for this section would be:

• Analytics or usage data
• Market research of internal business metrics
• Survey results or interview highlights

After explaining the problem, show how it impacts your users and their interaction with your product. If you did original user research or you’re seeking user research-oriented jobs, sharing interview scripts, affinity maps , and spreadsheets can be useful in showing your process.

However, this section shouldn’t be only about your process. A key goal of this section is articulating who your users are and what their needs are. These findings should set up your design work that follows, so try to set up that connection.

A few types of the deliverables you might share here are:

• User personas
• Mental models
• Journey maps or customer experience maps

Keep in mind you want to communicate users’ key motivations and challenges, as well as any more specific user groups you identified.

This section can really scale up or down depending on what you have to show. Research shows that hiring managers  don’t just want the final product , so it’s clear that showing some of your process is helpful. Especially for students or designers without a fully built product to show, this can be a moment for you to shine.

Don’t worry about the low fidelity of these documents, but the rougher they are, the more you’ll need to guide readers through them. Everything you show here should teach the reader something new about your process and/or your users.

Artifacts you might include are:

• Pen and paper or low fidelity digital wireframes

If you did early testing or faced constraints that determined your future design work, be sure to include them here, too.

This section should include the most final work you did on the project (e.g. wireframe flows or color mockups) and any final product it led to (if you have it). Be clear, though, about which work is yours and which isn’t.

Explain any key decisions or constraints that changed the design from the earlier stages. If you incorporated findings from usability testing, that’s great. If not, try to call out some best practices to help you explain your decisions. Referring to Material Design, WCAG, or Human Interface Guidelines can show the why behind your design.

If you’re able to show the impact of your work, this can take a good case study and make it outstanding. If your project has already been built and made available to users, have a look at any analytics, satisfaction data, or other metrics. See what you could highlight  in your case study to show how your design improved the user experience or achieved business goals. Ideally, you can refer back to your original problem statement and business goals from the introduction.

If you don’t have any way of showing the impact of your project, lay out how you would measure the impact. Showing you know how to measure success demonstrates you could do this on future projects.

Lastly, conclude your case study by sharing either your next design steps and/or some key insights you learned from the project. This isn’t just fluff! No project is perfect or final. Showing next steps is a great way to demonstrate your thinking iterative approach (without having to do the work!).

Also, many companies do (or should do) retrospectives after each project to identify challenges and improve future processes. Use this process and the insights you gain from it to inform your case study. Letting employers know you’re capable of reflection shows humility, self-awareness, and the value you can bring to a team.

3. Final thoughts

Since each case study is a unique story you’re telling about your project, it’s a little art and a little science. But starting with the structure laid out in this article will show who you are as a designer and how you solved a problem. And those are two stories companies want to hear!

If you’d like to learn more about how to craft a great UX portfolio, check out these articles:

• 5 Golden rules to build a job-winning UX portfolio
• The best UX design portfolio examples from around the web
• The best free UX/UI portfolio websites to use
• Salary negotiation for UX designers