I published the case study on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday morning I had three replies in my LinkedIn inbox.
I had been thinking about looking for a job for a long time without doing anything. My plan was always the same: finish the portfolio first, then start applying. After two months of polishing, the portfolio was still not finished, so I tried the opposite. Take one project, write about it completely, publish it, and let people tell me if it was good enough. The project was a redesign of the onboarding of a fintech company where I did not work. I was a customer and I had noticed three problems. During one long weekend I made a prototype of a flow that solved two of them, built a Figma file with notes on the frames, and published a text of 600 words on LinkedIn explaining what I changed and what I did not touch. N26 answered within one day. Their head of design said the writing was the part that made her stop. Most case studies she sees are only images, with no explanation of the thinking behind them, and she wanted to talk to designers who can explain their trade-offs out loud. The first call was 45 minutes with the head of design. We did not talk about N26 until the last ten minutes. Most of the time she asked how I ↓