A 35-point pre-publish review. Use it before sending the portfolio to recruiters. Mapped against the actual reasons hiring managers reject portfolios in 2026. Progress saves to your browser; print or copy as markdown when finished.
Every senior UX hiring manager runs a mental checklist on the portfolios that land in the inbox. The checks aren't published anywhere. They aren't taught in bootcamps. Candidates get rejected against them without ever being told what they were. This page makes the checklist visible, so candidates can self-review before recruiters do.
The 35 items are drawn from portfolio review notes across roughly 1,200 candidate portfolios reviewed over the last six years — junior through lead level, spanning agency, in-house, and freelance applications. The categories are ordered by the sequence in which hiring managers actually evaluate: the homepage decides whether case studies get opened, the case studies decide whether an interview is offered, the presentation and technical hygiene decide whether the portfolio survives the first ten seconds without an obvious flaw closing it prematurely.
Run the checklist in one sitting, honestly. The temptation to tick items that are almost-true is the primary failure mode of self-review; if an item requires "well, mostly," leave it unchecked and treat it as work to do. Progress persists in your browser, so it is safe to close the tab and return.
A portfolio at 100% completion is genuinely rare. Most published portfolios score somewhere between 65% and 85%. Sub-60% indicates structural work is needed before submitting — usually a case study rewrite or a homepage rebuild. 85%+ is submission-ready for mid-level roles; senior and lead applications typically need 95%+ because the bar for craft signalling is higher.
Print the checklist or copy it as markdown when finished — the completion report is useful evidence of pre-publish diligence in interviews where portfolio process comes up, and a printed copy is easier to work through with a mentor or peer reviewer.
The homepage is not read; it is scanned. Recruiters and hiring managers decide within roughly ten seconds whether the portfolio is worth opening a case study on. Six checks isolate the signals that survive that scan: identity (who, where, doing what), positioning (specialism in one line), evidence (specific case study titles, not "Project 1"), and route (a contact link visible without scrolling). Failing these is the most common reason portfolios are closed before a case study is ever opened.
The case study is where hiring managers evaluate seniority, decision-making and outcome literacy. Eight checks isolate the structural moves that separate strong case studies from weak ones: problem-and-outcome in the opening paragraph, named role clarity (owned vs contributed), visible decisions with alternatives and trade-offs, insight-led research summaries rather than method inventories, annotated final designs, honest outcomes, and a reflection section. The eighth check — that case studies are not identical templates — catches a common weakness in bootcamp portfolios where structural repetition signals unfamiliarity with real project variance.
Seven checks on typography, line length, image handling, page performance, motion discipline, and colour contrast. Presentation is subtle but heavily weighted in the first-impression phase. A portfolio that reads well and loads fast signals design maturity in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to feel. The hero-image LCP check (under 2.5 seconds) is often the most fixable technical failure — hero images are frequently 5-10x larger than needed and can be compressed without visible quality loss.
Six checks. Recruiters increasingly screen portfolios on phones during commutes, between meetings, and while multitasking. A portfolio that breaks below 600px width — horizontal overflow, illegible body text, cramped navigation, hero images that dominate the viewport — gets closed and rarely re-opened on desktop. The 24×24 CSS-pixel tap-target check (WCAG 2.5.8) is a WCAG 2.2 requirement and increasingly caught by hiring managers who prioritise accessibility literacy.
Eight checks. Easy to miss, embarrassing when caught. Custom domain (free subdomains signal early-career or non-serious), valid SSL, no broken links, specific page titles, sharing meta, downloadable CV with a sensible filename (not "cv-final-v3.pdf"), no exposed CMS editing tools, and a full spellcheck pass. Technical hygiene issues rarely lose an interview on their own, but they cluster with other weaknesses — a portfolio with a broken link and a 60-page unsplit case study reads as unfinished. Fix these last; they are the fastest wins.
Three failure modes recur in self-review. First, over-crediting familiar-but-weak sections; the case study you wrote six months ago and re-read too many times feels done, but a fresh reader would see the same gaps you dismissed. Second, treating checks as binary when they are actually spectrum — a case study with a decision section but no trade-offs stated fails the check even though the section exists. Third, running the checklist once and stopping. Portfolios drift; if the checklist was last run six months ago, it needs re-running before the next application cycle.
Peer review is the strongest counter to these failure modes. Ask another senior designer to run the checklist against your portfolio without prompting; the delta between their score and your score is where the actual work is.
Before publishing an initial portfolio. Before every senior application. Before every second mid-level application cycle. After adding or replacing a case study. After a substantial redesign of the site. Whenever a mentor or peer flags something specific. Roughly quarterly during active job search phases; roughly every six months during stable employment.
The checklist pairs with the portfolio guide (structural depth for building the portfolio in the first place), the case study template (the internal structure of each portfolio project), and the reviewer's checklist (six-section scored review, if a peer or mentor is running the review for you).