How does your resume hold up for a UX/UI Designer role?
Paste a UX/UI Designer posting and your resume. Get the score, the gaps, and what this role's ATS screens actually check for.
A portfolio link isn't a resume — most ATS and recruiters filter on the text before they open it, which means design work that only exists inside the portfolio is invisible to the first pass of screening no matter how strong it is. The text has to carry the problem, the process and the outcome on its own, in the same evidence-based way any other role's resume does, even though design as a discipline is used to letting the visuals do that talking. Check what yours actually evidences against a real posting. This gap costs designers more than most other roles, because the discipline's own norms — a portfolio-first culture — actively work against the resume doing this job well.
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What this role's postings ask for
- Figma
- User research
- Wireframing / prototyping
- Usability testing
- Design systems
- Information architecture
- Interaction design
- Accessibility (WCAG)
- User flows
- A/B testing
- Visual design
- Cross-functional collaboration
See how often each of these actually appears in live postings →
Common mistakes on resumes for this role
- Portfolio-only resume with no bullets — a link replaces the work summary instead of complementing it, and an ATS or a fast recruiter skim never gets to the portfolio to find out what's actually in it.
- "Created wireframes and mockups" with no problem solved or outcome — adoption, task completion, conversion — leaves the reader with an artifact but no result.
- No research method named — usability testing, interviews, surveys are absent even when clearly implied by the work, which makes rigorous design read as purely aesthetic.
- Visual-only framing ("beautiful UI") with nothing about the decision process, constraints or measurable effect, even though the process is usually where the actual design skill lived.
- Design system contributions folded into general "UI design" bullets instead of called out separately — system-level work signals a different, more senior kind of ownership than a single-screen redesign.
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Weak vs. strong
Weak Designed mockups and prototypes for the mobile app.
Strong Redesigned the mobile checkout flow after 12 usability sessions, raising task completion from 61% to 89%.
What "evidence" means for this role
For a design resume, evidence is the research behind a decision plus the metric that changed after it shipped — not the deliverable name. "Designed mockups and prototypes for the mobile app" evidences that artifacts exist; it says nothing about whether they were grounded in research or whether they worked once shipped. "Redesigned the checkout flow after 12 usability sessions, raising task completion from 61% to 89%" evidences method, scope and outcome in one line. SteadyCV's check is built to catch exactly this — a posting asking for research or measurable UX impact where your resume currently lists only the deliverables. It's also why a portfolio link can't do this work by itself: the check reads the resume text the same way an ATS does, and a URL with no words around it evidences nothing on its own. The same applies to visual design claims — a specific brand or system constraint you designed within, and how you resolved it, evidences craft that "strong visual design sense" as a phrase can't.
A closer look at the requirements that matter most
- User research
- This is asked for because it's the difference between design decisions grounded in evidence and design decisions grounded in taste, and postings are increasingly explicit about wanting the former. A named method and a rough sample size — 12 usability sessions, 8 interviews — evidences rigor that "user-centered design" as a phrase doesn't.
- Usability testing
- Usability testing specifically (as distinct from broader "research") is screened for because it's the step that validates a design actually works before it ships, not just that it was informed by research earlier in the process. Naming a task-completion or error-rate number from a test evidences that validation step happened.
- Design systems
- Design system experience signals you've worked at a level where consistency across many surfaces mattered more than any single screen, which is a materially different skill than solo feature design. If you contributed to or built components in a system, calling that out separately from general UI work answers this requirement directly instead of folding it into unrelated bullets.
- Accessibility (WCAG)
- Accessibility is one of the more concretely checkable design requirements — a specific WCAG level you designed to, a contrast or focus-state fix, a screen-reader pass — and almost no design resumes evidence it despite how often it now appears in postings, which makes even one specific bullet disproportionately useful.
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