I Designed My Portfolio for a Recruiter Stuck in LA Traffic

Here's the fantasy version of who visits my portfolio: a creative director at a Brooklyn studio, leisurely browsing on a 27-inch monitor, sipping a flat white, deeply moved by my case study transitions. She studies every hover state. She appreciates my process.

She does not exist.

The real version showed up in my analytics last spring: someone in Mountain View, on an iPhone, at 5:47 PM on a Tuesday, who spent eleven seconds on my homepage and left. Probably in a rideshare. Probably between meetings. Probably deciding whether to forward my name to a hiring manager or forget it forever.

That person became my entire design brief.

The 11-Second Problem

Once I started designing for one imaginary-but-based-in-reality person — let's call her Recruiter Rachel — every decision got brutally simple. Rachel is on LTE. Rachel's thumb is doing the work. Rachel has maybe forty-five seconds of attention before her Uber arrives or her next Slack ping steals her back.

My old homepage opened with a full-bleed video hero that took four seconds to load and communicated, as far as I could tell, that I own a camera. Below it: a poetic intro paragraph about "sitting at the intersection of strategy and craft." Rachel doesn't care. Rachel needs to know three things in five seconds: Who are you? What do you make? Has anyone paid you for it?

I cut the video. I cut the poetry. My new hero is one sentence, my name, and two buttons. It felt like admitting defeat for about a week. Then the interview requests started.

What Got Deleted (and What Survived)

The ruthless cuts:

• Six case studies became three. Nobody scrolls past three. My analytics said the fourth one got more bounces than reads anyway.
• The About page lost 700 words. I kept the part about how I work and deleted the part about my childhood in New Jersey. Painful. Necessary.
• Every project description now leads with the outcome. "Redesigned onboarding, cut churn 22%" — that's the first line now, not the last.
• I killed the custom cursor. I know. I loved it too. Rachel on her phone never saw it anyway.

What survived: real numbers, real client names (the ones I'm allowed to use), and one photo of me that doesn't look like a hostage situation. Turns out the boring stuff is what converts.

The Analytics Plot Twist

I expected the mobile traffic to improve. I did not expect which pages would carry the weight.

My most-visited page after the redesign? Not the homepage. Not the work. It was a single case study for a fintech dashboard I almost didn't include because I thought it was too niche. Turns out specificity is a magnet — the more I tried to appeal to everyone, the less anyone could tell what I actually did.

The second surprise: people who read past the first case study almost always read a second one. Depth beats breadth. Three deep dives outperform eight summaries every single time, and I had the scroll maps to prove it.

The Test I Run on Every Project Now

Before anything ships to my site, I do what I call the thumb-scroll test: I open it on my actual phone, with one thumb, while walking to the bodega. If I can't get the gist of a page in one unbroken scroll, it fails. No pinch-zooming, no rotating, no "I'll check it on desktop later."

It sounds obvious written down. It took me six years of freelancing to actually do it.

What Happened Next

Within two months of the rebuild, I got three interview invitations from companies I'd actually want to work with — including one where the hiring manager said, and I quote, "Your site was the easiest to skim. That's a compliment."

It is. It absolutely is.

We design for our peers because peer approval feels good. But our portfolios aren't for the people who'll applaud our transitions — they're for one tired, distracted, deeply practical human making a yes-or-no call from the back seat of a Camry on the 405.

Design for Rachel. She's the one holding the keys.