How should a UX case study be structured?

Context: who it was for, your role, the timeframe, the team. Two or three sentences, enough to size the work.

Problem: what was actually wrong and how you know. Evidence belongs here, not in a separate research section nobody reaches.

Approach: what you did about it, at the level of method rather than calendar.

Key decisions: two to four, each with the alternative you rejected and the reason. This is the section that gets you hired.

Outcome: what changed, in whatever terms you honestly have.

Reflection: what you would do differently. Short, specific, and never fake modesty.

Put the outcome in the headline and the opening summary. Chronological order is how the project felt; outcome-first is how it gets read.

The reader is deciding whether you are worth an interview, and they are doing it before the section on your discovery workshop.

Persona documents, empathy maps and process diagrams that were made for the portfolio rather than for the project. Reviewers recognise the difference immediately.

Anything you cannot defend in an interview. Every claim in a case study is a question you have invited.