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Make this yours. Duplicate this page into your own Notion workspace so you can write straight into it and tick each section off as you go. Use the Duplicate option in the page menu, top right. One copy per case study.
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Seven sections, deliberately not chronological. The order is built to show decisions rather than phases, because that is what the person reviewing your portfolio is actually looking for. Write each prompt in plain sentences first and format it last.
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The test the whole thing has to pass. A reader should be able to answer four questions without hunting: what was hard, what you decided, what you did, and what was different afterwards.
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What the organisation is
What the service does, and for whom
What was going wrong
Why it mattered to somebody with a budget
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No history, no scene-setting. If the reader does not know what is at stake within five lines, everything after it is decoration.
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The brief you were given and the problem you actually had are almost never the same. The gap between them is one of the most valuable things you can show.
The brief I was given:
The problem I actually had:
The evidence that moved me from one to the other:
Include the unglamorous evidence. The complaints data, the process observation, the conversation with an operations manager that changed the framing.
This is the section that makes a service design case study different from a UX one, and it is almost always the one that is missing. Name at least three.