Despite recently finishing an intensive course on User Experience (UX) Design, it hadn’t even occurred to me to apply the same process that I would approach any other design problem on it. Thankfully, my mentors at General Assembly reminded us to.
The UX process? That’s quite broad. What parts of the process did you use?
First, I researched I looked at what skills the market in my local area were looking for. I specifically looked at over 25 jobs that I was interested in (after all, I am client in this scenario!) and recorded what skills were hirers interested in.
What did that look like for me? Here’s a snapshot (blurred due to some sensitive information). If you’re interested in some of my findings, take a look at my other article here.
I was fortunate enough to sit in on a usability test in General Assembly of a hirer opening up and navigating a portfolio (pointing out what they liked and didn’t like). Key remarks included:
“This home page has a bunch of case studies on it and I have no idea if any of them have what I’m looking for.”
“I’m in the case study and the first thing I’m looking for is their clickable prototype. I can’t find it, I’m gone.”
Secondly, I synthesized this research, I took the top items and insights from my spreadsheet, ignoring any that only had less than 3 recordings.
Thirdly, I ideated. How might I display this information so that a hirer can easily find what they want?
Fourthly and not lastly, I developed a solution, tested and ideated on it. As per best practice (aka, what the Nielson Norman Group ), I conducted user testing on 5 users and received positive feedback for the main idea. I also received feedback and iterated on some of the following:
- How I can design more consistently (by naming the anchors on pages the same as the shortcut I was providing to give the user more context): “Why did the shortcut take me here”
- How I can improve the website for branding (by introducing similar graphics from my about me page on my home page): “I can tell you’re trying to be minimal on the first page, but it’s losing out on an opportunity to show your personality” | “On your homepage, my first thought was ‘is this complete?’”
- How I could improve navigation (by providing a pinned anchor menu): “I’m getting a bit lost in your case study, some breadcrumbs would be great”
That’s great, but what is this ‘big idea’ that makes your portfolio oh so different?
Well, it’s not really ground breaking, first I wanted to treat my portfolio like a regular website and helping users find what they want by providing a ‘Keyword Search’ option first in the navigation menu.
Secondly, I wanted to provide hirers with context on what each case study had, so on the case study overview page there is a bunch of tags that people can use to find what they want.
Thirdly, I had a link specifically for prototypes in the navigation for hiring managers that were there for just that (this was from the comment from the initial usability test and also from my research, 16/25 of the companies that I looked at listed prototypes as a key skill they wanted!).
It’s by no means perfect, but I think the results turned out better than expected, I had positive comments such as ‘this is really creative’, ‘this helps me find exactly what I’m looking for’ and ‘this is just good UX’ which is really, exactly what you want out of a UX design portfolio.
Try it out yourself and give me feedback for me to improve it!
Visit my data-driven portfolio at yasha.melbourne :)
