User Study 1: Interviews and Profile Boards of Pre-professionals

Introduction

To understand the portfolio practices of pre-professionals, we have conducted interviews with four young pre-professionals at Carnegie Mellon University to gain insights into their goals/motivations, organizational strategies, workflow, and challenges in their portfolio creation process. We then synthesized these qualitative data using profile boards to represent models of how emerging experts document their work and showcase their work and skills. These models may provide insight into improving project-based learning at a local high school.

Method

We have adopted the contextual inquiry as our data collection method. In these contextual inquiries, we will use a series of semi-structured interviews and think-aloud tasks to collect information about the context of their portfolio creation.

Data Collection

We have conducted 4 contextual inquiries with designers at or recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon. We split our teams into two smaller groups of two (one interviewer and one note-taker) to be less intimidating to the interviewees while ensuring that the interview data is thorough and complete. In these interviews, we have covered questions and asked the interviewees to perform tasks regarding the goals behind their portfolio creation, how they organize their portfolio pieces in the portfolio, how they keep track of the documentation for each project, and how they make their online portfolio.

Creating Profile Boards

To synthesize the qualitative data, we have summarized the goals, portfolio organizing strategies & workflow, tools used, and challenges of these four interviewees and created a profile board for each interviewee. These profile boards can show clearly the important aspects at a glance. We have anonymized the profile boards to show here: