{"id":2911,"date":"2019-08-29T11:29:49","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T17:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/?p=2911"},"modified":"2019-08-29T11:29:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-29T17:29:49","slug":"portfolio-updates-feedback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/portfolio-updates-feedback\/","title":{"rendered":"Portfolio and Website Updates: Incorporating Feedback"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/portfolio-and-website-updates\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">I&#8217;ve been making updates to my portfolio and website<\/a>, and I have even more updates to report. In this post, I want to\u00a0go a little deeper\u00a0on some of the feedback I received from friends and acquaintances, and how that has influenced some of my updates.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll continue to make updates, of course. These are just changes I&#8217;ve made so far.<\/p>\n<h3>My Initial Reaction<\/h3>\n<p>I asked most people to review my portfolio, which is on <a href=\"https:\/\/cargocollective.com\/alliwalk\">CargoCollective<\/a>.\u00a0When I got the feedback, my emotions ranged between feeling overwhelmed and disappointed.<\/p>\n<p>I was overwhelmed with what I had received, which was not all negative, because I felt that I&#8217;d wasted so many first impressions.<\/p>\n<p>For months, I&#8217;ve been sending out links to my portfolio and not getting anywhere with it. Despite my <a href=\"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/favorite-nypl-resume-tips\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">hard work with updating my resume<\/a>, including the time I spent gathering tips, I felt I\u00a0had ultimately been\u00a0short-changing myself by sending out a lackluster portfolio. It felt like a huge waste of time. I even felt like a fraud, <a href=\"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/ux-camp-2019\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">giving out tips<\/a> at the NYC UX Camp 2019.<\/p>\n<p>It was disappointing that other people weren&#8217;t seeing my vision or hadn&#8217;t understood the history how this site came to be. But, you know, people only reviewed what I asked them to review. They weren&#8217;t providing holistic direction on how to reframe my image as a designer. And they weren&#8217;t evaluating anything a hiring manager wouldn&#8217;t evaluate, either. In other words, it wasn&#8217;t personal.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, after a few days (or hours), I started thinking about how I could make changes. My personal website, <a href=\"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\">alliwalk.com<\/a>, actually went through a whirlwind of changes, large and small. And then I started focusing on my portfolio.<\/p>\n<p>So let&#8217;s go through some of the top feedback and how I addressed it.<\/p>\n<h3>The Feedback: 1-2-3<\/h3>\n<p>The 3 biggest areas of feedback centered on:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Domain: Using a real domain name, instead of a third party site.<\/li>\n<li>List of projects: Feeling overwhelmed by the number of projects; not sure where to start; emphasizing the projects.<\/li>\n<li>About: Adding a tagline or a paragraph to the home page to give a sense of who\u00a0I am.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now I&#8217;ll go through these top 3 pieces of feedback and give my thoughts, and what I did (or didn&#8217;t) do to address them.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>1.Personal Domain<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>Jared Spool gave a talk at BostonCHI in Jan 2019, about the difficulty of hiring designers. In the talk, he called out employers who discriminate against candidates who use third-party sites like Wix or other CMS tools.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, in his example, he recounts an encounter with a design leader who felt that &#8220;good designers&#8221; should be able to code and would have coded their own websites.\u00a0The video is linked to this point in the presentation.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PwDJqBW2gs4?start=5450\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re reading this on my blog, it&#8217;s clear that I do have my own domain. I also have own website and I did code it myself.<\/p>\n<p>The reasons\u00a0I coded my own site were not to prove myself as a &#8220;good&#8221; designer. They were due to: <strong>a)<\/strong> cost, and; <strong>b)<\/strong> exploration\/personal expression. Let&#8217;s review:<\/p>\n<p><strong>A. Cost:<\/strong> It&#8217;s cheaper to code your own website on your own domain than to pay a 3rd-party site to do it. A site that costs $12\/mo is $112\/year, which is over $500 after 5 years, assuming you keep it running all that time. Many sites cost more than $12\/month. About five years ago, when I first created my site in Bootstrap, I needed to find areas to cut back on my expenses. This was an easy choice to make and I&#8217;ve stuck with it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>B. Exploration:<\/strong> As mentioned above, about five years ago, I started seriously learning more about front-end development. I used building my portfolio and a few side projects as opportunities to\u00a0learn.\u00a0I like designing my own website. So why am I also using Cargo? Because updating a domain can be a small project but updating a CMS takes a few minutes.<\/p>\n<p>I could use my own domain to host an external website, but it feels like giving up control of my own website. And, I&#8217;m not sure that the external template available is what I want to use on my own site. Plus I get control over my own analytics.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, I won&#8217;t be moving the Cargo portfolio\u00a0to my domain. But, I did update my website to more prominently point to the portfolio.<\/p>\n<h4>2. List of Projects<\/h4>\n<p>I admit: I do have a lot of projects. I&#8217;ve heard that using 3-5 projects is a must. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a max of 5, but I&#8217;d definitely heard a minimum of 3.<\/p>\n<p>Even the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nngroup.com\/articles\/ux-design-portfolios\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NN\/g article<\/a> that prompted this redo suggests 3-5 projects:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Step 2: Choose 3\u20135 Projects as Detailed Case Studies<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But I want to share an image from the NN\/g article on UX portfolios. It depicts a gallery of projects.<\/p>\n<p><img src=\"https:\/\/media.nngroup.com\/media\/editor\/2019\/06\/27\/portfolio_web.png\" alt=\"Web Portfolio\" \/>How many\u00a0projects\u00a0do you see? I see 8. Clearly the maximum number of projects is not hard-limited to 3-5.<\/p>\n<p>At the moment, I may have too many at 11.\u00a0However,\u00a0the first 3 projects are the same as from my website. And on my website, I used analytics to narrow the list from 6-7, to 3 based on visitor traffic.<\/p>\n<p>Most people view a website in an F shape.\u00a0Using that logic, my most popular projects are placed first. This doesn&#8217;t mean I shouldn&#8217;t continue trying to narrow the list. But there&#8217;s clearly some discrepancy what&#8217;s too many,\u00a0and my choice of projects and the order they&#8217;re presented have some thought behind them.<\/p>\n<h5>Providing Signposts with the Writing<\/h5>\n<p>To help address the feedback\u00a0that people might be feeling lost, within each project page, I have been working on improving the writing.\u00a0As\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/2019\/08\/portfolio-and-website-updates\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">mentioned in my last post<\/a>, I&#8217;m updating the writing make it easier for people to scan.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve made changes such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Incorporated images at the top of projects, when appropriate. (Suggested by feedback.)<\/li>\n<li>Organized the writing a bit better. The format is now: <strong>a)<\/strong> description;\u00a0<strong>b)<\/strong> images.<\/li>\n<li>Included additional promo information, like videos, for people to find more information if wanted.<\/li>\n<li>Used more headings, lists, and bold text.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My hope is that even if people feel like they don&#8217;t know where to start, once they do, they will feel more directed.<\/p>\n<h4>3. About<\/h4>\n<p>I used to have an About Me page on my website, alliwalk.com. I removed it\u00a0because analytics\u00a0showed that <em>very<\/em> few people ever visited the page.<\/p>\n<p>But,\u00a0two respondents mentioned making <em>About<\/em>\u00a0info more prominent, like right on the homepage. They asked about adding a heading sub-title or adding a paragraph above the project.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, those are <strong>not<\/strong> options I can pursue due to limitations of the CMS template.\u00a0There are other changes I can make:<\/p>\n<p><strong>A. Using a Landing Page:\u00a0<\/strong>The template does\u00a0allow me to select any page as the landing page, even if that page is not public. (Public pages do not show in the nav in the template I&#8217;m using.) So\u00a0I am working on creating a landing\/about page, but it&#8217;s not something I can easily test without it immediately going live. So, I&#8217;m being very cautious.<\/p>\n<p><strong>B. Improving &#8220;About&#8221;:<\/strong>\u00a0While working on the writing and updating images, I have updated how I described myself on both my website and my portfolio. I used a combination of my resume and cover letter.\u00a0I also provided answers to a few questions I tend to get in interviews, like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Are you more of an information architect or visual designer?<\/li>\n<li>Do you typically work full-time or freelance?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I just wove that information into the writing itself, and then I put the same information on both my website and my portfolio.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><\/h3>\n<p>Still more to go. I haven&#8217;t made much progress on my website regarding the responsive images, semantic HTML, or migrating to Bootstrap 4.<\/p>\n<p>And, coincidentally, I recently participated in a virtual session with Google, on their design review process. I learned a few things&#8230;which is for another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An update to a previous post on the feedback I received from friends and acquaintances on my portfolio, and ongoing work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,122,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2911"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2911"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2926,"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2911\/revisions\/2926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alliwalk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}