This portfolio as a UX design project

Introduction

I decided to work on this project with the Design thinking process since it is a user-centered approach to problem-solving that involves understanding the user's needs, defining the problem, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. Applying this methodology would make me focus on the user and have a clear process to follow, while I also learnt more about how to work this way.

The Design Thinking Process

Empathize: Understand my user

• User Research: For this project I decided to not conduct interviews or surveys, since it is quite a narrow target group and quite clear what the goal of the project is. Instead I focused on doing desk research to understand the needs, challenges, and expectations of my portfolio's target audience (e.g., recruiters, hiring managers, potential clients).
• Persona: I decided to develop a persona that represents my primary audience, in order to help me keep the user in mind when doing my design decisions.

Define: Clarify the portfolio's goals

• Problem statement: Based on my research, I defined a clear problem statement that my portfolio aims to solve: "Recruiters and prospective clients need a way to quickly understand my UX process and see evidence of my skills in real projects."
• Objectives: Set specific, measurable goals for what I want my portfolio to achieve. For example showcasing particular skills, attracting a certain type of client, or securing job interviews.

Ideate: Explore potential solutions

• Brainstorming: During this stage I generated a wide range of ideas on how to structure and design my portfolio and how to present my work. In this process I was thinking about ways to showcase my design process and outcomes, but decided to stay quite structured and concise at this point for an MVP product, since I need to get it out there. In the next iteration I will focus on the more innovative ways to present the work.
• Concept Development: To be able to showcase 3-5 main projects in a simple way I wanted to develop a straight forward concept, to easily iterate and replace projects with newer work when possible.

Prototype:

• Low-Fidelity Prototype: I started to create a low-fidelity prototype in Figma in order to experiment with different layouts and content organization without investing too much time in details. At the same time I started building a design system, and worked on choosing a color palette.
• High-Fidelity Prototype and Design System: After testing out some layout options in my low-fidelity prototype, I continued to work a high-fidelity prototype in Figma, and also created a color palette, decided on fonts and created a small design system. I used the tool palettemaker.com to test the colors in different page layouts.

Test: Gather Feedback and Iterate

• User Testing: My finished prototype was shared with family, friends and also fellow UX Design students to gather feedback on usability, clarity of my design process, the structure of my projects, and the overall impact of the portfolio design.
• Iterate: From the feedback gathered I was able to refine and improve the portfolio.

Implementation and Launch

• Build: I decided to build my portfolio in the website tool Webflow, since I wanted to learn more about it, and be able to focus on the design instead of coding the website myself.
  Optimize and Test functionality: After finishing the development in Webflow, tested the links and optimized the images for the web using Adobe Photoshop. I also asked two fellow students to test the website to see if anything was broken or missing.
• Optimize and Test functionality: After finishing the development in Webflow, tested the links and optimized the images for the web using Adobe Photoshop.
• Publish: For this website I decided to test out Webflows hosting, since this was easy and I wanted to check if it works well. I connected it to my own domain name in order to have a nice URL for the portfolio instead of Webflows domain name. After having published it I shared it with my network, on Slack, LinkedIn and Facebook.