Questions
Target Audience
This portfolio site is designed to showcase my graphic design work to potential employers. With this in mind there are several key considerations that need to go into the construction of the site for this particular audience—
- Employers want to get an impression of my graphic design work quickly. So the portfolio should be upfornt, possibly on the home page. Also, navigation shouldn't be too complex; content shouldn't be hidden behind too many clicks, and there shouldn't be any confusion in terms of navigating back and forth through the portfolio, as this will create a frustrating experience, and the employer would be unlikely to persist with viewing the whole portfolio.
- Any hyperlinks to external sites should not navigate away from the page as it is important to keep the focus on the portfolio, so it's best if they open in a new tab. Another consideration would be to design the portfolio navigation as a kind of pop-up on the home page, as this means there is less chance that the employer will miss portfolio projects when looking at the detail-view of certain works.
- Contact details need to be prominent and easy to find on every page of the site, as this is the conversion target for visitors to the site.
- The visual design of the site should have impact. Employers see a lot of portfolios, so if I can integrate a unique design feature that will help the site to stand out that would be a point of difference which will add to the purpose of the site. Even something with motion, like an animated gif or an embedded video would be eye-catching.
Problems
- Portfolio image sizes are large, slow load time for visitors to site?
- How to make sure portfolio is quickly accessed and easily navigated?
- It seems I have now over-compressed the images, need to look at fixing resolution problems.
Solutions
- Reduce the images size in photoshop first, rather than uploading large files and reduce the size in the CSS. This will help images load faster.
- Could incorporate pop-up windows into the design and have portfolio on home page, so access is direct and clear.
Thumbnails
User Testing
Some users didn't recognise that top left text 'Francesca Davoren-Britton' was a navigation button to return home. Need to make styling more obvious to indicate it is a nav button. Also search feature was inactive during testing. Users were able to navigate clearly through the site, but were wanting to see more content in the form of project pages.Photoshop Comp
