Creating personal portfolio website for commissions and EXHIBITIONs.
Website Development and UX Project
Project Brief:
Goal: Helping users with developing a simple website design to showcase their portfolio work
Duration: May 2024
Tools Used: Figma, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Pen, and Paper mockups
This is a solo project using my own exhibition work created during undergrad with the input of my graduate peers who also created their own portfolio websites
The collaborative elements of creating websites with peers on an independent venture became a goal to create a simple website with minimal navigation to showcase strong works to potential gallaries and graduate level programs.
Research: I conducted short 15-minute conversations in a collaborative environment with other artists working on their own websites. Questions included:
What type of work should be showcased?
How should work be organized to show the strongest works first and then keep potential viewers engaged?
How long will the portfolio be looked at and considered for potential opportunities?
Is the navigation intuitive and simple for showcasing visual design work?
Takeaways:
Work should be organized into different concentrations: photography and painting should be separate files but easy and intuitive
Stronger works should be at the immediate forefront (first primacy) to gain initial interest and keep potential viewers engaged
Potential galleries, educational recruiters, and employees likely will only spend about 3-5 minutes looking through the work before making a decision
Navigation needs to be simplified and uncomplicated for a portfolio website and not advertise overly unrelated content
consider mobile vs desktop view convertability
links to social media should be incorporated into the design
Final UI Design and images from working Domain:
Mobile Website User Flow:
Desktop View User Flow:
User Personas:
Secondary User
Primary User
Affinity Mapping:
The affinity mapping process was important for constructing visual focal points that should be considered by users interacting with the design as well as the secondy users who have to make decisions based on content provided by the user interface.
Focal points include:
user experience
website content and navigation
user design and interactive reasoning for users
a design approach for multiple users
User Flow:
After taking into consideration the focal points that users would require, the next step in the design process was to design a user flow. This combines the needs of the users who are interacting with the website and how they will navigate through the portfolio.
The main takeaways for creating a “happy path” for users include:
intuitive website homepage and navigation
font that is easy to read and clearly defined tabs
clean presentation, uncluttered design
considering subcategories within the design that may be related
Wire Framing:
During this portion of the design process, the website had already been configured using Squarespace so this was more of a reverse design study using Figma for website mapping and showing full navigation from the product.
This is intended to be used as a tool to see how the product would look in one frame if presented to a user and potentially see the layout in the works from the previous user flow map.
Interestingly, from a design perspective, this is instrumental for design processes if you already acquired the design material and are familiar with a format that users find intuitive.
User Experience Testing and Takeaways:
Part of the user experience design process was gaining feedback from my peers who were also creating exhibition websites in our senior portfolio course in undergrad. The design process of creating a functional website, purchasing a domain, and updating our resumes, made the hurdle of working towards UX and potentially applying for exhibition work and graduate programs a much more feasible task. I gained insight into other artists, peers, and critiques from my professors about the important features to include in a website for fine art exhibition work. Knowing that this UX project has been a labor of my visual design work as well as a collaborative effort with my fellow peers does outline the effectiveness and need for web designers, user experience, and research into how humans feel and what they’re aware of when they interact with UI. Discovering the possibilities has been a personal journey and all around rewarding experience.