This week’s portfolio assignment provided a unique opportunity to broaden my UX knowledge base by creating a professional website to document my work. Up to now, my experience with portfolios has been limited to the traditional studio art portfolio: a massive brown carrying case full of large and micro-scale drawings, paintings, and multimedia works. A UX portfolio seemed daunting at first, as I had never set up a website of any kind before or presented my non-studio artwork in a way that didn’t involve a multipage research paper or PowerPoint presentation. I started out in my Microsoft Office comfort zone for a rough draft of the content of my piece before setting up a domain and new site on WordPress. This allowed me to synthesize my process, initially by selecting the most important information from my weekly deliverables and grafting it onto slides. Laden with a more focused fiber of ideas, I began the slow weaving of original content for my website – a narrative discussion of my process, part self-reflection, part fact-reporting.

It took a bit of bumbling around, but by the end of the day on Friday, I had a working site on WordPress. With the basic pattern of my site in place and functioning, I crafted and polished the final content within page itself, rather than copying and pasting from another program. Aside from creating the site (I really need to learn how to use CSS), I had to learn the delicate art of telling the story of ReminderX with just enough detail to trace the thread of my thought process, and not bore the reader with sterile descriptions of methodology and research. Browsing professional UX and UI designers’ portfolio sites, I gained ideas galore, but also had to constantly remind myself that, a.) I am not a graphic designer, and b.) I’m new to this. My work will not be visually stunning, at least not yet. Instead, I needed to focus on my problem-solving strengths and my storytelling abilities to draw in potential employers.

The UX in Practice class structure has provided the perfect medium for a crash course in UX work. I have learned more in the last seven weeks than I could ever have learned on my own or by simply reading about the field. One big lesson I’m taking away from this course not mentioned in my ReminderX portfolio page: Master your tools. I purchased Adobe InDesign during the previous UX class, but I haven’t used it to the point of mastery. That will be among my goals for upcoming classes. With an education in English/Art and a background in Library Services, I must now catch up with technology and the tools of my career switch. I am excited (and just a bit nervous) to dive into the details of programs like Photoshop and InDesign and start using some new tools for prototyping and new computer languages. Baby steps.