User Interviews are important in that they allow the developer to gain knowledge about the psychology of their user. In addition they are a great platform to ask general questions about the usability of the website. I asked general questions about my interviewees, gaining knowledge of who they were, and what they were expecting from my website.
View Here.Competitor Analysis is a great way to get ideas, and to compare your website to another. In my case, I chose to compare to professional developers and web-designers, so that I could get good incite as to what the elements are that make up a successful portfolio.
View Here.Feature Value Matrices are crucial to determine what aspects of your webiste you should devote time to improving or developing. I chose some stylistic features, and a few functional ones as well. I selected features that were suggested by the Competitor Analysis, and User Interviews.
View Here.I prioritized my Features according to the Feature Value Matrix. This will allow me to choose the most important, efficient aspects to work on. The highest priority features at the moment, are the inclusion of project links/code samples, and the functionality of the email on-site feature.
View Here.User Stories allowed me to think about specific tasks from a user's point of view. This gave me incite as to what I should include, or improve on my website. I chose to focus specifically on a hiring manager's point of view, and therefore I was able to decipher that it might be beneficial for me to make contacting me a very prominent feature, and to possibly add code examples in the future.
View Here.Cognitive walkthroughs are important in order to find usability issues in regards to specific use cases. One of the challenges I faced when I conducting them was that a lot of my questions were not very open-ended, and therefore the user may not have been able to talk as freely about the walkthrough process.
View Here.I did a click test and a questionnaire. The click test helped me to determine if the task of emailing me was too difficult to achieve, and the questionnaire addressed some usability issues that had been brought up in user interviews, and Cognitive Walkthroughs. Both tests confirmed my suspicions, and therefore I will need to make the email link a bit more visible, and my menu items a darker color.
View Click Test Here.Through these usability tests I was able to find certain issues that had not been apparent to me before. The process also is valuable in that it taught be many design principles and practices that are relevant as a developer. The biggest improvements that I need to make are specifically to make the email a bit easier to notice, and improve the top menu colorization in order to make them easier to see. Also, my about page received a bit of flak due to it just being a huge picture of my face.
Some difficulties I faced were the inclusion of friends in my research and testing, which caused me to deal with some less than serious results. Fortunately, I was able to re-test these, and get better answers that were more constructive.
In the future I will definitely attempt to make the site more user friendly, by making important links easier to see and use. In addition, I would like to make the site a bit more techy. As of now, it is more of a personal website, not the website of someone who is obviously a coder.
In addition, I will change the graphic on the about page, improve the aesthetics to be a bit more modern, and edgy, and add some color. I was happy with my original website, as it was stylish, but through user interviews, I also learned that it does not really scream coder. In the future, I will fix this.