Getting better UX work: Designing your UX portfolio

Ian Fenn@ifenn – mentioned that he participated on a portfolio workshop with Lane Halley (http://www.lanehalley.com@thinknow)

He searched UX portfolios online and visited some. Problems found: breaking lines, third person sentences, mockup style, he thinks that personal rewarding task or job is not of relevance in a portfolio. He recommends us to tell WHY a specific solution was chosen; what you did, why you chose xyz, your thinking process, the final solution and also describe how you worked with people.

People are interested in your skills but also in how you think.

Goals of a UX portfolio:

  • Explain what you think about UX design/research, etc.
  • Get an interview (a sales device)
  • Establish yourself as an expert (perception is established but can be a dangerous game)

Tips/Suggestions:

Format your PDFs, make it easily shareable, printed, presented, etc. (avoid web criticism)
Web is easy to share but print is more difficult, maybe a solution would be print stylesheets if you are ok with your portfolio being public.

Cover, about you and UX, client list, case studies, addition projects, training, public speaking, client testimonial (LinkedIn “clips”), add summary, explain UX and deliverables

Add logos to show off client list, it has a visual appeal.

Try to show case studies representing the breadth of your projects and skills, not only one type of project.

Be careful, don’t accept any job just to be a job, don’t do any mediocre work. Eliminate projects that are too similar and demonstrate your best work.

Ideally include a brief, what was done, key tools and deliverables, the results and possibly the aftermath (things learned)

Ask your client your permission before comencing the work to display parts (or all) of the work on your profile – some clients will work using NDA (non-disclosure agreements). Or disclose just enough based on public annual reports and add a line saying “subject to client NDA” (just-in-case)

When talking about difficult projects try to be professional and explain the problems as constraints.

For the projects that are not used as showcase/case study, they can be a list of logos and quick explanation of what was done.

Add or highlight improvements: training in “adaptive path”, user focus, lean, ux leans startups, courses to fill gaps.

Add a few testimonials, clients and “social proof”.

He recommended 10 pages maximum, but I do feel that could be a bit too much… however if we think this is not a CV, it is a portfolio, adding explanations and user cases on 10 pages could be ‘ok’.

If you are working on a same project and same company for a long time treat each task/development on project as a case and try to make a wider roundup. Try to use images that acompany the story. Take loads of pictures of the process from beginning to end.

Maybe avoid buzzwords because people interviewing you might not know, keep discussions as non-UX as possible.

“To me UX is just problem solving and design.”

His ebook ‘coming soon’: Leanpub.com/uxportfolios

Description of this event (on Eventbrite)

Git references and tutorials

Git is a choice for many developers, groups and companies and you can find many resources online. I compiled a list of some of my favourites, and they can help us to grasp the “magic” of Git a bit better…

 

GitHub and Git logos

Differences between Git and GitHub:

 

Git is a revision control system, a tool to manage your source code history. GitHub is a hosting service for Git repositories. So they are not the same thing: Git the tool, GitHub the service for projects that uses Git. [Source: Stackoverflow]

 

I hope this helps! Enjoy!

 

UPDATE – 22/04/2014

More tutorials – https://www.atlassian.com/git

This one is just brilliant: http://www.git-tower.com/learn/ it has many options, but there is a FREE online book and great visuals.

Learn Version Control with Git A step-by-step course for the complete beginner

Learn Version Control with Git
A step-by-step course for the complete beginner

And yet another Git Cheat Sheet – http://www.git-tower.com/blog/git-cheat-sheet-detail/

UPDATE – 22/09/2015

Another GIT tutorial came to me, by @udemy. It is text-and image based, easy to search for quick answers, and super helpful for anyone: as a base for learning or as a reference guide.

Responsive Day Out

I was happy to participate on the Responsive Day Out this year. Loaded with great speakers, some familiar faces and many tips, was a great way to either reinforce already acquired knowledge (from practice and other conferences I’ve been) and also learn some new interesting stuff!

Below are my humble notes but nevertheless “my” notes and I also included audio and slide links on this post. 🙂


The Responsive Workflow – Sarah Parameter – @Sazzy

Audio for this session

“You can create good experiences without knowing the content but you can’t create good experiences without knowing your content structure” – Mark Boulton

She mentions Mark’s post about the use of newspaper-like structure, saying that constraints are good and she likes to design with constrains. Check his writings at http://markboulton.co.uk/journal

She tested Browserstack (which I personally recommend, it is a great tool for testing your site in different browsers and OSs) with CrazyEgg for heat testing. It is good to know where your users’ click (and don’t click).

Sarah and her team are making use of pattern libraries which describe where and why to use an element within a site; but highlighted a difference in between pattern libraries and style guides – the latter just describes each element (this is a button, this is a quote, etc.)

Sarah highly recommend the use of Slicy which export PSD elements as assets for your website or app, including retina options.pp, including retina options.

Slicy

She finalises that her process is adaptive and the work carries on.


Responsive Navigation – David Bushell – @dbushell

Audio – and – Slide for this session.

My notes:
Remember the fullscreen size not always is used as it is, user might resize the browser then you need to consider the viewpoint.

List navigation on mobile hides the content, try to use a smaller (two lines) menu. Check site Gloople and Clearleft website itself for examples of navigation when different screen sizes are chosen, pay attention on menus and icons.

Patterns used:

  • Overlay (doesn’t push content down) – check Sony website on mobile.
  • Off-canvas – his own website (similar to Path)
  • Check ISO website ‘big footer’ on desktop and mobile.

But what about soul? blog post and menu brings a table of contents ‘with overlay’ on top of full page.

University of Surrey – focus away from menu on a more ‘magazine’ style for discovery.

Take-away: don’t overload menu; remember that feature detection is different than preferred usage; focus on discoverability (like the Surrey website); know your content hierarchy; single point of navigation = single point of failure.

This Is Responsive – Patterns, resources and news for creating responsive web experiences. bit.ly/TIRWD

This is Responsive

A responsive off-canvas menu using CSS transforms and transitions – bit.ly/offcanvas (he wrote)

“It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove”. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Cutting the Mustard – Tom Maslen – @tmaslen

Works for BBC, working with many devices, supporting different browsers.
Audio – AND – Slide for this session.

Premium experience > Not rubbish (ok) > Not supported. They started building from ground up. Simple page across as many browsers possible. Use css (2) to style the main feature (without javascript). Then they create enhanced experience with javascript and they give it to browsers that only use querySelector, localStorage and addEventListener.

Change from graceful degradation to progressive enhancement.

Sofa talk: Jeremy chatting with Sarah, David, and Tom

Audio for this session.

Educating client, instead of ‘telling them what has to be done’. Also experimenting with technologies and features without having the sign-off.


Responsive Web Fonts – Richard Rutter @clagnut

Audio – AND – Slide for this session.

Options:
1. default appears at it loads
2. dont’ send webfonts to small screens
3. show tet in the fallback fonts until all web font loads
4. swap fonts one by one as they load

Use a webfont.css and use media=”all and (min-width: 569px)” (or similar code):

<link href="webfont.css" rel="stylesheet" media="all and (min-width: 569px)" />

Web font loader – The WebFont Loader is a JavaScript library that gives you more control over font loading than the Google Web Fonts API provides. The WebFont Loader also lets you use multiple web-font providers. It was co-developed by Google and Typekit.


Asset Fonts – Josh Emerson @joshje

Audio – AND – Slide for this session.

Mentioned to use icons as fonts instead of bitmap versions. If creating something more complicated use SVG.

His step-by-step on Using Fonts for Resolution Independent Assets

Also, an amazing tool that I should be using soon: IcoMoon – is a custom icon font builder, which allows users to select the icons they need, and make them into a font. Basically you can upload an SVG file and download a font file.

Nice tip: remember to remove the text-to-speech option of icons using CSS, for example:

.icon:before{
  content:attr(data-icon);
  font-family:'xyz';
  speak:none;
}

Josh uses Fontforge to create font sets. He created forecast.is using Climacons icons. The project can be found at: github.com/joshje/forecast

Climacons

He also mentioned about the ligatures used on the fonts where instead of just leaving a symbol on the font set you can give it a meaning, so the ‘sun’ icon would have a ‘sunny’ meaning for his forecast.is application, and on the html what would appear is a legible ‘Sunny’ instead of any code. However, ligatures have to be set on browsers, using:

-webkit-font-feature-settings: "liga";
-moz-font-feature-settings: "liga=1";
-moz-font-feature-settings: "liga";
-ms-font-feature-settings: "liga" 1;
-o-font-feature-settings: "liga";
font-feature-settings: "liga";


Design Systems – Laura Kalbag – @laurakalbag

Audio – AND – Slide for this session.

We have multiple devices and would like to have consistency across. (My obs: she gave a very nice presentation and selected great icon sets)

We have to have balance between Ideals and Practicality.

Core of the design system:

  • typography (the most-like item you will have on a website)
  • layout
  • shape/form
  • colour

Core design features

But also:

  • userflow
  • content strategy
  • tone of voice

What you are going to make it similar and what it would be differentiate in between different ddevices. She advocates same content no matter what device.

We should detach our design from the viewports, they will be different, and continue to grow different.

Do not stick to one tool, choose the best tool for the job today. Examples:

Mockup to create design ideas to developers, clients, etc. but mockup on different viewports – how the design “might look” at some different devices and points in time – (optimum points according to context).


RWD:The war has not yet been won – ElliotJayStocks – @ElliotJayStockshttp://elliotjaystocks.com/

Audio for this session.

Right or wrong directions? – people ditching responsive design because only 2% of their users use mobile (the article I believe he was quoting is https://gocardless.com/blog/unresponsive-design/. Speaker said it is not just about mobile, RWD is/should be design agnostic.

Risky, Wild Decisions – higher cost to companies/people in a way is an investment on yourself, on your skills, on the people in your team. Important for a designer to code too, at least the basic html/css to be able to test on browser.


Sofa talk with Laura, Elliot and guys from Clearleft

Audio for this session.

“the web has been always free” we’re starting to use it as before again, with the tools as advantage to go beyond to the default. Using the tools/knowledge instead of trying to retro-fit.

Mobile website can be the starting point for some business, but often (in their opinion) it can be replaced to a fully responsive site.

Careful in creating high expectations: creating the Photoshop mockups can be dangerous, high-fidelity and ‘perfect’, where something online will be different depending on the browser.

Font Squirrel and IcoMoon – subset of fonts.


Playing with Game Console Browsers – Anna Debenham – @anna_debenhamhttp://maban.co.uk

Audio – AND – Slides for this session.

Although devices are becoming ever more powerful and feature-rich, less capable devices continue to be developed as well. Paul Lloyd – The Web Aesthetic, A List Apart


The Anatomy of a Responsive Page Load – Andy Hume – @andyhumehttp://andyhume.net

Audio – AND – Slide for this session.

Contentencoding: gzip
Cache control maxi-age

Page load
Content, enhancement, leftovers
Script loading using
trade off on CSS
If (iswidedevice): Load larger CSS

Responsive server: relies on device detection,

Trade off on webfonts: progressive enhancement: support woff and fonts in local storge.

Trade off on responsive images: oocss, SMACSS, module patterns, systems, components – instead of media queries and they shouldn’t refer to media queries.
Picture element – use of image according to size of view port.

Lanyrd.com/ckwqy


What’s Next in StandardsLand – Bruce Lawson – @brucelbrucelawson.co.uk

Audio – AND – Slides for this session.

CSS device adaptation
@viewport {
Min width
Max width
}

Karen Luke website
Choice of filling viewport or not.

Flexbox
FixMyStreet hack without flexbox
Media queries level4
Pointer events spec smus.com/mouse-touch-pointer

John Hicks – http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/

WebP lossless images 26% smaller in size compared to pngs and jpegs.
Image replacement:
Background-image: url(),
Background-image: image(.webp, .png),

Opera presto. Html5 video with media queries
http://responsiveimages.org@respimg


Sofa talk with Andy, Bruce and Anna

Audio for this session.

No body know better than audience.. They told a story that a blind man entered a skateboard store asking for a skate and sales person said: “how? why? you are blind!” but the skate was for his son. The store could potentially lose a client there…


Antiphonal Geometry – Owen Gregory

Audio – AND – Slides for this session.

Book recommendation: The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

Device Spect ratio 3/4
Viewport percentage lengths
H1 font size 8vh
P font size 5vw
Article width 8vw

Chech ALA 362 – The Web Aesthetic


The Edge of the Web – Paul Robert Lloyd – @paulrobertlloyd

Main: is meaning, design is enhancement

CSS img replacement on CSS, image src in content, data image in decoration

Responsive Markup Patterns – http://paulrobertlloyd.github.com/responsivepatterns/

New layout for NY times – http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/


In between – Mark Boulton

Audio – AND – Slides for this session.

Edges are knowable

Lots of people say “we broke the web”, we didn’t, we transformed the chaotic fluid web to something more comfortable.

To get rid of this discomfort forcing the fluidity. “fluid first design” then progressive enhancement and lots of tweaking.

The Responsive Day Out website has audio recordings of all 17 sessions (downloadable mp3) and also some of the slides from the speakers; the Lanyrd website have a complete coverage with pictures, audios, videos, slides and other blog posts from people that contributed to document this event.