Problem Statement

While I was attending graduate school, my initial portfolio/personal website was built using a website builder. However after being notified that I will be having to use a paid version, I decided to use my programming skills to create my own personal/portfolio website. I also felt this was also a good way to make sure my progamming skills weren't rusty and learn a new framework, NextJS.

Discover

Initially, for the "discovery" phase of this project I analyzed and examined other portfolio webistes. I made sure to not only analysis websites that weren't primarily a UX portfolio but also websites that weren't built with my target framework. Afte some initial analysis, I found a template/design that seemed like a good initial starting point. While the current design has a lot of similararities with the template, my website includes a variety of different variations to better match with my needs.

Define

For me, I wanted to make sure the website had the following 'requirements':

• 1: Needs to be responsive and should utilize a different navigation bar for mobile.
• 2: Should incorporate transitions unless the user prefers-reduced-motion.
• 3: Only includes the minimal amount of necessary pages/details; i.e. minimalism.
• 4: Include a light and dark mode version

Note however that this is always expanding and changing!

Design & Deliver

My general process is whenever I decide to make a change/update my website I create a physical sticky-note that represents my "user story". Then I organize these sticky-notes in a kanban fashion, prioritizing them, changing their status, and "deleting" them i.e. throwing it away.

My process for "closing" a "user story"/sticky-note depends on the type of work needed. There are some that are mostly design-centric such as evaluating the "design system" of the website. These often entail me carefully considering my design rationales, being very detail-oriented, and then making the apporpriate changes. There are also stories that are mostly coding-centric such as refactoring my code. These stories often require me to read documentation, finding training/examples, and de-bugging. Lastly there are some that are require both such as creating a contact form. These often require both processes mentioned earlier.

My website is a "living" and constantly being changed/updated. Feel free to reach-out if you would like to share your thoughts on design and/or programming, it would be greatly appreciated!