Exchange Portfolios

Project Overview

I co-founded this project in May 2020 to make portfolio reviews accessible for new UX designers. With the help of another fantastic UX designer, Jingle Chen, Exchange Portfolios was successfully built and launched, attracting over 80% of external users of the total users with compliments of the LinkedIn community site.

Timeline

6 months, In-person

My Role

Lead UX Researcher

The Problem

As a junior UX Designer at the time, receiving feedback was an essential way to improve their design portfolio. Unfortunately, portfolio reviews are not always easy to access, especially for designers who just get into UX. How can we help with it?

A simple solution!

We envisioned a new web solution.
‍
Exchange Portfolios will allow UX designers to exchange portfolio reviews with each other:

Two designers will be paired to review each other’s portfolios. Through this idea, we intended to achieve two goals:

Make portfolio review accessible
Allow designers to improve by giving and receiving feedback

The final website

Wait, wait... What is on the market?

The concept of Exchange Portfolios comes from our assumption that portfolio reviews are not accessible for new UX designers. Now, it’s time to verify that.

We did a competitive analysis around all the existing portfolio review resources. We assessed most of the resources that designers can reach out to and get feedback regarding their portfolio through the following two lenses:

Comprehensive: How detailed or solid the feedback is
Accessibility: How fast the designer can receive the feedback

We then placed them on this plot to further show the current market:

When putting on the plot, we noticed that current services tended to be on two extremes. They are either make an effort to build connections and networks while providing in-depth feedback or easy to find but provide lackluster feedback.

However, there isn’t something in the center of this map where a sweet spot of both Accessibility and comprehensiveness can be met. That is our focus.

How about the people?

We now get a general understanding of the market we plan to break into, but what do our fellow designers think about their portfolio-making process?

To fully understand it from their perspective, we conducted both a survey with 8 questions and semi-structured 30-minute interview studies for entry-level and student Designers. In the end, we received 125 responses from the survey and 6 participants from the interview.

So...?

With all the research data coming in, we conducted a couple of rounds of bottom-up research synthesis sessions to flesh out the research result thoroughly.

We engaged with a bottom-up approach to the data analysis, where we first open-coded each interview transcript and survey data and then mapped out the insights on an affinity diagram. Grouping similar insight findings, we created the following overarching themes from the data set.

The rounds of data analysis we conducted helped us define the existing user experience of creating and developing a UX design portfolio into 6 stages.

Throughout these 6 stages, various problems designers need to overcome to make a portfolio as best as they can. And when going over all the stages, we noticed that Feedback and iteration is the most troubled stage. Our participants indicated the following problems:

Lack of motivation of updating portfolio regularly
Lack of expertise of self-evaluating portfolio
Need for constructive, quick and targeted feedback from experienced designers

How do people said about our solution?

After our need-finding process and design, I set up a 30-min online testing session with 12 UX Designers with a preproduction mockup.
‍

The goal of the test is to both check if the overall information architecture is straightforward and easy to understand and see if the feedback from the users to see if it solves their needs.

During this test, we discovered some significant concerns and steps we will take to resolve those concerns.

Mockup Link

Concern #1: The “How it works” section is a little wordy and confusing.
Concern #2: Confusion about the two forms on the web page. People are not sure about submitting which form initially.
Concern #3: Some new UX designers are not confident enough to be portfolio reviewers.
Concern #4: People question the quality of the review.
Concern #5: There is too little guidance after submitting the initial form.

Shorten and restructure the “How it works" section to make the process clear.
Remove the review submission form from the page and create a separate page to streamline to process
Add a section right after the hero section to explain why reviewing other people’s portfolios is beneficial to everyone. Additionally, we planned to provide a simple portfolio review guideline for all of our users for understand the expectations.
This would be a huge challenge for us. At this moment, we decided to hold this problem and see how people would review it after we launch.
To address this, we made a Service Blueprint to map out the entire experience. Please see the next section for more detail.

The Service Blueprint

To better map out the whole site's service and pinpoint potential guiding points for new users. We round up a service blueprint of the site to identify all potential touchpoints users might go through. This may help us address some of the concerns raised during our usability testing.

Stage: From the beginning to the end, each user will go through 7 stages. There would be user touchpoints, content, error, and backend in each stage.
User Touchpoints: What users may encounter at each stage.
Content: The content user will see or ideally the information user may know at each stage.
Error: What may go wrong.
Backend: Backend tasks that either the team or the software system has to complete to ensure a smooth front-end experience.

From the service blueprint, we noticed some processes are error-prone and lengthy. Users might forget their ID or enter the wrong information during the lengthy process, leading to no response for their review. This may lead users to drop out of the service entirely

The backend process we initially proposed is also unideal. Manual matching and email sending can lead to too much uncertainty. We need to reconsider the service infrastructure to facilitate future users and requests.

From here, we redesigned the platform using the service blueprint and all the findings that led to the fantastic service we had in the beginning!

Looking Back...

Unproved Assumption is a double-edged sword

The whole project begins with our assumption we feel as a fellow junior designer. While we feel there is a lack of review and feedback for our portfolio, it does not mean others are experiencing the same as we do. It is not about “us.” But more about Junior UX designers with their portfolio work. Although the project started with our assumption, it does not mean the assumption is totally accountable in the market. Validation and proof are always needed to make sure our product and vision isn't just a fluke.

Be responsible for your own project

As the co-lead and the sole researcher for the project, it can be hard sometimes to determine the right vision and strategy to follow for the project. We did not have any external guidance during the projects, it all depends on ourselves to be responsive to the outcome of the project. Since we divided our responsibilities for the project between design and research, we made sure we had clear and constant communication throughout the project.

Documentation and result sharing are constant during the project, and we make sure we show what each other is working on and how it may impact and change the project in real-time.

We set the project direction focused more on the verification of the ideas and creating it in the end. There are certain benefits to this design approach, but it also limits other possibilities. One of the limitations we saw during the project is that due lack of outside perspective, it can be difficult to know if there were other ways to explore the problem space. If we could redo this project, instead of focusing on verifying a specific idea, we would take more time to explore this problem space and be more passionate about coming up with new ideas.