Please view the content for Unit 1 here: Unit 1 - Google Drive

Work Done For This Unit

In this unit, I started building my website design idea by brainstorming its purpose (a personal portfolio), its potential visitors, and building their personas. I used this information to build scenarios about how they would interact with my website. This process helped me understand what types of information I would need to put on my website, such as my professional experience and even my personal design endeavors. This also included thinking about accessibility, such as interacting with the website from different platforms. I drafted mockups of how these pages would be linked and interact with each other, what information they would provide, and what they might look like from a very rudimentary perspective. The mockups and sitemap helped me visualize my ideas coming to life.

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify the potential audience and purpose for a website.

   I believe I achieved this outcome, as I laid out three different personas in my design documentation that can benefit from using my website in different ways, such as a recruiter for technical information, a business owner for freelancing information, and a student for resume and personal project inspiration.

2. Use a simple but structured process to identify how the website will address the needs of the anticipated audience.

   Through the scenarios, site maps and mockup, I identified each user's needs and laid out the information systematically to help my potential audience access what they need on my website.

What Went Well and What Didn’t

Overall, I’m happy about how this went, although I did struggle to initially get set up in this course and project. As an artist, I struggled through creative blocks, and designing a website was very akin to a design thinking experience for me. Through creative blocks, it’s hard to get setup and build a design-filled process when you feel stuck and burnt out. I struggled initially to get my feet off the ground in terms of how I wanted the site to look, but I slowly realized that it was okay to build a functioning purposeful website at the cost of making it overly complex and “out of this world”. My ambitions are really high, and I hope that this website building process gives me a basis to build my ambitions on top. If I could do this again, I would spend less time looking forward into the future about my website design, and focus more on the basic elements and building my website from the ground up.

References

- All images are generated from thispersondoesnotexist.com.

- All diagrams and mockups designed on draw.io.