Design Orchard

Monday 2 February 2015

A case study in UX

Now that I've got that slightly cathartic post out of the way, I can move on to the positive progression which will get me past this most recent chapter of my life.

My portfolio. The document I want to create and am petrified of creating.

I want to express myself, represent myself. But is that what the portfolio is for? No. The portfolio is for getting a job. The website I want to build is more than that. A digital home for my mind is what I would like to build. But who is that audience except for myself? If I am the audience, why must i create something which is a reflection of myself? This feels like vanity. Life increasingly does.

So. Not the digital home for my eternal soul, bound to be archived in a long-forgotten part of the web. A petrified scream whirling through the void. No, not that. A portfolio. The Audience? My future employers and recruitment agents. They are my users, what would they like to experience? As little as possible. Just what they need to experience, the rest is superfluous clutter. So.

There is a great Steve Jobs quote on this, on the nature of focus.

This is the best way I can describe the process of creating the user experience journey for this new portfolio site. First off I wrote down everything I wanted it to be. Then I downloaded a sprawling (but well coded) HTML template from themeforest, and began to pick out the pieces I didn't need, and develop the pieces I did. I thought I was saving time by skipping to the end. I thought I didn't need to apply the same rigorous preparation that I invest in my usual projects. I thought "I've built a hundred sites, I know what I want this site to be, I'll just build it." I was a fool.

Here was the wishlist for the website I thought I was building, Incorporating all my creative output in one place:

Web projects
Photography
Drawings
VJ Gigs
VJ Loops
VJ sets
Installations
Poetry Prose
Mountainboard Videos
Animations

An interesting site, maybe. But for who? Me, I guess. At this point I took a deep breath and started again.

Who is my audience? Employers, Recruiters, potential future Colleagues.

What are they like? They are in a rush, they don't enjoy trawling through loads of crap to get to what they're trying to find.

Why will they be looking at the site? To find out if I can do the job and if they want to work with me.

How will they find the site? 90% of the time through a link I send them. (SEO is not a high priority).

What do they want?

1) They want to be reassured they are looking at the portfolio of the guy they are considering hiring.
2) They want to see my work
3) They want to know what skills I contributed to these projects
4) They want an idea of who I am.
5) they want to be able to contact me

What is the business need of the site? To entice the audience into setting up interviews with me regarding employment.

Like any good site, it should tell a coherent story in which the user plays a crucial part. The story should be simple, quick and alluring. The wishlist did not help with this at all, so out it went. After some thought I whittled the story down thus:

1) Hi my name is Austin, hopefully you are here to peruse my work. You are in the right place, come on in (Click here call to action)

2) Right! I should give you an idea of the kind of projects I have helped succeed

A bit about political journals
A bit about e-commerce
A bit about the variety of other sites I've helped build

3) A bit explaining what skills I brought to these projects

4) A bit about my personality.

5) Contact me if you like my shit. MAKE THIS EASY AS POSSIBLE.

An easy to navigate 5 step story with a beginning middle and end. The end is my call to action. This is effectively the same approach I used in the site's previous incarnation. But it's worth going through the metal stages in order to create a solid idea of the site's focus before it's built.

I'm not entirely sure yet how I should ask them to contact me. email is easiest, but putting an email address in a website any spambot can crawl is not ideal. Gmail's spam filter is good, but even so. Linkedin is a good platform for this, but I wonder if some people don't have access? A contact form would be easy but again, the spambots may cause me grief.

I guess I'll mull it over. I have my user journey, I will build it and see what it looks like, test it and reiterate. That's how sites are made these days.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

The Passing of Angus "Gus" Ellis

My younger brother's best friend took his own life over a month ago.

I had know him from the age of twelve, coming round to watch buffy on a Thursday. I wrote this poem 2 days before his funeral. Woke up and it just came out.

The Gus we know is not gone,
The Gus we know is not gone.
Not the hopeful, happy, cheeky face,
Nor the touselled hair and constant pace,
the sense of running without the sense of race...

The Gus we know lives on in this room, in every shining eye,
in every racked sob and foundly thought of time,
in every shared memory and story told of man,
so good and true and bold.

The Gus remembered lives on in the beaches of Indo,
The waves of the med,
The Children of Channai,
In Australian baby's father's heads,
The roads of Europe, the american film sets and sand,
so, so many places in this sometimes green and pleasant land.
a thousand million little tiny holes in life that he found
and filled with his love and understanding.
Gus lives on in many lands.

but we are imperfect and the gus we forget is gone,
we cannot contain his whole,
just the pieces that help us down the road,
the pieces we take with us, tucked so secure and treasured so deeply,
a promise to stay inspired, to keep looking, frequently.
to care, to heal, to listen, to support...
to do the things he can no longer do himself,

The gus we know is not gone.

the gus we forget was taken by a gus I rarely met,
a gus who is in everyone one of us, too.
The dark, the stress, the shame, the raging, angry, dissapointed, let down voice who shouts
“this is bullshit”,
so crystal clear.

I cant believe 'that gus rarely met' won the argument,
but we all know how twisted reality can get,
how he managed to forget all the brilliance of his life, his love and likes,
swallowed by the blackness like too many of our time,
of this I know there will be more,
but please my friends,
none of us.
No More.

You all must promise one another today that we will not leave this way,
in such a hurry, leaving so much mess,
lets not be hasty, lets not forget.
because no matter how great the stress
of life, look, here we all are now,
as we would have been then, in that time of need,
if he had just picked up the phone and dialed a friend, or sister, mother,
hell a barman would have fucking done it to be honest.
Just long enough to find someone who can
sing you your song when it leaves your head,
and is replaced by something dark instead
Promise us, promise me,
no more waste like this, please.

We dont want to have to remember, we want him here,
to have a chat over a beer,
to go out raving or some adventure, over the seas
to some land of leisure.

The Gus we know is not gone,
he's in this room in everyone,
The love, the shining eyes, the sense,
the adventure, the empathy, the understanding,
here in his friends,
so lets raise a glass and hug and smile
embed those memories,
stay a while,
build this gus inside our heads,
to keep alive what isn't dead.
To cherish that which is not gone,
to tell his tales and sing his songs.

Gus was like a brother to me,
in that i'm not alone I see,
so raise a glass with me if you can,
lets say it together, for Gus:
“I love you, man!”