Greg Answer

Summary

I initially created this site to showcase my skills, provide links to my various social media accounts, and provide additional information about me. After receiving advice from a friend, I decided to make this site specifically to help potential employers discover why I’m an excellent candidate for a position as a web developer.

Last updated: June 14, 2017

Planning

User Personas

NOTE: The following User Personas are based on interviews that were done in an informal matter. To protect the identity of the individuals, stock images were used to represent them.

I need someone who fulfills my client's requirements

Rachel the Recruiter

I like candidates who can:

• Market themselves
• Interview well
• Request a high salary

I can't stand people who think they know everything

Sean the Senior Dev

I work with people who can:

• Work in a team
• Write clean code
• Deliver on time
• Ask good questions

Our success depends on building a strong team

Chris the CTO

I hire people who are:

• Time sensitive
• Customer oriented
• Fast and flexible

Designing

The initial design was focused on speed of delivery. "Get this done in 24 hours" was the design focus. I decided to use the Ruby on Rails web framework and Materialize CSS framework for the following reasons:

• I excel with these tools
• They give me the flexibility to modify sections of the site as needed
• I want to focus on delivering a final product as quickly as possible

Information Architecture

Developing

Behavior Driven Development (BDD)

I decided not to use behavior driven development for most of this process for 2 reasons:

1. Other than the contact form, there is no complex part of the site that I'm worried about breaking
2. I have no intention of working with a team for my personal site.

The limited testing I did:

1. Basic link testing (header links, side nav links, footer links)
2. Contact form testing

Review

The Review process involves the following steps:

1.   Spell-checking
2.   Browser/device testing
3.   Push to staging server
4.   Link testing
5.   Form testing
6.   User feedback

Changes Made

You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.
— Randy Pausch

It is great to have a plan, but it doesn't always go according to plan. Here are some of the change I made throughout the process:

1. Removed brief "About Me" section from homepage in favor of giving more emphasis to projects
2. Simplified list of skills into 3 phases of development
3. Omit additional skills (I may add a "Skills" page that has a searchable list of all my skills
4. Reduced the number of visible social networks. Focus on what employers would be looking for

Lessons Learned

Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.
— Twyla Tharp

1. Determine your target audience no matter how small the project.
2. Always research your direct and indirect competition (Web Developers and UX Designers)
3. The full UX process should be applied to projects of all sizes
4. Omit needless links. Try to use only 3-5 links per section
5. Omit needless words. Try to cut sentences/paragraphs in half while retaining important information

Next Steps

1.   Add a few pictures of UI sketching for each project
2.   Add Additional links:
1.   "How and Why I Redesigned My Portfolio"  Medium blog post for greganswer.com project
2.   Behance project page for each project
3.   Add site screenshots for each project
4.   Add social share buttons to each project page and the "About" page
5.   Add JavaScript transitions for different sections
6.   Add a list of programming books I've read to the "About" page