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Every audience has certain expectations—whether it’s a specific tone or certain concepts that are highly valued. We will use this video to recognize those expectations for your audience.
New Terms:
-
Empathy -- the act of recognizing the humanity in others.
- Design Thinking -- a user-centered approach to problem-solving.
Further Reading:
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Your audience will have certain
expectations regarding your portfolio and
0:00
how you curate your work.
0:04
As such, the way you go about
accomplishing the goals you've set for
0:06
your portfolio goes beyond
your immediate needs, and
0:12
has quite a bit to do with your
audience's needs, and expectations.
0:16
To accomplish this, you'll need to employ
0:21
a user-centered approach to problem
solving called design thinking.
0:24
Design thinking is a mindset
rooted in the practice of empathy,
0:28
which is the act of recognizing
the humanity in others.
0:32
Another way of putting this is
that you'll have to look for
0:37
the overlap between what you need and
what the users need.
0:40
A design thinking method of figuring
out the overlap between you and
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your users' needs could be to create
a questions and assumptions matrix.
0:50
This is a design thinking tool that allows
you to better consider what you do and
0:56
don't know about your users.
1:01
To do this,
let's first establish your users.
1:04
In this instance,
1:07
your portfolio's users maybe
recruiters looking to make referrals.
1:09
Or team leads, developers, or
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designers who need to find someone
they can effectively work with.
1:17
Now that we know who are users are, we
need to think on what they actually need.
1:22
Here's how the matrix works.
1:28
It consists of two columns that
you fill in with sticky notes.
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On the left you have questions you
want answered about your users needs.
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And on the right you'll place
assumptions that you believe to be true
1:40
about your users' needs.
1:45
For the questions, ask yourself the most
fundamental questions that you would need
1:47
to know about your users like, what could
they likely want from this interaction,
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or what does this company
care the most about?
1:57
These tend to be very broad questions,
but very helpful for
2:00
you to pinpoint how you need to put
your portfolio content together.
2:04
For your assumptions,
you may assume that a dev at
2:11
a particular company might be short on
time if they're looking at portfolios for
2:16
another teammate to help
lighten their workload.
2:20
That would definitely affect how
you go about presenting your work.
2:24
The point of this exercise is to help you
figure out what you do and don't know.
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And then help you to consider
those things against
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what you actually want to accomplish.
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In your questions and
assumptions matrix, you'll likely
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realize whether a business place has less
emphasis on traditional academics or not.
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And if so,
the recruiter will likely anticipate and
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appreciate an informal tone in the writing
used to describe your process and work.
2:54
You may use this tool to acknowledge
the developers who conduct
3:00
portfolio screenings might place
a greater immediate emphasis
3:04
on the actual outputs found in a GitHub
repo than on a tone of writing.
3:08
Or you could deduce the designers will
immediately be considering how the sites
3:14
aesthetics contribute or
detract from the overall user experience.
3:20
In the next video, we'll build on these
ideas by discussing how you establish
3:26
the voice of your portfolio.
3:30
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