A Google search tells me that some regard WiX or SquareSpace as adequate for a UI/UX portfolio. However, I don’t see it this way.
I’ve been designing and coding websites since 1994. Until four years ago, I led creative teams that included web developers and UI/UX specialists.
I always hired UI designers who knew enough HTML/CSS and JavaScript to build a basic website on their own from scratch. I didn’t expect them to be great coders. Still, I did expect them to know enough to design websites that coders could easily build without resorting to awkward hacks and workarounds that could have easily been avoided had they known enough about coding to design interfaces that could be easily built within the W3C standards.
UX specialists got a bit of a pass since they’re more concerned with the site’s architecture and user interactions than the details of the interface. Even with them, however, I expected enough knowledge about the work of the other team members not to toss in a superficially good but impractical UX suggestion that would increase costs in ways that could be avoided using another approach. Luckily, most of them had an engineering mentality that enabled them to think through the problems they might have otherwise created.
With that in mind, a UI or UX applicant sending me a portfolio built with a drag-and-drop website builder would suggest I was dealing with an amateur or a wannabe. In other words, I considered the website containing the portfolio as part of the portfolio.
To use an imperfect analogy, let’s say I was a college basketball team coach. At the beginning of the year, dozens of applicants tried to make the team. Most were in top shape and had been working out continuously and perfecting their game for years. However, a few of them showed up and got severely winded as I ran them through some practice exercises. They didn’t seem to understand the difference between high school and college basketball. They hadn’t bothered to study the school, the team’s history, or the league they would be playing in, but they still claimed that they could quickly get into shape, learn the ropes, and be a great player. Well, OK, maybe, but my instincts would tell me that I was dealing with a slacker who wasn’t committed enough to do what was necessary and to go the extra mile, despite whatever raw talent they might have had. In other words, I would likely cut them from consideration.
Similarly, as an employer, could I have confidence in hiring a website designer who hadn’t bothered to design his own portfolio website and who, instead, relied on an online website builder and its limited options made for do-it-yourselfers who don’t know how to design websites themselves?
Why your Google UX class said WiX and Squarespace are a standard, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m alone in my views, too demanding, or too dogmatic. With luck, others will jump in to give their points of view.
What you’ve told me is that you missed a huge UX problem. You expected the users (me, in this case) to know they were supposed to click on the images to display mission-critical content. As a UX designer, you can’t assume everyone thinks like you. Instead, you need to think through the architecture from multiple points of view and build in redundancies that will enable everyone to find the obvious path to your case studies without assuming the user knows enough to click on something that might be less than obvious.
At our agency, whenever we designed new websites, we would thoroughly test them by bringing in random people and assigning them to perform tasks on the site, such as buying a pair of shoes or finding a specific piece of information. Even when everyone on the team had no problem navigating the site, if five percent of the random people got confused and failed, we knew we had a UX problem that we needed to fix.
I hope I haven’t discouraged you or come down too hard on what you’ve done. Take my opinions with a grain of salt and realize I spent some time writing this whole thing to help. I wouldn’t have done so if I thought you weren’t ready for it.
