Looking Inward: A usability evaluation of my portfolio
Continuous improvement is the goal. Building a strong portfolio is important to get recruiters to notice you. Beyond just having a portfolio, I believe that it is important to get good feedback on its usability and user experience.
One way to improve a portfolio is to ask other UX professionals and recruiters to review your portfolio, but individual differences between reviewers sometimes leave you a little confused.
The home page with a link to the usability survey
To get a balanced, impartial view of the usability and user experience of my website, I thought it would be good to ask the users themselves what they honestly thought about it in addition to having feedback from UX professionals. I used the Systems Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire to measure the usability of my portfolio. Visitors to my website could choose to participate in evaluating my website by clicking on the survey link on the home page.
All demographic and usage data was extracted using Google Analytics and survey data was visualized with Qualtrics.
Visitor data between Feb 9th,2020 to March 9th, 2020 from Google Analytics
General Demographics
A total of 220 unique visitors accessed this website between 9th Feb,2020 and 9th March, 2020.
A larger proportion of visitors of my portfolio website were male (67%) and were aged between 25-34 years old.
A large proportion of visitors came from the USA and India.
Ages of visitors
Gender distribution of visitors
Devices used by website visitors
72% of visitors used mobile phones. This was an interesting finding as a lot of my editing was done on a desktop browser.
Although the website is optimized for mobile use, it was not necessarily designed for such users.
Around 61% of visitors left the website only after visiting one page. This high bounce rate indicated that very few users actually ended up reaching my project and research pages (In fact, less than 10% of all unique visitors).
Usability Evaluation
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a useful tool for assessing the usability of products, including websites. It gives an easy to understand score between 0-100.
A total of 17 participants filled up the System Usability Scale survey. Participants were aged between 18 and 54, with 11 males and 6 females. Of the participants who filled up the occupation section, only two held roles in research and design, with the majority being students.
The average SUS score was approximately 82.5 between 17 users. Which indicates a generally favorable rating for the usability of the website
A majority of users rated the website favorably, with nearly 70% of participants rating the website an 80 or higher.
Although the website was rated favorably, it has to be noted that most of the participants were from the general public and not recruiters, which is the intended demographic.
The SUS usability questionnaire used in this evaluation
SUS rating distribution histogram
Grade rankings of the SUS score. Bangor, Kortum & Miller (2009)
Additional Questionnaire
These additional questions helped understand how participants felt the overall aesthetics were for this website, which most participants rating the website favorably for the color scheme, navigation and readability of the content on the website.
Q. How good or bad was the color scheme on the website?
Q. How easy or difficult was it to read the font size on the website?
Q. How easy or difficult was it to use the navigation system on the website?
Q. How easy or difficult was it to read the font style on the website?
Summary
Visitors to each page on this website
In general, although the SUS score indicated the website had an overall favorable usability, it still was not indicative of how effective it was in generating interest in my portfolio and projects. This was shown in the high bounce rate (61%) on the website. Less then 10% of visitors viewed my projects or research.
Additionally, with most visitors and survey respondents being from a background other than UX research or recruitment, the usability metrics should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Additional methods such as interviewing UX professionals and recruiters and adding questions based on interest and likability might help identify ways to improve this website. A holistic evaluation of this website beyond just the quantitative analysis will definitely help in the goal of continuous improvement.