Help reviewing my personal/portfolio website

Hi guys. Ive been a designer for about 5 years. I recently put together a personal/portfolio/showcase website and will appreciate feedback from the community.
You can check it out at > http://ojanti.com/

Your feedback is highly appreciated. :runner:

Hey John,
We’d be happy to check out your portfolio but please take some time to review at least one other portfolio first, as per these guidelines.

Thanks!

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Oh, pardon me. Wish I had seen that earlier

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Hey John,
Here you go:

  • Cute design. I was captivated by the message in the search field. That said, it probably shouldn’t be in the search field. :wink:
  • Clicking on HELLO WANDERER breaks things
  • Capital i’s are needed in the last para of the hello there! section of About Me.
  • Your portfolio is beautifully designed but you have no UX projects at all. Have you got some that you can document? At the moment it is very UI centric.
  • Watchlist throws an error
  • Typo in this sentence “See the full list of technolgies used here”
  • And here “Im a creative designer”

Hope that’s helpful :slight_smile:

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Hi @HAWK
Thank you soo much for the feedback. User feedback is golden.

  • I’ll look into the (very embarrassing) error you noticed when the HELLO WANDERER text was clicked.
    A side question - How did you know the text was clickable? Did the icon help? Did you suspect it was after the highlight that shows up when hovering over the area? I’ll appreciate the info.

  • I’ll fix the text errors you spotted. Really grateful.

  • Regarding the lack of UX documentations and projects, yea it’s an issue for me. Most of my UX work were done within official capacity in a company and sadly I wasn’t granted permission to share the process :disappointed:.
    So i decided to do some freelance work this year but both of the projects i did haven’t launched so they are concerned about exposing the ideas.

Once again, thank you so much for the feedback :slight_smile:

Hi there,

My feedback isn’t as in depth as Hawk’s, but I wanted to give you something. Sadly, I’m not a fan of the text in the search bar. It looks like it’s encouraging me to type something but I never get the opportunity to. In the end, all I can do is contact you.

I hope that makes sense. Let me know.

Piper

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Can’t remember TBH. Curiosity?

Hello @Piper_Wilson, yes yes yes. this point seems to be reoccurring. Ill definitely look into it.
Thanks so much.

@Piper_Wilson @HAWK . I’m considering using a CLI response type styling to replace the search look as a temporary fix. Something that looks like this first draft. I can style it more to look like a real CLI interface. Just dont want tone/contrast that conflicts with the design.

Does it affect your tendency to type in it? What do you think?

John, those are some curious design choices you made for your portfolio framework. I would love to know the context of it - who is your site aimed for, what’s the goal here?

I can see you have some serious front-end skills but perhaps overusing them to create this extensive portfolio framework with your projects kind of buried a bit too deep won’t serve your purpose. I mean back in a day we had printed versions of our portfolios, and did a number of crazy things with them but never was the framework more important then the work.

While we’re on the framework subject I must admit my eyes squinted a little when I’ve read “designer” and saw you’d chosen to mimic google’s old design. Why? Let me retrospect: prior to 2011 nobody even heard of google design team, the community was sure this data driven company just employed bots to a/b test every single element in quest for creation of the most universal (and in effect dull and boring) design ever. I believe it was the flop of Google+ in 2012 that lead community to ask who the hell designed this service and Google to finally take their designers out of the closets and basements producing some really inspiring ideas - like material design. Can you see what happened here? Before material design Google was just saying ‘poo’ and a/b testing how it sounds better - and since it failed - they’ve created a visual language so they can form real sentences now.

So on the concept level why would you choose to copy Google’s old design (even account login area - very fishy) instead of using their still fresh design language to create your own design? And why to position yourself within Google ecosystem in the first place?

Hi @kwedo, thanks for the “extensive” feeback :smile: haha.

So the site is primarily aimed at 2 profiles

  1. Fellows involved at the technical phases of a typical software development process for:
    _ their viewing pleasure
    _ striking interesting conversations like this

  2. Potential recruiters who may be Tech Leads or Human Resources personnel interested in hiring a designer

Based on my understanding of the second paragraph, I didnt intend for the website to just display a gallery or portfolio of my work. I also wanted the site’s build to reflect my design/coding skills hence why I created this page. Also I never name it a portfolio website alone. I want it to serve other purposes such as a blog so i always add the personal in the title personal/portfolio website.
I perfectly understanding what you’re saying. Im saying from the feedback ive been getting, it seems to be achieving what i intended :slight_smile:.

I dont think i copied Google’s old design. I started building the site and backend app a few hours a week as a side thing since last year. ALL design inspiration in respect to Google can be dated only as far back as 2016.
As for the account login area, Google recently changed that. After the first wave of user tests i conducted about one & half months ago, I decided to scrap that page. Ill probably implement in the next major update. Can you comment more on why you think its “fishy”?
Please reference this link for more info. It answers many of the questions you asked in the 3rd and 4th paragraphs.

@kwedo, I hope I provided enough answers. Again, thanks so much for taking the time to review & respond, I deeply appreciate.

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I really like this portfolio! The only thing for me, is that I want to see more of your style, not googles. But, I did think this was very creative.

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I liked the initial material design, especially the contact link coming up as a ‘compose email’ - really nice touch.
This link was sadly broken: http://ojanti.com/watchlist
I feel it lacks your creative input rather than just using Google’s components.
The personalisation was nice, but I kept wanting to click in the search bar :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the feedback @dan0 :slight_smile: . It resonates well with feeback from others.
Yes, the search bar has been an issues. I will work on that as well other points in the next version

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