I want to create a new project for my portfolio, a fictitious one in hopes of getting clients or jobs down the road. The only thing I know is that I want it to be a website for desktop. I want to design to solve a problem but what is the best way to do that? In what way do I find problems worth solving?
There is an Indian website for booking Indian Railway tickets with massive amount of traffic.
However, it’s usability is very very poor.
You could probably redesign the website and add it in your portfolio.
Key points to remember about that site are:
- URL - www.irctc.co.in
- India is multilingual with Hindi being the national language and hence the highest number of speakers, followed by English and a zillion other regional languages.
- The target audience of the website consists of grossly illiterate and uneducated users who hardly use any internet in their daily lives. They are not tech savvy at all.
- The website books around 8,000 tickets/minute.
- 40% of customers pay for IRCTC Ticket Booking through Internet banking & 30% user use Credit/Debit cards.
And of course you can google to find out more about IRCTC.
But this project would be very useful as it can add to your portfolio a lot of UX related things.
Hi Ralph,
This took me awhile to figure out. Basically, anything - website or app - that you think could be improved. I picked an app I use for tracking the international space station. Then I’ve got a list to go down : hair salon appointment app, online grocery shopping app/website, women’s health, elementary school teacher resource sharing website, etc. Literally anything. It can be something that already exists, or one you’ve never seen before. Just pick something and start.
Something I had to push through to get started: my first personal project is going to suck. And I needed to be ok with that. I don’t want it to suck, but after trying the ux process a few times, getting the flow, maybe I’ll come back and redo my first one, see if I can do it better. Just need to get it done.
Best of luck!
Marie
Yea thanks. I can’t overthink it and just pick something and improve on it.