I am planning to do exploratory research for a fictional personal portfolio project. I am trying to find out how to approach it however. For any project I know that you are trying to find problems to solve but I should be asking myself what am I trying to learn to correct? This may sound weird but I need help finding out how do I decide what I want to learn?
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Hi there!
I think I have a idea for you. For example you want to learn about check out process of a webshop. Maybe go and validate one. Choose which methodes you want to use/learn. So there might not be a problem but you can learn the methodes, by doing expert or user inteviews for example.
Does that make any sense? Just don’t focus on problems for now, but on the methodes how to solve them. If you need problems, just post something on social like: “Do you need extra conversions on your website? Let me know.” Probably you well get some response to that 
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Let’s break your personal portfolio/project down into some buckets/phases to try and glean a better understanding of what you’re hoping to accomplish here. What you are hoping to learn can fall into the following categories:
UX Design
UX Research
UX Strategy
Is there a particular part of any of these areas you want to focus on? Try and hone in.
Now, let’s ask the following: “what are my long term UX goals?” Maybe you know the answer already, which would be awesome, if not, don’t worry about it. If it’s “UX Design” for example, your project should show stronger focus on low-fidelity and computer generated UX deliverables. If it’s “UX Research”, you’ll want to focus on user interviews, creating personas, discussion guides and collecting statistics/data and interpreting qualitative/quantitative data. You would do the same for UX strategy as these two examples.
While it’s odd to me to separate the UX practice into these buckets (I do all 3), this unfortunately is how the industry interviews/hires and a major challenge I personally ran into during 2018.
If you think I’m in the right ballpark of helping you answer your question or even way off the mark please let me know in a response where I can learn more about your personal project, give further advice if this is at all helpful or maybe I just need listen and learn from others on this one. Thanks.
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