Hawk, sure. So this was me wanting to do some research on what makes a good resume. I have been looking at some ux resumes and they seem to be very visual which i like but i wanted to get information from people who deal with them everyday. I also wanted to see what the preferred format and file types were. I figured this would be a good chance to also get permission to interview them for our portfolio project.
Here is a link to the survey.
Nice, thanks everyone. Im getting some interesting feedback so far. I will post a report. I also got several willing participants for skype interviews on the portfolios.
Here are the results of the survey thus far. If you scroll down to the data table you can see we have 5 willing to do Skype interviews for the portfolio. I think this is a good start. We now need to define the questions we want to ask for the interview.
https://titanstudio.wufoo.com/reports/resume-ux-report/
I was thinking of using one of the portfolios on Hawks list (thinking this one: http://www.andyhugelier.com/ ) and do a usability study with the recruiters for a baseline.
Thoughts?
Ok, time to get this project back on track.
Those survey results are excellent (aside from the ambiguous ânon-traditionalâ question results). I see that the overwhelming majority of people prefer Word as a their preferred file type for a âresumeâ. Did you specifically use that word? I wonder if the people surveyed were thinking along the lines of resumes, or specifically of portfolios, which are a very different thingâŚ
I love Andy Hugelierâs portfolio, not least because it follows a format that weâre pretty used to these days, so I think itâs intuitively easy to follow.
Are the people that answered that survey recruiters that knew you were talking about a UX role?
Hawk,
The survey was resume only. As i researched ux resumes i seen a large number of them, with claimed excellent results, did not appear as traditional resumes. Some even resembled infographics more than resumes. Yet most recruiters swear they dont present well. I ran this survey to see if that was still the case and it appears it is. Perhaps its a regional thing.
While running the survey i asked the last question asking if they would be willing to be interviewed over skype about portfolios which helped us get participants for this phase of portfolio research.
Initially, i thought lets interview them to get a better understanding of what they look for. However, i did a lot of research on ux portfolios and decided to create a hi-fi fully funtional portfolio based on that research. Now, i think we should actually do contextual inquiry on those recruiters using my site and go from there.
If that makes sense, i will finish up the prototype in the next few days but we can begin planning the user testing now. Would anyone like to do 1 or 2 inquiries? Keep in mind these are recruiters based in US EST so may present some issues for the peeps time wise. Otherwise i can perform them and post videos.
We could begin working on a script for the user testing now as well⌠We can either base that on basic ux portfolio research or do personas with user stories? Or⌠Im open to suggestions.
-Noq
I talked this through with the team today and they back what youâre saying â UX recruiters often prefer âresumesâ in more traditional formats such as Word (which may be because they import them into another software platform). Iâm not sure what that means in regards to this project.
Would anyone like to do 1 or 2 inquiries
Do you mean interviews?
Hawk,
The resume report means nothing to this project per say, it was separate research i performed. I posted the results purely as informational and most importantly because the table shows the recruiters that are willing to do interviews, in regards to portfolios, along with their contact info.
My thought was instead of doing research interviews, we do full on remote user testing on the site i have with the recruiters. That is why i say âinquiriesâ. If that is not the correct approach then my apologies. Research interviews would certainly help as well. Or perhaps we are just mixing symantics lol.
That is why i say âinquiriesâ. If that is not the correct approach then my apologies.
Not incorrect at all, I just needed clarification.
I think that doing remote user testing on the existing site is a great idea. I know that Iâve seen it already (assuming by âsiteâ you mean your interim portfolio), but have you published it for the group yet?
So, next step is to do some interviews, and collect some data from other sources too? Iâd suggest a competitive anaysis and some hunting through analytics (such as Google Analytics) for the existing site, if available.
Hi, just wanted to touch base with everyone. Forums can be tough to communicate through for something such as this where team input is so vital. I will tell you where I am at in the process and we can pick it up from there.
I went ahead and performed competitive research using the links in HAWKâs article. I also did an impromptu email interview with Dr. David Travis to get his input. While I want to give the Ux process its due diligence and learn as much as I can from it, I have been getting quite a few linkedIn hits asking for portfolios.
In addition, I wanted to get some answers on how to recreate my resume. I did some competitive research there as well and found that what I was seeing resume wise from the Ux community differed from long time resume beliefs ( i.e. keep it to 1 page, donât use graphics, donât put pictures of yourself, etc.) So I devised a quick survey and sent it out to the recruiters in my LinkedIn profile. To try and kill two birds with one stone, the very last question on that resume survey asked if they would be willing to do a Skype interview on portfolios. We have 4 that were very interested in willing. So we have that list here in the resume report (if you look at the first data table, the last column indicates yes or no for the interview). We actually had 5 but one did not put their name in. My bad on that⌠should have made it mandatory.
https://titanstudio.wufoo.com/reports/resume-ux-report/
Emma Jones - emma@mitchellake.com
GeorgieCarpenter - georgie@10collective.com.au(AU)
Hillary Mueller - hmueller@brooksource.com
Jason Hamberg - jhamberg@cohesion.com
So, while it is still a work in progress, here is my new prototype Portfolio. I have not sent it out to be proof read yet so excuse the grammar. If anyone is good at that sort of thing and would like to help please feel free.
http://titanstudio.net/jc.html
My thought is instead of doing basic research with the recruiters above, we instead use my prototype site as our baseline and actually do some user testing with it via remote moderated (or unmoderated) testing. That is kind of where we are at right now. I would also like your guys feedback in it, since you are also stakeholders and subject matter experts.
If we are all in agreement, I think the next step would be lets come up with a user testing script. (I was thinking perhaps a brainstorm session via the forum) and then assign them the task of doing the moderated remote tests.
Hope it all makes sense.
-Noq
Ok, weâre getting somewhere.
So now we: [LIST=1]
[]Write a user testing script
[]Use that script to run user testing (via Skype) on this prototype site with the 4 recruiters listed above
[/LIST] I havenât written a user testing script before so I canât take the lead on that, but Iâm going to call in @mattymcg and @Lukcha
In the mean time I will write up this project where it currently stands for publishing on the uxmastery.com blog, and we may get some new blood to take part.
If its remote moderated i cant see it being all that different script wise as being there physically. Unmoderated i think the difference is that you need to be pretty detailed with the script since you cant guide them like you could with moderation. The one thing i learned at a usertesting.com webinar from Steve Krugg is to make sure you test the script first before doing it to make sure it works. These would be my thoughts but would like insight if anyone has it on remote testing. @ASHM has some experience with this i believe.
I have some experience writing remote testing scripts, although it was a while ago. They werenât moderated.
Youâve had some interaction with the test subjects via the survey already, so theyâve got good context. The biggest hurdle I faced with usertesting.com was that the subjects really were from all walks of life, and didnât have the same kind of context. So they just didnât get some tasks, or they went off on completely unrelated tangents or got completely stuck, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The biggest hurdle youâre likely to face here is technical glitchesâwhat will you do if their Skype connection is patchy, or the website goes down? Also, be sure to make a note of any cookies/clicked links/caching that needs resetting before each test.
I agree that testing your script to make sure that there are avenues where test participants can skip ahead if theyâre stuck is definitely important, regardless of whether youâre moderating it or not. It should give you some insight into what you might have missed. But there is still the potential for someone doing something completely random that you donât anticipate.
And sometimes thatâs the most interesting ⌠other times itâs just a waste of time. 
Itâs good that youâre moderating the tests as it will be valuable experience.
So perhaps the next obvious step would be to start a new thread to write the script, and then testing it on us as a dry run?
Sorry guys⌠Been feeling under the weather. Let me get something up this weekend.
Great points Natalie. I agree overall itâs pretty goodâcaptures enough personality without too much fluff.
I think your objective is much better, too, @Noquarter. And I agree that removing the deadlines make sense given you want an emphasis on the learning.
I have one idea for how to measure how much youâve learned at the end of this process.
[I]Write about it[/I] (for UX Mastery, of course).
Thereâs a saying that goes âwhen one person teaches, two people learn.â At the end of this project, if you were to write up your thoughts on the process and list what youâve learned along the way, the quality of that article that would reflect how well youâve understood some of the principles and applied the techniques along the way. Weâre pretty discerning about whether something gets published (which is why we donât post new articles all that often, even though we receive many unsolicited submissions). So if it passed our quality radar (in terms of the quality of the insights/learnings recorded, not the quality of the writingâwe can help you with that) then Iâd say that we could infer that you had learned a certain amount. Of course this is arbitrary, and one never stops learning, yada yada. But itâs a start. How does that sound?
I guess the other criteria would be how well the final product performs in the marketplace.
Iâll give some thought about finding a mentor. My gut feel is that it should be separate to this project. We do get a few requests from the community on the best way to go about this. Iâm not sure itâs actually that tied to this project though. There is the IAI mentoring program, thereâs meetups, and Luke and I were running Q&A webinars for gold members at one point which in a way are a form of mentoring. This fell off the radar as weâre a bit time-poor, but itâs something Iâd like to consider running again down the track.