Description

During my exchange semester in Tokyo, I decided it was time to get a portfolio. I was keen to try out the new methodologies I had learned. Lean production from my Japanese Business Management class as well as GV's Sprint learned from Jake Knapp's book Sprint. After filling the coffee supply and purchased sticky notes for the week, I turned my room into a design war room.

Design

To kick off the creative process of my portfolio, I conducted a five-day sprint. The idea was to generate unbiased ideas before going on to gather inspiration from other great websites. Throughout the process of creating the portfolio, I have been using a Kanban to structure my work. Throughout, from the design process to maintenance, I have used a Kanban to prioritize, structure, and learn by evaluation.

Design Sprint

An ideal Sprint should be conducted in a team. However, several of the techniques from the book can be used individually as well. The method proved to be great at quickly generating ideas and not dwelling for too long on potential obstacles. After having gone through the five-day sprint, I increased the fidelity of the portfolio. I developed hi-fi prototypes in Sketch as well as writing the copy for the different sections.

![Design Sprint]( "Design Sprint")

Development

Having gone through a proper conceptualization process, I had a clear idea about the design when starting the implementation. Since I had a solid design foundation, I decided to build the portfolio from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. During development, I've been using GitHub routinely. Although the risk of deploying harmful or conflicting updates as a sole developer is very slim, I consider version control to be good practice for all development.

Accessibility

As a UX designer, I always have accessibility in mind during development. This portfolio is not created to be accessed by the masses. However, I still think it was essential to making it available to everyone. Examples of such measures are responsivity, platform compatibility, SSL security, and image optimization for saving bandwidth.

Takeaways

The portfolio is an ongoing project, meaning there is always room for improvement. Putting methods in place to prioritize and formulate concrete goals for each task has been vital. Several times during the development and maintenance of the portfolio, I was unsatisfied with the design. However, continually setting deliverables to deploy changes made the difference between realizing the portfolio and it being stuck in countless variations of undeployable prototypes.