Website Design, Build, and Automation – Portfolio Assignment 1
Overview
Persona(s) –
- Students from ENP-161/293 –
- The users from this group will be doing similar assignments and portfolio work as I have on this website.
- They will be driven there by links on Canvas
- The students will care about their grades, and their life journey will be a little bit like mine as in they are current students just trying to survive the semester 🙂
- The students will be hoping to find portfolio and blog items that are engaging and relevant to the Human Factors topics being covered in class
- They may like the simple design aesthetic and easy to use UX; I am not sure what they will dislike, but there is chatbot that can collect data on that eventually
- Friends/Family that know about farabeck.com
- This group of users will be random friends and family that have the link to farabeck.com and happen to click it.
- The site has been inactive for a while so it probably will not get much use from this group unless my wife or I post about it on social media (which we may)
- They will care about what we are up to and see what I am learning about in school using their tax money
- They will most like the photos we have in the Photo tab
InfoArcht – The information on this site is organized into easy to understand pages with links located at the top of the site (Portfolio, Blog, Photos, etc). The first two items were chosen since they were part of the course requirement. The photos tab was created because my wife and I like photography and wanted to showcase some of our stuff here.
Brand – The brand of this site is modern/clean/simple. The wordpress theme was chosen by my wife and I because we like the clean look of it and how it easily presents the information in a logical format. We also liked the color yellow and so chose this theme since it included that. Beyond that, we want to have users see a site where they can learn about what I am working on, see some photos we have taken and learn a little about us. In the future this site will probably grow to include some of my PhD work, maybe a file share, and our CV/Resumes. The website address will be on our LinkedIn accounts and be added to our personal business cards.
UX – As I said in the branding section, we wanted this site to be modern/clean/simple and the UX reflects this. The fonts, colors and style are easy on the eyes with minimal distractions. There are pictures to look at since everyone likes pictures and the site should flow well for the two groups of people identified in the “Persona(s)” section.
Automation – Part of assignment 1 was to automate some part of the website. I decided to try two different automation items. The first one is a simple IFTTT recipe which will automatically take any new blog posts posted on this website and post them to my twitter account automatically. It is a useful feature for friends of mine that may not be in the two groups of personas mentioned above and could drive visitors to the website. The second item I automated was the chatbot seen on the bottom right of the page. If you click the little avatar it will greet you and ask a couple questions…this data is aggregated and can be reviewed at a later time. It is a simple demonstration of automation logic and was an easy to use plug-in that anyone can learn. I didn’t get too far into the chat bot mostly because I didn’t want to pay the $30/mo for the full fledged features, but as a demonstration it’s pretty cool. The chatbot function would be really nice for a sales website in case you wanted to answer common questions and I may use it for future PhD research depending on how that page eventually turns out.
Date
September 17, 2019