A recent article on feverbee points out that “most online communities are designed for lurkers“. It’s true. A lot of energy is spent on creating great interesting content to attract new people, and with success. But after that, the new user is left on his own. The welcome message is cold (almost rude), and when he arrives at the community he’s lost and doesn’t know where to start. A few brave souls may have the courage to write a few words, but many of them are scared away when the desired reaction just doesn’t come.

In a library people are silent

An accurate metaphor for a content-driven ‘community’ is a library. And what happens when people walk into a library? They whisper, walk slowly and try not to disturb the other people there. Social psychologists have shown that just the association of the concept library is enough to make people speak softer. For the vibrant active community you have in mind, that’s not the behavior you want to stimulate.

If you don’t want to silence your newbies, but get them to connect with your existing community members, look at what you can learn from other real life situations. How do people start talking? What do they say and what do they do? People online are still people, and they tend to follow all the normal rules of social interaction.

it’s not that hard

In a community that I’m involved with, we’ve recently taken a few simple steps to help our newcomers really join. The account confirmation email was replaced by a welcome message offering guidance and a little encouragement. Instead of demanding new members to “introduce yourself! within a week, or else…”, we’re now welcoming them and ask them the kind of questions you would expect to hear at a real life meeting as well (hi, what’s your name? what brought you here? what are you interested in? etc.). We’re paying explicit attention to the first few interactions, where a fast friendly reply can make all the difference between feeling ignored and feeling welcome. And it seems to work. People find their way more easily, and are more comfortable than before.

It helps inform the people who care about you and your work, and with a good online portfolio you can share your work with a large audience, including those who can’t physically come to your expositions due to time constraints (or travel distance). Here are some tips on how to arrive at an effective portfolio:

know what you want to achieve

Ask yourself this question: ‘if my online portfolio was an enormous success, what would I get from it?’ For some people the main goal will be to drive sales of their art work, for others the best thing that can happen is that they get in touch with people who are now unreachable, and for still others the whole point of having a portfolio may be described in terms of building reputation and getting recognition as an artist.

A great portfolio gets the message across. Another question: if you could just say one sentence to your visitors, what would it be? It’s easy to get lost in trying to say too much, to too many people, so be as specific as you can.

who are you talking to?

Who’s your target audience? Who are you trying to reach? Are there different groups of people, with different goals and needs? If you already have an existing portfolio, start with your current visitors: who are they, what is their background, do you know them? If you are starting from scratch, try working from your intended audience, or from your imaginary ideal customer.

Some techniques to get into the head of your audience (but I’m getting a bit technical here… if you need help, just let me know): build personas, write stories, do user research, create empathy maps. The best thing you can do is talk to real people, in the wild (not online) and observe what they are doing.

learn from others

There are so many good and bad examples… simply google for the product/service you will be offering, ask your friends and spend a few hours on just browsing to other people’s websites. It will help you discover what is technically possible, and what you want for your own presentation. Make a list of websites you like, and a list of websites you really don’t like (take notes about what you like/dislike).

In an earlier post I described a prototypical portfolio website from a few years ago. That one was based on mainly web design portfolios, but many of the principles apply to other disciplines too. You really need to provide an opportunity to get in touch with you, you might want to list your clients or the people you’ve worked with, and you might want to tell a little background story on each project you have done.

thoughts, emotion, behavior, tone and style

Time to make some decisions. A portfolio website should not exist in isolation, but be part of your larger business strategy and certainly fit within your marketing plan. What is the desired tone/style for the design? Jot down some keywords (think for example informal/formal, cold/warm, female/male, subtle/bold, informative/inspiring).

What kind of emotions should your visitors feel? What should they be thinking when they first arrive on your site? And, most importantly, what do you want them to do? Even if you’re not directly selling, think of what else you can offer to build a relationship and help them a bit closer to their goals. Do you want them to get in touch with you? They’ll need your contact information, or could use a contact form. Do you want them to subscribe to a newsletter? Tell them about it.

You’re a creative professional, so use your creativity. You really don’t need technical skills, or knowledge of html/css/flash/etc to get started, just pen&paper will do. Draw at least 6 sketches exploring different design directions quickly (shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes, then you’re getting into too much detail). Take a step back and decide what works on what not. (If you decide to go to a professional web designer and developer later, you can start the conversation from here and get better and more accurate information).

start small, try, test and iterate

If you’re just starting, you probably have a small budget for your website. That’s okay. One of the greatest advantages of the web is that you don’t need to get it perfect the first time. You can start small, with little or no budget, and that will help you find out what works and what doesn’t work for you. When your business grows, your website can grow with you.

(Oh, and don’t forget to have fun and enjoy yourself!)

The methods section of the Usability body of knowledge. It presents benefits, disadvantages, descriptions, and links to further resources for a number of techniques. Not everything is complete yet, but the list is growing.

UX Techniques: Effective ways to resolve digital design challenges An iphone app listing why/when/how for 45 different UX techniques (or 15 in the free version). Grouped into categories: gather, organize, understand, explain, test. Clear and concise, nicely organized.

Ideo method cards A deck of 51 cards, with a single method on each card. Not very detailed, but can work well as an inspiration tool in the UX process.

UXBASIS has a selection of 24 methods, grouped by the stage in the project, displayed as an animated pie chart. For each of the methods there is a short description of ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘how’.

My personal favorite methods at the moment are the contextual inquiries (talking with people and observing them while they complete a task in a natural context), low fidelity paper prototyping and focus groups/participatory design. Card sorting is great too, to find the natural structure in a large collection of items. And the classic heuristic evaluation to find issues and suggest improvements for an existing website or application.

If working with one participant at a time, use normal think-aloud instructions. Do a warm-up exercise if necessary. Alternatively, you could pair up your participants and have them talk to each other, or use a larger group.

• Encourage to make a pile for ‘other’ or ‘don’t know this item’. That way the sort will be focused on items that the participants have something to say about. You can always revisit the rest pile at a later stage.
• Ask why questions (that is, if they don’t talk enough on their own). Why does this item belong in pile A? With really strong participants such as true domain experts you can even ask ‘why not’ without influencing the results (for example when asking a medical doctor to categorize symptoms).
• Often, during the sort people will change their mind. Add a new category, change a label, or move an item. This is where it gets really interesting. What was wrong, why is this better?
• Have some blank cards ready, in case a participant can’t choose between two or more piles because he feels the item can belong to all of them. In that case you can duplicate the card.
• When the sort is complete, take a look at the results. Does your participant feel that any items were missing? If that’s the case, it’s easy to create a few extra cards and at them to the relevant piles.
• After the initial sort, you can move up or down into the hierarchy. Ask to split up large categories into subcategories. And ask to group multiple categories together into supercategories. You can strongly encourage splitting up by taking 3 random items, and asking which 2 are most similar (the other one will go into a new category, taking all items that belong there too with it).
• Some members of a category are more central than others. You can ask which items are the best, most representative, example(s) for each category.
• Ask questions about the chosen labels. What makes them a good description? Alternative wordings?
• Ask questions about the participant. How familiar are they with the items? Do they consider themselves an expert in the domain? If so, did that influence their sorting?

With this type of card sorting the final groupings are less important than the thoughts during the process. Your questions may influence the participant’s behavior, so I wouldn’t mix the results from such sessions with those where participants work on their own.

Portfolio Design Study: Design Patterns and Current Practices – Smashing Magazine

How does the typical portfolio site look?

Prototypical portfolio site: light design, with neutral, calm colors in a horizontally centered layouts with two to three columns and a simple large horizontal navigation with right-aligned elements including a link to the ‘about us’ page, some kind of introductory block in the upper area, contact link in the upper-right corner.
For every project there’s a detailed page including case studies, testimonials, slideshows with screenshots, drafts and sketches. There is some form of standalone services page. The contact page contains driving directions, a phone number, email address, postal address, vCard and online form.

A great example of the effects that user testing can have is this case study: The $300 Million Button

For this particular webshop user testing showed that users didn’t want to register before making a purchase. Removing the obligation to create an account resulted in 45% more customers purchasing, which translated in an added revenue of 300 MILLION in the first year.

Still, the physical keyboard is the preferred tool to use when you need to do a lot of typing. I’ve heard many people complain about their lost abilities to write neatly with pen and paper, and many of them are certain that typing is much easier and faster. For those who type a lot, touch typing really helps to improve speed. The dvorak keyboard never really caught on though, and qwerty is everywhere.

If you know where to find the keys, you don’t need vision anymore. For feedback on your typing you can rely on other senses: touch and hearing. The old mechanical typewriters had a nice typing sound that could really keep you in a writing rhythm. The people from Das Keyboard took this idea pretty seriously and created a keyboard with blank keys, no peeking. It has mechanical clicking sounds and keys that feel nice to your fingers.

• Das Keyboard: The mechanical keyboard that clicks
  A computer keyboard with blank keys and mechanical clicking sounds built into the keys. No visual feedback on this one, but tactile and auditory combined with memory and learning.
  (tags: keyboard design haptics)