Portfolio Redesign: New Design Plans
Although there are many goals for the new portfolio's design, I believe the three most important goals are to communicate the 'big picture' of the portfolio, to address concerns about relevance, and to increase the average visit duration.
The Big Picture
Feedback from friends, colleagues, and prospective employers suggested that my existing design seemed "thrown together"—which it was, admittedly—and that it lacked a solid message. I've decided that communicating a clear, cohesive message is the primary priority for the new portfolio design.
Specifically, that message will be: "I walk the line between design, development, and usability". I believe this is my primary strength—relatively few people can switch between those roles without them interfering with one another, but I've been training and practicing just that for several years now—and that this message also maps easily onto recruiter and employer goals, for both generalist and specialist positions.
Relevance
Some of the best feedback I received on the old design dealt with the seeming-irrelevant nature of several of the entries, particularly my Master's thesis (which initially emphasized technical details, and nothing else) and some presentations and lectures I delivered as a graduate student (which were not part of any class or requirement, but appeared as though they were). This ambiguity distracted from the actual portfolio items, and made some intentional decisions appear unintentional.
To remedy this, everything will be segmented by design, usability, and development work: a project which overlaps multiple areas (as many of my projects do) will have multiple pages, rather than trying to 'do it all' on a single page. The information architecture and navigation of the new design will be built around this goal of ensuring (and communicating) the relevance of each facet of each item.
Visit Duration
Site logs showed that many visitors did not explore beyond one item in the portfolio, and that they often spent little time on even that one item. To assess the new design I will measure both the number of portfolio items viewed per visit and the total time of each visit.
Although my ultimate goal is to get hired (which is a very easy metric to measure ;-)), I will use those visit-oriented metrics to determine whether or not the new design is genuinely better—and, later on, to do some A/B tests as I add new material. (The rapid addition of new material led to many of the problems with the old design, I believe, so future changes will progress more carefully.)