How I designed my website with the help of adplist.org
A portfolio is an essential tool for a designer to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and experience. As a UX designer, I noticed the urge for a great portfolio in the early days of my career, but it took me 6 whole years to finally design a professional portfolio. Adplist.org played a very important role in this journey of designing my portfolio.
Feedback is an unimaginably crucial element in a designer career. Good things turn into great things with proper feedback from professionals. Why am I talking about the feedback you think? The reason is that I had been having a nightmare getting UX professionals’ feedback on my work until I discovered adplis.org.
The portfolio journey started 6 years ago. In the beginning, I did not seem to be very crucial to designing the portfolio, so I just made little plans. A year later I finally started working on my portfolio and designed the first version. I even coded the website myself and launched it. However, the website did not live long and was shut down a year later. I simply got very busy with projects and did not pay attention to the portfolio.
At the end of 2019, the urge for a portfolio fired up again and I decided to collect the projects I had worked on into a PDF. I was happy to finish it, but it did not bring the expected results. I could state that it was a failure. The reason is that I was supposed to make case studies of my projects, but instead, I just made a list of the final looks of the projects. That is the reason I got rejected by several companies that did not believe in my skills.
In 2021, I finally made up my mind and planned to design my portfolio website with the case studies of the projects. The first thing I did was to complete the design of my logo which was in the process for the last 4 years. I successfully completed the logo and then I concentrated on the website. There I met a lot of difficulties from a feedback perspective.
The reason for the issue is that the designers around me are visual designers, not users. I wanted to get feedback from UX designers, especially UX managers as they were my target audience. I relied on LinkedIn and sent requests to different UX managers from across the world. But I did not get a single reply and I was devastated. I thought that I could easily approach a designer and ask for their help. But I ended up with a bunch of requests without a single reply.
I did not know what to do at that time. The project needs to be completed, days are going, time is ticking but I have no source of feedback. On one of those days, I saw a post by a designer in my LinkedIn feed. The post was about adplist.org and it got me interested. So, I visited adplist.org and ended up registering.
My first meeting with a professional UXer came fast and it was full of useful tips. I finally could improve my website based on the feedback received from my target audience. I have scheduled a lot of meetings with UX professionals from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and other European countries. All the feedback received helped me design and test my portfolio website. Besides, I got to meet real UX professionals and learn about their work processes. I exchanged ideas with them and learned from them.
The sweet part is that for all above stated I paid nothing, as the service is totally free. I strongly encourage designers to sign up for adplist.org and get the benefits. I’m not going to stop using it even if the service becomes paid. I have plans to become a mentor and help other designers across the world to enhance their career.