Portfolio Feedback

Hi everyone,

I’m a graduate student from Carleton University up here in Canada! Looking forward to starting my career in design and I’d be interested in getting some feedback on my latest portfolio.

My works are available for viewing at: http://www.christopher-dang.com/. Any feedback would be appreciated. I tried to include a mix between student works (which have more process) to internship/professional work (which include produced projects, but little to no process due to NDAs).

Thanks!
Chris

Funny, I just reviewed a portfolio and it was based on exactly the same template.
So advice number one: if you use a template, make sure you customize it enough so it becomes your own personal website - and remove cues that tell that a template has been used such as the ‘-view-’ tags on every image link. It is very valuable to invest in some basic HTML/CSS skills and build a website from scratch.

All in all you have a great portfolio, showing multidisciplinary projects with corporate stakeholders. You have great product design abilities and this shows. Your best project in my view is Clearscope, this seems like a viable solution to implement. You do some user research but you can develop in involving your end user more throughout your projects. What your projects also lack is a proof of concept - a user test and quantitative statement where you show your proposed solution can be turned into a market-ready product. Especially your social BBQ project is wonderful and would be so much enriched with doing cycles of user research and improvement using a basic testing platform. It can be optimized for portability and include holders for all tools, a coal handling system, smoke handling etc.

When doing projects like Shoplist you deal with many stakeholders and are intervening in a quite complex system. I like your designerly approach but it can be backed up more by referring to methodologies and showing higher-level thinking next to the methods you are already using. This was a promising project and it is too bad it resulted in a smartphone barcode scanner that looks less usable than those already on the market. Your app is nice and you make good observations regarding what people need, overall what is not taken into account is that actually, when shopping people don’t want to deal with devices and lists unless they are in a hurry. So along offering these functionalities, you can aim to make shopping more fun or more social and enrich the app with more personal and contextual information.

You have great skills, a strong process approach and good ideas, now it is time to decide what specifically you want to do in the industry.