Learning UX – ScottPantall.com Website Design

The purpose of scottpantall.com is to give myself a live environment to experiment with web-based technologies. It will also be a resource for anyone who is interested in my professional achievements and goals. The site is built on a WordPress CMS which will allow me to re-familiarize myself with PHP and CSS.

Goal: My goal is to be working as a software developer before the year 2016. My website will help me achieve this goal by showing local tech folk my knowledge, skills and achievements. I will attract local tech folk to my site with informative Colorado Tech Weekly posts and my social media interactions. I will show off my previous knowledge, skills and achievements by showing my work, project and education history. I will show that my knowledge, skills and abilities are current and constantly improving by showing the status of self-guided, relevant projects. I will measure my success monthly by tracking webpage views from Colorado and social interactions with local tech folk.

Plan: Create honest content that is worth reading. Come up with a system to keep the site up-to-date. Once I am satisfied with my content and system, learn the basics of UX (user experience) design to find out the best ways to cater to my audience. After coming up with a design for the site, start learning the technologies needed to implement the design.

Challenges: I am happy with the content I’ve created and the system I’ve developed to keep my site up-to-date. Unfortunately I got stuck on the step of learning the basics of UX design. Self-directed learning is hard. The biggest reason is that you don’t know what you don’t know until you dive in. I was quite satisfied with my first 4 updates, but the more I learned about UX Design, the deeper I went down the rabbit hole which was not my intent.

Outcome: I did not finish my project. I’ve decided to give myself a break from learning UX design. Looking at my plan again, it was an overly ambitious plan to create content, learn UX and design and develop a website all one one project, so I’m going to scale down my projects. If the word “learn” comes up in any description of the project, I’m going to focus just on learning.

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