PORTFOLIO WEBSITE.

WORK WITH CLIENT – RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN.

UX RESEARCH PLAN.

BACKGROUND

The client is a musician and composer working in the niche of film score writing. She needs a responsive portfolio website where she could share her audio and video works with the potential clients in order to make them interested in hiring her.

PROBLEM

Since the project is for a highly competitive field of job finding, it makes it crucial for the product to stand out and convey the client’s uniqueness in the way that will benefit her goal.

RESEARCH GOALS

·         Learn what the client’s goals, motivations and expectations are.

·         Find out what can make our website stand out among other similar websites.

·         Get to understand the target user better.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

·         Discuss with the client her goals, motivations and expectations concerning the to-be-designed website.

·         Choose a few strong direct competitors and run a competitive research to learn about their strengths and weaknesses.

·         Organize and conduct user interviews to understand the target user better.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

·         What is the reason behind the project? What are the main goals, motivations and expectations of the client?

·         Does the client have any examples of what she expects?

·         Who are our competitors?

·         What strengths and weaknesses do our competitors have?

·         How can we use the information about our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses for the benefit of the website?

·         Who is our target user?

·         What does the target user expect from a portfolio website?

·         What positive or negative experiences did they have with portfolio websites in the past?

·         How can we use that information to make our website more convenient in the eyes of the user?

METHODOLOGIES

·         Client Interview:

-       prepare an interview script;

-       share a list of possible questions with the client so that she knows what to expect and can prepare better;

-       ask the client if she already has any particular examples of what end result she expects, and if so, then ask her to have those examples ready for the meeting; if not – possibly prepare a few examples to discuss in order to learn more about what will work for the client and what won’t;

-       have an interview with the client;

-       find out what information she already has and what information needs to be obtained;

-       discuss the examples of other websites to determine her goals and expectations;

-       record the interview and then document the findings.

·         Competitive Research:

-       pick a 3 or 4 good examples of composer’s portfolio websites;

-       run a competitive analysis of the chosen competitor websites;

-       document strengths and weaknesses of the competitors;

-       summarize a conclusion of what we learned from the competitor analysis and how we could benefit from that knowledge.

·         User Interviews:

-       write a script containing the user interview questions;

-       recruit participants;

-       conduct the interview based on the interview script as well as ask additional insightful questions depending on how the conversation goes;

-       record the interviews (with the permission of the interviewees);

-       document the findings.

PARTICIPANTS

·         The client.

·         Potential users: film directors, producers, content creators, composer agents, etc.

ASSUMPTIONS AND RISKS

·         Client might not agree with the results of the research and still want things to be done differently.

·         Difficulties might arise when finding and scheduling interviews with the movie industry representatives within a limited time frame.

TIMELINE

·         Prepare a client interview script.

·         Conduct the client interview.

·         Document the findings.

·         Run a competitive research.

·         Prepare a user interview script.

·         Recruit user interview participants.

·         Conduct user interviews.

·         Document the findings.

·         Summarize all the findings in a research debrief.

·         Create user personas based on the research.