ePortfolio user experience design

I am working on some user experience designs for the Open University ePortfolio system.

Most of my work so far is available to view and I appreciate any comments you might have.

What’s an ePortfolio?

The title ePortfolio is misleading and needs to be dumped at the earliest opportunity since it (perhaps a little strong!) doesn’t really describe the system.

Briefly, it’s a place to put stuff. But that stuff must be digital. Files like Word Documents, PDFs, Excel Spreadsheets can happily be tossed into your ePortfolio. The contents of your fridge however, can not.

Putting all this stuff onto a webserver will not in it’s self be especially useful so an ePortfolio is also a tool to help you organise all that stuff. It enables you to attach tags (keywords) to things so you can easily locate your stuff.

The third and perhaps most interesting aspect of an ePortfolio is that is enables you to package your stuff up into meaningful collections such as a CV, Appraisal, Portfolio of work, photo gallery and more. The ePortfolio offers you a set of ever-increasing templates to get started and also enables you to create your own.

Once you have some stuff or a collection of stuff, you can then share it with people such as your tutor, employer, friends and family. You can even collaborate on stuff together. You can submit a collection of stuff to your tutor for marking and even get it varified as part of your professional recognition.

So all in all, it’s quite an interesting tool. You can read more about ePortfolios on the OU ePortfolio page.

What’s my role in all of this?

I’m working with some clever technical programmers to create a nice looking, usable web interface to encourage people to use the system and above all else, to want to use it for all the exciting things described above. But I’m not doing this all by myself. I’ve set up this blog to share my ideas and to ask for your comments. So please feel free to drop me a line.