Once in a while, I get sucked down a rabbit hole by a side project that’s so compelling that I just can’t leave it alone. Such was the case with the challenge of building an interactive visual CV.
I was inspired by an article I read in the Gamestorming blog about an interactive CV template called the JourneyFolio, a framework developed by Raquel Felix using Google Slides. It consists of a slide with a horizontal timeline, on which are displayed rounded rectangles that represent the jobs and responsibilities in one’s career timeline. These link to other slides in the deck that contain mini-portfolios of the author’s work.
I was totally intrigued by the interactive nature of this framework, but I found that it presented two significant usability problems: First, I thought it might cause some visitors to lose a sense of place while exploring it. What I mean is this: Each time they click on a timeline element, the JourneyFolio “jumps” them to another slide in the deck. They then needed to click on a “home” icon to jump you back to slide one, the timeline. I thought this may be confusing to some people.
It also occurred to me that the large number of unlabeled timeline elements in the JourneyFolio timeline would create a challenge for time-challenged hiring managers. That’s because each one is a mystery – you must click to see what’s behind it. I couldn’t picture a busy hiring manager repeating this “hide and seek” process numerous times to get a sense of a candidate’s experience and past work.
The JourneyFolio concept was so intriguing that I felt compelled to create my own, using a similar timeline but employing pop-over windows to contain the details of each job and mini-portfolio. This would enable visitors to easily view my work – without ever leaving the timeline (click here or on the image below to visit my interactive visual CV).
I was able to create this attractive visual timeline in a web-based graphics tool called Visme, which I recently featured when its developer released version 4.0 of its remarkably broad and capable toolset. Please click here or on the image below to view my interactive visual CV.
To help you visualize how I created this interactive CV, how it works and what I learned about using Visme’s toolset to manage and optimize the large number of objects and actions it contains, I created this video. I hope you enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at this project! (click the icon in the lower right corner of the video to view it fullscreen)
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