The relationship established between job candidates and design firms during an interview is critical. The ability to understand how someone works; how they approach projects; how they communicate is essential to finding right-fitting candidates.

On the candidate side: There are few centralized on-line places for a candidate to benchmark digital portfolios or to share work with potential employers.

Candidates need to attract employers, share their professional goals and previous work as well as express their personality.

Project Goals
We want to create something that will be useful in helping prospective employers learn about us, our work and the way we work. That being the case, we want a tangible product/site that demonstrates our information design and interaction design abilities. We want to produce something that highlights our strategic expertise as well as our visual communication abilities. And we want to work as a team to push common concepts of a portfolio into a broader scope.

Plan and Approach
Our plan is to follow the standard Total Quality Improvement (or continuous quality improvement) steps: research, plan, produce and evaluate. This series of problem identifying and problem-solving rounds should lead to a useful, usable and user-friendly product.

The research phase will include benchmarking web sites to identify successful features and techniques. We will also look at other forms of communication that will challenge our current perceptions, such as film, articles, interactive media, etc. We also hope to casually survey professional associations and design firms. Through this we hope to identify, at a minimum, customer information, customer needs and competitive information.

The planning phase will include identification of improvement opportunities, scheduling and understanding what is necessary to enable and manage an improvement/devlopment plan.

The production phase will include prototyping, cause and effect diagrams, and visualizing spaces and relationships among other things.

The evaluation phase will verify that our goals have been met by doing usability testing, reviewing performance measurements, identifying shortcomings, determining corrective actions and making modifications.

A timeline with major milestones follows. The specific tasks needed to realize this plan will follow in the coming week.

Expected Results
A working HTML site full of rich information, striking graphic design, and an intuitive interface. We expect this to result in a dynamic environment that will attract employers as well as creative-types. This space will be adaptable and could eventually provide services to organizations such as AIGA, University Career Centers and Employment Agencies.