It is easy when you are designing your tribute or portfolio to just throw buttons, progress bars, and dropdowns on there just because they look cool and others are doing it. However, little design choices can have huge consequences. One mistake I often see is people putting their skills on progress bars like this (taken from someone’s codepen):
At first glance, it may appear like a nifty design, but it is actually not that good. Instead of giving a glance of your best skills, you are showing that you are rather bad at JavaScript and PHP. The 95% and 90% for HTML and WordPress are also highly subjective, and if you are rating yourself that high in those categories while rating your self that much worse in JavaScript, it is probable that you are very bad at JavaScript.
That’s trivial. Poor design choices led to a panic in Hawaii last weekend as Hawaiians were greeted with a message: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” Sure, the worker who pressed the button is an idiot. Go ahead, blame Trump because he has probably escalated fears of missiles falling out of the sky. But the whole thing could have been easily prevented if whoever designed the program had been more conscious of design. An example of the interface by Quartz:
If you were given the option above which would you pick? This is a horrible design implementation by the developer. The user is given two almost identical options with two disastrously different results. Don’t do this to your users. I have below a link to the article, and I think you should read it. I found it very helpful and eye-opening.
So, while throwing buttons on your projects may seem trivial, you MUST think about your user’s perspective and consequences that may arise because of your choices.