During my certification course, I was tasked with the following.

A client needs help launching an app that connects different types of visual artists in the area. They are a visual artists and a small business owner that runs a tattoo shop. They are interested in starting a virtual artists cooperative bringing local artists together and exchanging ideas about tattooing and other forms of visual art. They want to see where it goes and how it can help their business in terms of increasing awareness and cultivating innovation.

For this project, as the sole designer, researcher and stakeholder, my role was to research, prototype, test, design, and delivery an image-sharing app with a social twist that allowed artists to not only provide feedback for each other, but to allow artists a space to set up future collaborations with all kinds of other artists, both locally and globally.

Again, as the only stakeholder on the project, I was responsible for all background research starting at square one. To start, I began with some competitive analysis of similar sites and apps that artists are most likely to be using to fulfill this need. To summarize these findings and get a baseline from our starting point, I completed a feature inventory of these competitors.

With the foundation established, my next steps were to find artists and potential users of this new app.

Recruitment began, and I was able to do some qualitative interviews with artists around the country that specialize in all kinds of mediums. I quickly discovered the whys behind our participants' career choice. Every single participant was passionate about their love for art and making the world a more beautiful place. And every single participant had discovered their love of art as a child in school.

For our artists, collaboration was a way to expand their art and learn new things from other artists in the field. Affinity mapping after the interviews unlocked some other common themes: much of their current feedback on art was from friends and family on social media platforms. Sometimes, this was appreciated. Often times, it was unwarranted. Mostly, it was extremely positive and supportive. Rarely was this feedback actually useful or impactful.

All of our artists had a secondary career in order to financially survive, but again, all of our artists hoped for financial freedom through their true passion of making art. Making the jump from hobby or secondary career to primary source of income was not only a daunting one, but for the participants that have tried or were actively trying, was difficult to be taken seriously or communicate the value of their art and hard work into dollars.

Although all our participants had different backgrounds, different types of art, different careers, etc., there were an incredible amount of similarities in terms of what they felt was missing for their profession in the social media realm. Because of this, I was able to create an extensive persona to translate what artists actually would use, and what opportunities we had to create this space for them.

Once I felt that I had a hard understanding of who our user was, it was time to shift gears into designing the application.

I created a storyboard to indicate the steps needed to reach the goal of finding, outreaching, connecting with, and collaborating with another local artist. Next, I created a user flow using Miro to display how that same process would work.

In order to create the information architecture in a way that makes sense to users and not just stakeholders, I did an online card sort with participants. The goal was to help shape the information architecture for the design of ART-spire and uncover how intended users expect to see content and information organized on the site/application.

Related outcomes from ART-spire research