Exploring Art Application Design
Course: Designing for Usability
Professor: Katherine Moriwaki
Focus Area: Exploring Art
Groups: Imogene Liang, Yinan Xia, Yoonjin Bae, Fiona Jin
💡Problems
- What Problems are we trying to solve?
- How can we create an immersive and exploratory experience for both artists and spectators?
- How can the art exhibition experience be applied and translated into a digital form?
- How can we generate the same art exploration experience for art seekers and encourage creativity to art creators?
- Who are our users?
- To breakdown this design problem, it concludes that there are two clusters of people who need the connection between artist and fans.
Simply, one of them is an art creators/content exporter, one of them is the content receiver.
- Sometimes, their roles can be interchanged. Content exporters can be content receivers, content explorers can be art creators.
- What are their goals and motivations?
- For artist users, their goal is to be easily discovered and recognized by a wider group
- For fans users, their goal is to connect and discover new creative artists
🔍Personas
Cecilia
Art Student 🎨
Age:18
Location: New York City
Short description
Cecilia is a freshman who just entered New York, is full of love for art, but because of the epidemic, she can’t go to the art museum to appreciate art.
“ I am fresh in New York City and also in art world, however I came with my fully passion in art area. I want to get more connection with the art world and also have a space will can exhibit my talents.”
Cecilia’s Questions
• I am a freshman in an art school, how can I learn the latest trends around the are area?
• How can I get some connection with some art professional people?
• How can I have a platform that I can train myself in the art area outside the school?
• How can I exhibit my own artwork for free?
Skill
Have some knowledge and interest in art.
Goal
Want to learn more art and appreciate art at home.
Jay
Graphic Designer📐
Age: 27
Location: Brooklyn
Short description
Jay works as a graphic designer after his recent master’s degree. He is interested in art trends and visiting exhibitions.
“I’ll go to exhibitions that grab my attention or look cool. Sometimes the art I see serve as good inspiration. It’s a pity that I don’t get any more of that during this pandemic.”
Cecilia’s Questions
• What are ways in which I can still look for creative inspiration?
• As a working professional, where can I connect with other designers like myself?
• Realizing trends is important for my work. In what ways can I connect with emerging, creative designers to collaborate on bigger projects?
Skill
Keen observation to detail and color.
Goal
Enjoy design and understand creative trends.
Brian
Researcher 💻
Age: 32
Location: Boston
Short description
Brian is a researcher at a biology lab in Boston. To relieve his stress from work, he began to paint as a hobby. He is beginning to develop an interest in art.
“I have recently started painting as my new hobby and want to learn more about art. I have no knowledge in this area and don’t know where to start. I wish I could explore a wide range of creative talent.”
Cecilia’s Questions
• I have no background knowledge in art- where should I start?
• I’m aware of some famous masterpieces, but I’d also like to see the art being created today. Where should I look to?
• It’s a bit intimidating to walk into galleries when there aren’t many people but I’ve wanted to see work in closer detail. Can I experience a virtual gallery?
Skill
Interest to learn about art and design.
Goal
Develop a hobby and passion for visual art.
📌 Scenarios
Cecilia (18 years old, Art Student, NYC)
Cecilia is a freshman who just entered New York, full of love for art, but can’t go to art museums to appreciate art due to the pandemic.
Despite the pandemic, her passion for art still prevails and she is looking for alternatives to appreciate other people’s artworks and exhibit her work to the public to interact with creative people. She found many online platforms, but she’s unwilling to pay for a membership.
Cecilia enjoys social media and sharing photos with people because it gives her the opportunity to expand her interests. She likes to explore different artworks, try out instructive videos, and in the process get inspiration for her own work.
Lately, one of her favorite artists posted an image of his “NAME” account where he posted a step-by-step instruction on how to fold his Paper Frog for free. This grabbed her attention to try out the interactiveness of exploring and sharing art.
As she creates a post of instructions for her pearl painting, she makes sure to save other origami artwork to try out later.
Jay (27 years old, Graphic Designer, Brooklyn)
Jay is a graphic designer interested in art trends and enjoys visiting exhibitions, but it’s not necessarily his priority.
He follows his favorite graphic designers on social media and enjoys looking at their inspirations as well as discover new admirable artists.
During the pandemic, it’s a pity that he’s unable to see art exhibited and roam around in space because the presence of being in an exhibition space is what he appreciates the most.
As a working professional, he searches for recent trends in design, art, and color. He watches live broadcasts on social media to listen to people’s opinions and how they mix-match design in space.
Recently, a magazine editor introduced “NAME” and the immersive exhibition function where it feels like exploring a space of the artwork. Jay finds it charming to browse curated art collections by different users. He notices some artworks recurring in many collections and realizes new art trends.
Brian (32 years old, Researcher, Boston)
Brian is a biology researcher in Boston. Recently he has developed painting as a hobby to relieve his stress from work.
As Brian continues to paint, he realizes that he wants to learn more about different techniques beyond just painting. He wants to expand his creative horizon but doesn’t know where to start.
Last week when his sister visited him, he showed her the paintings that he had done. His sister thinks that they’re creative and recommends he upload to “NAME”. She mentions how he can get feedback from the community and learn how other people create artwork with detailed instructions.
Driven by his sister’s support, Brian uploads his paintings. He also discovers artworks that utilize everyday materials, which he had never imagined could become an art. He tries them and incorporates some of the techniques into his paintings. Yesterday Brian received 7 helpful comments on his plant painting and this deepened his interest in art.
🎬 Customer Journey
After we finished the interview of potential users, conduct contextual inquiry, and analyze the results of user surveys, we generarted 5 part of user’s activities to define what expectations a user persona has about the interaction. We got the conclusions that our potential users would engage and interact with others in an art community though different meduims.
🔗 Flows
Our flow is currently divided into two main parts
The first part is to explore the instruction you like,
artists will share their usual design process and design instructions for art lovers to try. Users will find exciting challenges here, and they can also see the results of other people’s challenges.
We will design instructions templates for designers, introduce what tools and materials are needed, and describe the order of steps (like a recipe for cooking). Then users prepare their tools/materials and then enjoy the design process.
When they are done, they can share the challenges in this series.
The second part is watching the exhibition. Users can invite friends through the app or immerse themselves in the virtual world to watch the exhibition. If they see a work they like, they can turn on the camera and see the 3d/realistic effect of the work through the camera.
🎨 Low-fi Wireframe
On the instruction page, we can read the design process and instructions shared by the artists. The designer can also share experience in the story, which is at the top. Users can like, share, and comment on the post. The picture on the right is the template we will design for designers.
The page of the exhibition will be similar to the instruction page. Users can enter the exhibitions they are interested in. The difference is that the above part is live exhibitions. Inside, you can watch the exhibition with many people you don’t know. If users want to invite their friends to watch the exhibition, they can enter the exhibition and invite them.
📝 Competitive Analysis
We determined that our strengths are active participation beyond the digital realm for a hands-on experience and through this, other people can experience the work process of the artists and create closer connections. And this ongoing conversation among the community, which doesn’t just limit to artists and fans, but also fan-fan, and artist-artist, we believe more creativity will be stimulated to inspire the community. On the other hand, the competitor’s strengths are large, the informative database is available for a wide range of artistic genres, easily manageable interface for users, contents are professionally curated to meet specific needs of the audience.
Our weakness is that the features may feel like additional plug-ins to existing platforms- like a combination of different platforms. Our competitor’s weaknesses are limited interactions between artists and viewers, some have membership fees which limit users from using the service, many platforms don’t support a collective experience but rather it’s one-sided for exhibiting/presenting work, and there tends to be more exposure on well-named artists and designers and less on amateur, emerging artists.
Our opportunities are that we’re an open and communicative platform where interactions within the community can spur unexpected creativity, we can also physically experience and walk through the working process of the artists, and there’s more flexibility in artistic expression by leading and curating your own exhibition. Their opportunities are there are more traffic and exposure, reliable information, and trustworthy transactions, the platform itself can become a professional online portfolio for artists to build an artistic presence.
Some of our threats are that the virtual exhibition is still mostly limited to viewing — so how immersive is this experience? and the instructions for recreating the artwork could become too DIY/life hacks — and how does this affect the art and artist’s purpose? The competitors’ threats are that VR equipment and its experience aren’t available to everyone, and the main function is mostly limited to one which is either displaying work or selling work.
💊 Feedback
💪 Our Next Steps
Decide amongst group members how the roles
💻Researcher
- Product management
- User research
🎨Design
- Wireframing
- UI design
💡User Testing & Synthesis
🙌 Give Us Some Feedbacks!
- Should we add a selling/store/market function to our product?
- Should we define branding design?
- Should we interview more clusters of people?
- How might we let users immerse in our product?
