My Art mobile application — UX case study
General Assembly LON | MOBILE APPLICATION | CONCEPT SOLO PROJECT | 2-WEEK SPRINT
Overview:
Within busy information traffic in our everyday life more and more art lovers experience not as enjoyable art as it used to be. It is getting more complicated to find out about good exhibition and visit before it ends or been sold out.
People tend to miss them or end up going to the same places they know there is going to be something anyway. Omit the experience they used to enjoy and get inspired by becomes decent and forgettable.
What if we could access art and enjoy it given mind escapes from busy lives more often and without any frustration?
Enter My art, smart, but easy to use art assistant. A mobile application which curates art exhibitions within your interests and lets you take joy in art.
Brief:
This was my first project at the General Assembly, where I had two weeks to build a mobile application to solve a problem for my main user, Jacob.
User research:
I conducted an initial user interview with Jacob to get an understanding of his lifestyle and potential problems to be solved.
Key findings :
- Jacob studied fine art and enjoys visiting art exhibitions.
- He gets frustrated while getting huge waves of information from all different sources every time he tries to go to the exhibitions.
- He ends up missing most of the events or going to the same galleries or museums over and over again.
It was clear from my findings that Jacob needs an easier way to find accurate information about art events. Enjoy art not only more pleasant but more often as well.
Process:
I decided to interview Jacob further, about his last art exhibition visit experience. From here, I was then able to highlight his key goals and frustrations during the process.
Problem Statement:
Mapping Jacob’s latest experience helped me to define the main problem and start to develop first ideas.
Jacob needs a way to get accurate info about art exhibitions because he keeps on missing them.
Ideation:
From here I quickly came up with various ideas to help solve the problem statement and settled on one idea.
The main app feature is My Art curates art exhibitions according to the user’s chosen interests as a favourite art style, artist or region.
Utilising the findings from the user research and the ideation phase, I created a storyboard, to visualise the solution.
Develop:
With limited time to design the app for Jacob, I focused on a key user flow. The happiest path from opening the app, choosing the interests, finding the right exhibition.
Jacob, wasn’t particularly interested in any fancy features. Accessing the main information about the exhibition was his primary goal. Therefore, I add a reminder feature to simple user flow and moved further.
Prototyping & Testing:
I then designed a paper prototype of the screens based on this user flow. During the paper prototype usability tests, I found that the user had a few problems completing the task that was set for him. Further adjustments were made on a mid-fidelity prototype.
For example, the user lacked search button on interests screen to make a quicker way of choosing the right interests. Later on, Jacob was not sure in which order app curates exhibitions what left him bit unsure. More issues than I have expected appeared while setting the reminder. This leads me to leave this feature for future steps when all the main design would work perfectly.
After testing paper prototype I implemented main findings in my medium-fidelity wireframes. During this process, I was trying to design information architecture and make it easy to access and understand.
Visual design:
With the wireframes complete, I moved on to creating and implementing a style guide for the application. While looking for the inspiration I came with an idea to show exhibition as a poster with vivid but still readable colour palette.
Prototype HD:
I was happy with the app’s ability to help solve Jacob’s problem. There is still some more work to be done on the design and further testing. As next steps I would like to build and test other app feature.
Conclusion:
The timeline for designing the application was tight which meant scope for was limited. However, I was proud of what I was able to produce and my user Jacob felt the app was able to solve his problem. It would enable him to enjoy his favourite actives again.
