Beautiful communities through artistic expression and human connection.
The Problem
Artists (which can include musicians, performance artists, fine artists) don’t always have an easy or convenient way to connect with their local community in terms of direct sales, event planning, collaboration, booking events, etc. This is especially true during socially restricted situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. artisanna explores how it might be possible to improve the potential for local artists to promote themselves and connect with vendors, buyers, and event planners within the community.
The Art / Music Sector Facts [Toronto Case Study]
70% of Torontonians regularly attend arts performances.
71% of Torontonians feel that the arts improve the quality of life.
79% of Toronto residents agree that the arts benefit the city by attracting tourists and highlighting the city’s diversity.
42% of Torontonians say that the top impacts of the arts on communities are sharing experiences.
The Solution
Being an artist and musician myself, I was motivated to find a solution, perhaps in the form of a mobile app. I don’t have a lot of time to pursue these passions, so I wanted to find something that would be efficient and intuitive to use. Furthermore, I knew friends and acquaintances, who chose art as a career, simply prefer to minimize and automate the amount of administrative work they do (required for marketing and self promotion). It was imperative that I find something quick, easy and inspiring to use.
After significant search efforts, I could not find anything that ticked all the boxes. There were multiple tools and services available, but nothing that had it all in one place.
For this project I was for responsible for all the research, design, prototyping, and testing.
An Endeavor to Innovate
artisanna was taken through a process with multiple phases, the first of which was to come up with ideas. Brainstorming via gamification was the approach. Empathy was the driving factor that fueled these ideas, and helped to define the major issues, so that ideas stayed relevant.
The Idea
I knew some of the major problems, but needed to figure out how exactly they were going to be solved. Several ideas were generated, and finally a social networking / planning app was decided upon.
The goal was to improve the marketing and promotional experience for artists and the planning / coordination experience for event planners and curators, while keeping in mind the need for a smooth, intuitive, clean and simple experience for all users of the platform.
Bringing it All Together
Introducing a social networking and community building app that encourages people to connect and collaborate.
Artists can efficiently promote their work by building and sharing their portfolio.
Event planners can connect to those artists and request collaborations and offer vending opportunities for the events they create through the app.
Art curators can browse the list of local talent, and offer opportunities for them to sell art at their shops.
Community members can view local talent, and/or view local events, and get tickets to show their love and support.
The Research
The project required various research methodologies including:
Researching academic articles, reading blogs, reviewing cultural case studies, watching documentaries (to get a better understanding of arts and culture and its social and economic impact).
Demographically focused user interviews (asking artists, event planners, curators, specifically curated questions to elicit informative answers).
Usability testing (having chosen individuals use a specifically tailored prototype to see what works and what doesn’t).
This research helped gain insight into the needs and issues of artisanna’s potential users, while achieving a much more empathetic perspective into their lives.
The Process
The approach was to research the problem, synthesize that research to help ideate a possible solution, and finally validate the efficacy of the solution through testing and refinement.
Gaining Insight & Increasing Empathy
A true understanding of the problems people were facing and a deep empathetic perspective of their situation was required. The first step was to create a screener survey to aid in finding the right people to interview.
Separate survey questions were tailored for each likely user type: event planners / coordinators, artists (musicians / painters / dancers / sculptors etc.), art curators and shop owners, and members of the local community that happen to love and support the art / music sector. For example, artists were asked things like: what services if any, they used to help them promote and market their work, how often they did so, and what difficulties they faced.
The User Interviews
10 user interviews were conducted: 5 artists, 2 event planners, 1 art curator, 2 local community members. Most of them were conducted through streaming calls, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Some were done face to face, as they were close friends already within my bubble.
Some Key Insights
Artists find that marketing and promotion are extremely time consuming, laborious, expensive and often confusing.
Event planners / coordinators, especially if starting out, find searching for talent to be difficult, since their resource pool is not especially plentiful. Talent, contacts and other resources are almost all attained and communicated with via word of mouth, and in person. The pandemic has exacerbated the issue.
Artists have to compete at the global scale, when using a social media platform, even if they are only targeting the local market.
Art curators (shop owners), perform manual searches for art, but often find it difficult to search for local art specfically, as there aren’t tailored services catering to local communities.
Heuristics - Evaluating Competition
Direct competition wasn’t found, but certain services had competitive similarities and features that were evaluated. The Heuristic Analysis was based on the Nielsen Norman Group’s Heuristics for User Interface Design.
Certain informative strengths and weaknesses were identified within a few chosen platforms: Facebook, Instagram and EventBrite.
Rating System & Heuristic Types
1. Consistency and Standards
2. Aesthetics and Minimalist Design
3. Visibility and System Status
Complete failure to provide a usable experience.
Moderate usability problems, has serious impacts on user experience.
Some minor usability problems, small issues that can easily be remedied.
Very little usability problems.
Analysis Results
The results were quite useful in that they identified problems and revealed features that could prove useful to the artisanna platform.
EventBrite (Average Rating: 88%) had an extremely minimal and simplistic interface. Absolutely no superfluous features or elements, liberal use of white space, and a clean, fresh overall aesthetic feel. This would later prove influential in the design for artisanna.
Facebook (Average Rating: 60%), while features appear plentiful, their new design, modern and attempting more of a minimalist approach, has it’s problems. I found the design to demand forced exploration, as there was no clear place to ‘start’. Users reported finding similar issues. This was also very influential for artisanna’s design. The interface had to be self explanatory and never confusing.
Synthesis - Affinity & Empathy Mapping
The next step required synthesizing the information gained from all the research and interviews. About 80 post-it notes commandeered my walls revealing insightful information about the particular needs of artisanna’s users, such as needing an extremely easy and simple way to add photos and artwork to their profile.
Two empathy maps were then generated, one for the Artist user type, and the other for the Event Planner / Coordinator / Art Curator user type. This really helped put artisanna in the shoes of its users.
The Artist
The Curator / Planner / Coordinator
Personas
Next up were creating some personas. They kept the project in focus during the entire life cycle, while increasing an understanding of the people whom artisanna was for.
The Local Citizen
The Artist
The Musician
The Event Planner
User Stories
To create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), user stories were produced to help determine which features were essential, and which could be included at a later time.
For artists, it was essential to be able to create a portfolio and add it to your profile, while also being able to browse local events.
For event planners, they needed the ability to create events, browse the local talent, and book that talent for the events they create.
For the community member (everday art enthusiast), they needed the ability to browse events, and local talent, and buy tickets for those events.
Example User Story: Arist
The Architecture
Designing the architectural layout would be the first step in helping define the user’s journey within artisanna. This would essentially represent the key actions a user would take while using the platform.
User Flows
User flows help focus the project by determining the most necessary features required for an MVP.
In the interest of time and building a proof of concept, red routes (the critical user flows) were specifically chosen to push the project into the next phases: wireframes, high fidelity mockups, prototyping, and finally user testing.
The following red routes were chosen:
1. User sign up
2. Artist - Add/Edit profile
3. Artist - Add photo gallery to build portfolio
4. Event Planner - Create event
5. Event Planner - Add talent (artists) to event
Example User Flow | Event Planner - Create New Event / Book Artist for Event
Prototyping - Sketch & Test
Sketching on paper or “Prototyping on Paper” was an an efficient and quick way to construct some screens of how the application’s interface might look.
After enough screens were drawn to reflect the what the red routes required, they were brought into Marvel - an application that essentially brings your drawings to life and adds some simple interactivity.
Guerrilla Testing
I took some notes while watching some colleagues and a few randomly chosen people use the prototype. With these notes I adjusted the flow and overall feel. This helped with refining the future high fidelity wireframes.
Wireframes
High fidelity wireframes were created to represent a much more accurate interface.
Features and solutions found to be helpful to the user’s experience in the low fidelity screens during guerilla testing, were included in the high fidelity wireframes.
The next step was to create the high fidelity mockups and protoypes.
High Fidelity Mockups & Prototyping
Artist Sign Up
You’re an artist and you want to sign up to create a profile.
Artist - Profile | Add Gallery
You’re signed in as an artist, now you want to add a gallery to your profile.
Community Member | Attend Event
You’ve setup an account already, you just heard about the “Local Lantern Festival” event, and you want to buy a ticket for it, so you can attend.
Event Planner | Create Event, Add Talent
You’re an event planner and you want to create a new event. You then want to browse the local talent and request a booking for one of the artists for this event.
Usability Testing
Two rounds of testing were conducted. Specific kinds of users were recruited, e.g. actual artists, event planners, and curators. A holistic approach was taken for the red routes; each participant was given a scenario and a goal with simple tasks to perform, for every user type. E.g., an ‘artist’ participant went through each red route which included the artist, event planner, and community member user flows.
Testing was moderated online through the use of Zoom and Google Meet. Detailed notes were taken as the participants were observed making their way through the prototype. An open dialogue was encouraged as they performed the tasks and encountered difficult or rewarding situations.
Testing Results
The first round of testing went fairly well with no catastrophic issues, each participant completed the given tasks successfully.
Some critical issues were discovered though, like an oversight with online ticket purchases. There was no link to the actual event, once the ticket had been purchased. This was easily fixed.
The only other point of friction was during event creation. Since it was a multi-step process, users found it a bit confusing what information was required to complete the event creation, this was remedied by adding guiding notices that told participants what to fill out next, in order to complete the task.
The second round of testing revealed a number of smaller visual issues, all easily fixed by tweaking the prototype. Overall the users found the experience to be positive and fairly easy.
Next Steps
artisanna set out to create an inviting and enjoyable experience for community members involved in the art sector. It wanted to help artists promote and market their work locally. It wanted to help event planners / coordinators find those artists, and book them, to create the perfect event.
After learning some important lessons dealing with form entry, and user flow, artisanna was able to create excitement and positive experiences for its users.
With further user testing and placing the prototype in front of a lot more people, the platform can be further focused and refined to be not only the experience people want, but the tool they need.