ArtHaus
In spring 2021 I went through General Assembly’s UX Design bootcamp. Over the course of the program I designed an app called ArtHaus.
In the last few years our society has been experiencing a loneliness epidemic. COVID-19 drastically worsened this, and in October 2020 this Harvard study found that 61% of participants 18-25 experienced loneliness "almost all of the time or all of the time.”
While conducting generative research for this project, I interviewed my peers, specifically artists, about their feelings towards sharing their art on social media platforms. I found that many, like myself, were tired of the games that algorithms and hashtags present.
“It feels like your voice easily gets lost in the endless feed”
Hashtags feel “silly and demeaning”
“That feeling of competition when selling art”
By Elise Gravel
With modern pervasive loneliness and hashtag fatigue in mind, I started designing ArtHaus. The goal was to create a platform where young people could share their art with their communities, without needing to worry about competition or promotion. The communities would be location based, which would enable artists to build relationships with those in their immediate area. My thinking here is that relationships built on this platform would have the capability of becoming face to face, given proper modern safety precautions, which gives the relationships real potential, as well as a greater sense of viability and tangibility.
While designing this app I performed generative research, affinity maps, user personas, feature prioritization, competitor task analysis, user flows, and both moderated and unmoderated usability testing.
After I’d settled on my concept and performed my generative research, it was time for competitor task analyses. Since there are innumerable social apps in this day and age, I had a very solid framework to work off of. I examined Instagram, VSCO, Reddit, and Twitter. I assessed these apps for features, user flow, and visual design. I was inspired by VSCO’s simple, smooth UI, and knew it was something I wanted to emulate.
Of course the designing process started with sketching out some wireframes.
I went through four main iterations. After the first I had lo-fi wireframes, and performed a preliminary round of five moderated user task analysis to see if my concept was translating. My users had very little difficulty navigating the prototype, and enjoyed the concept.
I received feedback, incorporated it, and created medium-fi mockups, and performed unmoderated user task analyses on Maze. I set up my prototype in Figma, hooked up the Maze test, and got 19 testers. I received some good feedback, though most of it was a bit too vague to be too actionable.
"All tasks were intuitive! I would re-think the color scheme, maybe a dark grey/light grey!"
"Looks great! Super intuitive, I barely had to think about how to do the things I wanted."
After all this, I created two more iterations. I tweaked the details of the layouts and visual design, and arrived on a final version. At least for now.
