The Artists App (TAP) is an illustration application that aims to provide a safe and fair-trading platform for both artist and non-artist users of the painting trade and offers variety of colorful artists. The application allows the user to choose and generate the discover page according to the user’s own preferences.
A social media application for artists that allows artists to post their artwork, create challenges, open commissions and connect with other users.
Goal-Directed Design ensures that designs are based on user needs and goals throughout the design process, resulting in a user-centric and effective solution that aligns with the product's goals and objectives.
The main goal of this project to create a secure and equitable trading platform that caters to two types of user/persona, while offering a diverse selection of vibrant artists. The application will enable users to personalize their discover page, based on their individual preferences.
Create both artist and non-artist users a social media platform to meet the different needs of their enterprises.
Provide efficient plan templates to quickly and accurately express the requirement of both artist and non-artist users.
Connect users with personalized feed content and suggestions.
For the purpose of our application, the whole creating process was driven by Goal-Directed Design (GDD), a design process created by Alan Cooper. GDD is a design process focused on understanding the user’s behaviors, goals, needs and motivations. When creating TAP, we followed the GDD method by the following five phases of the process: Research, Modeling, Requirements, Framework and Refinement.
The first phase of GDD begins with the research phase. This phase is important to the GDD because during the research phase it is about information gathering on field competitors, stakeholder’s needs and the potential user’s behaviors and goals. This is where we also established primary objectives of our application.
To begin with our research, we conducted a kick-off meeting designed to get the team to set up the foundation of the project goals and purposes.
A kickoff meeting is one of the first meetings as a design team would have with stakeholders. This meeting is where we, as a team can set up general concept and project goals with stakeholders. During this phase, the designers have opportunities to ask stakeholders initial key questions and expectations they may have on the project.
Since this project was being completed within an Interaction Design I class, we did not have actual stakeholders that would in most cases be present in a traditional kick-off meeting setting to discuss the primary goals of a project. Therefore, we constructed our own problem statement and assumption statement about our potential users.
It's important to to get a baseline understanding of the potential user. We discussed on the method that best suits the research objectives, target audience, and available resources.
Target user is people who struggle to find platforms to sell and buy arts.
The application should have simple and minimalistic interface.
The users will also be able to learn few tips and tricks on drawing tutorials.
The users should be able to post high quality images of their arts within the correct timeline and no additional pop-up website other than the application itself.
Our application will generate revenue through ads and commission fees.
After the kick-off meeting, our team started researching about the domain as well as user behaviors and attitudes toward our application. Our main goal during this phase was to get as much information as we could about the motivations and frustrations when sharing and hunting artwork online. This phase is essential because it is important to obtain any prior knowledge on the domain of our application, competitors in the fields, and our users’ behaviors/goals, the literature review gives the latest information in the field by mapping the progress of knowledge.
Our team conducted literature review across the web to gain a deeper understanding focused on the procs and cons of sharing arts on social media for artists. We found few articles that correlate with the application and its goals.
Most users post artwork online in the hope of potential buyers and commissions.
It is hard to get noticed and gain exposure on any social media platform as an artist.
It is essential to join groups, public pages, and community hubs to connect with people that have similar interests.
It is hard to keep up with social media application algorithms.
The competitive audit is used to compare existing versions, prototypes, or competitors of a product. This section of GDD will allow our team to understand what makes other social media platforms different from others by examining the features they offer and the capabilities they have.
There are many existing social media applications and creative platforms that are used around the world in order to keep in touch with friends, post pictures and videos, and post art. The above application comparison chart is the platforms we chose to analyze in our competitive audit because they allow artists to post their artwork and find inspiration for new pieces.
After research about the domain and product but before user research, a design team must meet with stakeholders again to reaffirm their business goals. Some information to gather in a stakeholder interview that they could not discuss in the kickoff meeting would be product vision, budget, schedule, technical restraints, business goals, and the perception of users.
Since this project is a university class project, we did not have any real stakeholders to interview. Instead, we imagined what a stakeholder might have discussed with our team about the application. They would reaffirm that they want to make an application that is easy to use and can connect many people together. However, they would also be concerned with how to reach the application’s domain and how to earn revenue from the services provided by the application.
We conducted user interviews and mapped out our research into affinity maps to identify patterns and key details about our participants' behaviors and goals.
Most use Instagram because most friends use Instagram.
Direct messaging is an important feature to have on a social media app.
Artists wanted to know who was sharing posts.
Users did not like the quality of images.
Most users did not like the Instagram shopping cart tab on Instagram's navigation bar.
The final step of GDD’s research stage concludes with conducting user interviews. To begin our user research and learn what goals, behaviors, and attitudes real life users had our team conducted user interview sessions. The first step of this process was to create a heavy focus on the persona hypothesis, information from previous literature reviews along with our competitive audit.
We conducted five user interviews that are all held through a virtual meeting to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. We then synthesized our notes on Miro to create affinity maps for each interviewee based on the common topics, ideas or features that was constantly mentioned in our interviews.
Affinity maps serve as a visual representation of user problems and needs. By layering and grouping the data collected during each interview, this will be come the basis for subsequent for the team to define the user needs.
The modeling phase is important within the GDD process because it helps us to visualize the relationships of our target users for this specific research. Thus, after completing our research phase, our team was able to create two different types of personas based on the research data we collected during the previous phase.
In order to create our personas, we used affinity maps from the user interviews and laid out each behavior to spot the behavioral patterns and specific trends that are begin to appear. These are things that we think is identifiable and can help us categorize modes of use of a potential or existing behavior of the application. This helps us to perceive the potential trends and dominant behaviors of each of our interviewees.
We mapped out the similar behaviors and find clusters of patterns on the continuum. We then synthesized the characteristics and defined goals of the potential personas as a team.
A persona is a descriptive model that is based on the goals and behaviors of real users. The purpose of creating a persona is to minimize subjective assumptions and understand what users really need so that we know how to better serve different types of users.
Based on the research results and the affinity mapping, we ended up with two types of personas.
Our primary persona, Skye Sarina, an artist with end goals of wanting to post artworks online to get feedbacks from fellow artists and in hopes of expand her commission range.
While our secondary persona, Lopo Simiyu, a non-artists with end goals of wanting to find inspirations for his own creative work.
The requirement phase is essential within the GDD process because this phase is where we find out the connections of our developed primary persona. Skye, between the design’s frameworks. How it would help our persona achieve her goals, behaviors, and needs.
To identify the potential steps from our persona would take to reach their goals, we constructed context scenarios that help achieve the goals, behaviors, and needs of our developed personas, when potentially using the application.
We mapped out the similar behaviors and find clusters of patterns on the continuum. We then synthesized the characteristics and defined goals of the potential personas as a team.
The main focus of context scenarios is generating a story based on the persona’s interaction with the application, to address how the application fits into her daily routine and how it helps to meet her goals.
Based from the context scenarios, we also created a list of requirements that helps to allow the user to successfully meet their goals.
We transitioned user goals and requirements into visualization. Our goal during the framework phase was to create a low-fidelity wireframe that follows the key path scenarios and focuses on flows and the placement of the elements. Low fidelity wireframes are meant to be quick; it gives a possible layout idea of how the application would look and function. This task was completed using wireframing tools and elements that are provided on Miro.
We created low-fidelity wireframe based from the ke path, he alternative scenario that the primary persona will take through an application to accomplish their goals and validation scenarios, and many other possible paths and experiences within the application we still need to consider for primary or secondary personas.
Once we completed our low-fidelity wireframes on Miro, we continued using the same key path and validation scenarios while constructing a refinable prototype on Figma.
We created low-fidelity wireframe based from the ke path, he alternative scenario that the primary persona will take through an application to accomplish their goals and validation scenarios, and many other possible paths and experiences within the application we still need to consider for primary or secondary personas.
Interviewees love the enlarge feature on a post.
Some button flows were broken.
Appreciated the simplicity of the app.
The alignments of some screens are off.
Appreciated the commission screen.
Profile screen is too crowded with elements.
We proceeded to refine our prototype based on the user feedback we fixed the function flows, ensured that the flows are consistent, improved the screen alignment, and removed some elements to make the screen less crammed.
GDD is a design principle with a wide range of connotation and application, which can provide a very clear design basis and reference in the pre-design, mid-design and post-design, to ensure that the entire design process is always around the user's goal. The purpose of GDD is to design a solution that is more in line with the product and user's needs, but in the design still needs to be integrated with other design principles based on the actual situation, analysis and design.