Research Phase

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.

Kickoff Meeting

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 kick-off 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.
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As a team, we decided that:

• Target user is people who struggle to find platforms to sell and buy arts.  
• The application should have simple and minimalistic interface.
• 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.  
• The users will also be able to learn few tips and tricks on drawing tutorials.  
• Our application will generate revenue through ads and commission fees.

Literature Review

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.

These were the key points that we found during the literature review:

• 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.

Competitive Audit

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.

Stakeholder Interviews

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.

User Interviews

Affinity maps for each interviewee to showcase common topics

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.
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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.

Modeling Phase

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.

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.

Behavior Variable Map

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.




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Behavior Variable Map

The Personas

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.

Primary Persona: Skye Sarina

Secondary Persona: Lopo Simiyu