Art Marketplace Website
Art in Res is an e-commerce marketplace for original art, connecting buyers ("collectors") with work from emerging independent artists. It offers installment payments option for buyers and supports artists.
Client project
Website Editing
2.5 weeks
4 UX Designers
UX Designer
Challenge
This project was created as a part of the bootcamp. We had only 2 weeks to solve a realistic design problem: find a solution to easily sell artworks for artists within the existing design system with strict constraints.
Goals
- Update the website from the artists perspective to make selling artworks online intuitive
- Introduce artists to the new features seamlessly
Discovery
User Interviews & Usability Testing: To understand what is the process of selling artworks online with its pain points and how artists do it through current website we first decided to directly ask them to demonstrate it since the client wanted to know specifically about their experience and provided contact information. We interviewed 7 artists with following usability testing of the current website.
We found out:
Competitive Analysis: To understand what are the industry standards and common practices in selling artworks online, we decided to analyze competitors mentioned by the client and their applications feature inventory.
We found out:
Online art marketplaces design should be minimalistic and simple in order to showcase the artworks.
Integrating feature to view artwork in the space is a common practice to avoid problems with dimensions.
Commission form is based on reference from artists artworks.
Definition
Option 1: We sketched a few ideas after the our research. First option I explored was to include the “View in the space” feature in already existing uploading flow but provide artists an option to choose how their artworks would be look in the space: I was developing an idea of integrating 3d party interior mockups service or widget like ArtPlacer.
Option 2: However later I noticed that we should keep an option to preview artwork while uploading so that the artists still would be able to visualize their artwork's look, so the 2nd option was based on the idea of combining the “View in the space” and “Preview the artwork” features.
Prototype
After a 2nd meeting with our client and team brainstorming we decided to test option 2, because it’s easy to implement in a given time without extended technical support and integrating 3d party service.
Usability Testing
We were interested in understanding:
1. How users will perceive changes in the uploading process?
2. Will users understand the Choose a Display Background feature?
We went for usability tests to show people our prototype with 5 artists that were new to Art in Res website so that their interaction with our prototype would be less biased than with more experienced artists.
Usability test findings:
All participants were confused by choosing the size of the background display.
3/5 participants wanted the uploading flow to be more consequent without need to return to the top of the page.
Design
Iterations
After our usability testing, we figured out that uploading process needs to be more flexible for artists needs, so we decided to make the background display optional and to ensure consistency across Art in Res, we took the guesswork away from sizing and made it an auto generated response.
The artist will enter the dimensions of their piece and a background will display that is the appropriate size.
Final Designs
Results
To evaluate how users use our live version of the website we set the following set of UX metrics: time to complete the task, task success rate, and artists satisfaction for 3 user flows that we were working on:
Uploading artworks
Adding Studio visits
Commissions feature
We couldn’t measure an attitudinal set of metrics because we didn’t have an environment for it since our designs are in the process of incorporating them into the website.