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AGA - Art Gallery App

Mobile art gallery app that allows art enthusiasts with busy time-schedule to plan their art event visits effortlessly

PROJECT OVERVIEW:

“AGA” - Art Gallery App is a user-centric mobile app that allows art enthusiasts with busy time-schedule to plan their art events effortlessly. This project was generated along the “Google UX Certificate” course that guided participants through the entire process of a UX design project and educated them on the required skills in each phase. Moreover, the project idea originates from a randomly assigned prompt using the prompt generator Sharpen: “Design a mobile booking app for an art gallery.”

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Currently, the art industry is profoundly influenced by the emerging technologies. One notorious example might be the transformation of artworks into Non-fungible Tokens - NFT. However, many small art galleries are still confused about the benefits of new technologies and how to reach out to the new generation of audiences that demand integrated digital experiences. Hence, AGA intends to demonstrate a mobile app solution that helps art galleries enhance their digital user experience.

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Deliverables:

User Research

Personas

User Flow

Wireframes

Usability Testing

Hi-fidelity Prototype

Hypothesis:

I identified that busy working professionals are commonly under constant pressure, as they wish to stay competitive in their working environment. Leisure event, like an art gallery visit, for relieving this stress in their time off-work is an absolute necessity. However, they don’t have a lot of time or energy to browse through numerous websites searching for art events that suit their interests & packed calendars at the same time. And as I mentioned before, art galleries (especially the ones with smaller scale) are mostly not equipped with digital technologies that optimise the event booking flow and satisfy art visitors that demand seamlessly blended digital visiting experience.

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“So I believe that developing an mobile app that provides recommendations of art events based on user’s time availability and preferences, will drastically reduce the planning effort of users and simultaneously increase the conversion rate of event bookings for art galleries.”

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Value Propostions:
Example User Story:
More information and final deliverables will be uploaded as the project progresses.
Preliminary Research:

As I approach this problem, some statistics and responses from potential users that are gathered during my preliminary research backed our theory:

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  • Current trend: Young professionals are leaving their jobs in record numbers because of unacceptable work-life balance (source: TIME)
  • Statistics: 77% of Americans Who Work Full-Time Have Experienced Burnout at Their Jobs (source: Deloitte)
  • Competitor Audit (locally in Munich): 1. Direct competitors are art galleries that operate on a small or medium scale. In this case, my two sampled cases (Gallery Leu and Kunstlabor) both have relatively old-fashioned websites that lack meaningful filtering and searching functionalities. Hence, users might not get to their desired information efficiently. 2. Indirect competitors are museums that operate on a bigger scale. Haus der Kunst and Lenbacher Haus both possess well designed websites with useful features that simplify user’s booking and visiting preparation processes.
  • Response from interviewee: “I truly enjoy going to art events at smaller local art galleries. But sometimes I find it super difficult to get informed about the upcoming events. Most of the time, I am exhausted from work, so I am too lazy to search for events that I want to attend.”
Personas:

Based on the user research I set up the key persona “Sophia”, a busy working professional that is enthusiast about art and would love to spend her free time going to cool events at art galleries. I referred to this persona throughout the entire design process. The information about the persona focused on its goals and frustrations with the product as well as its interaction with it. Here are some examples of its goals and pain points:

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  • Goals:
  1. “To lead my project project team to greater success”
  2. “To maintain a healthy work-life balance and have time for my own hobbies”

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  • Frustrations:
  1. “Often I feel lost in the numerous art tour offerings with abstract descriptions. I rarely have time to do research myself, in order to find out whether the event really interests me.”
  2. “Sometimes, I miss out on exciting events because I am not inform about when the registration starts and they are then fully booked.”
  3. “Printing out the confirmation email every time truly is inefficient.“

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Problem Statement:
Busy working professionals need an efficient way to book and check-in at their favorite art gallery events because they don’t want to waste energy on planning their art gallery event visits.

SELECTED PHOTOS:

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DESIGN PROCESS:

I created the user flow based on common tasks that the target user would perform using the app. Basically, the diagram describes the user interaction required to achieve the main goal of our mobile app: “As a user, I want to get recommendations of art gallery events and book them effortlessly.”

Focus of UX:

With the user flows in mind, I started visualizing the mobile app through wireframes. Taking into account the insights we collected during the previous ideating phase, several ideas were sketched and highlights of each idea were collected to iteratively construct the final wireframe for each screen. Here are some preliminary sketches that I did.

Consequently, I filled the elements of the digital wireframe with mock content and graphics to create test-ready low-fidelity prototype. Finding diverse test users that can represent the target users of the designed app introduced some challenges. However, by leveraging the network of the university and other student associations, the user testing was conducted with various individuals that share certain similarities with our target users.

Findings:

User Testing:

Design Solutions:

Design Exploration:

Wireframes:

Digital Wireframes:

  • Users found the conversational text in the top bar miss-leading. Its purpose of making the app more warm and amiable is not functioning.
  • Users value bigger display of images on the home screen for recommended events. The impression given by the thumbnail image is a important factor for whether the user is interested in the event.
  • Leave out the conversational text and incorporate user-friendly icons instead.
  • Increase the size of each card for recommendations on home screen.

HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE:

By combining all elements from the design process together, high-fidelity prototypes are built. On the whole, I aim for a clean & modern visual design. And in particular, I want the users to fulfill their goals quickly. To achieve this, the app presents the users straight forward with the most frequently used features on the home screen. Moreover, I made sure that they are easily identifiable and accessible.

A complementary colour palette was chosen for this project in order to generate a dynamic feeling for the app with the dramatic display of colour. The primary colour selected was purple which is often perceived as “imaginative” and “spiritual”. In my opinion, these adjectives are great fits for an art gallery mobile app.

Visual Design:

PROTOTYPE HIGHLIGHTS:

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