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When I visit an art gallery I am fascinated by the different exhibits and always end up taking a billion pictures. I use social media fairly often and like to share art that I think is really cool with my friends. The problem myself and many others face while moving throughout the art gallery is navigating the different exhibits, learning more about the art pieces, and easily sharing what you learned to social media.
I reached out to people that have visited an art gallery in the last 2 years to learn more about their experiences to see if my assumptions were correct.
Instead of taking the survey approach and getting a large amount of responses, I conducted interviews so I could get deeper and more thoughtful responses. A visit to an art gallery isn't something you do many times and I thought interviews would be better for recounting this experience. I was surprised to find out that the main motivation for going to an art gallery is the feeling of exploration and finding something new.
I synthesized the qualitative and quantitative data from interviews to define two target group profiles. I used these to empathize with my main user groups and prioritize goals according to their needs. This also allowed me to create their user stories.
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I also used data from my interviews to create a user journey map. With this map, I'm able to understand how the user feels throughout their experience and where we have improvement opportunities.
The research was exciting but I wanted to focus my team's effort on one thing and not get overwhelmed with the key insights, so I created a problem statement for Kassidy.
After setting my focus on one problem, I conducted a competitive audit to see what solutions were out there for other art galleries and even museums. I wanted to get a feel for the style, navigation, ease-of-use, and feature set that our users were used to. Using the audit to guide me, I set my focus on 3 core functionalities that my design had to include in order to solve for my target problem statement.
Keeping the core functionalities in mind I sketched some lo-fi wireframes on paper to see which components would work well together. I listed out some of the main elements I would need in my wireframes so I could easily brainstorm different ways these could be arranged.
I put a star next to elements that I really liked and took to Figma to make lo-fi digital wireframes.
After creating some initial wireframes in Figma, I wanted to find out if the main user experience, sharing the exhibits to social media, is easy for users to complete. I also wanted to understand the specific challenges that users might face in the searching, exploring, and navigation processes. I conducted a moderated usability study with a prototype I created from the wireframes.
After updating the wireframes with the insights made from the usability study, I was able to create a high fidelity prototype. I focused on showing less instead of more and cleaned up ambiguous language and icons.
This project was different from others I've worked on because it was a part of Google's UX Design course. The biggest difference I felt was that I didn't come into the problem organically. This is great because I expect to "learn" about problems in my career quite often given the nature of a UX designer's role in the workforce.
I learned that I should put less emphasis on building out a prototype in Figma before deciding on a UI kit for development. There were many things that changed after making this decision. I also learned that every phase of the design process builds upon the previous stages. It is important to take your time in order to optimize later phases.