Artwalk App
Shared Experiences Build Communities
Artwalk is a vibrant, curated, daily calendar and supportive community for art events. People start their day by swiping through a series of screens to see what’s happening in the world of art, dance, theater and design.
My Role
I worked on a cross functional team with 2 engineers and a PM to define a core flow uploading flow and their brand look and feel.
Goal
Help Artwalk define a core flow to serve as their North Star as they they build more features.
Problem
Artwalk wanted to be a two-sided marketplace of artist events and users. However, this diluted the teams focus and they wanted help prioritizing where they should focus their design & engineering efforts.
Impact
I helped them define what user they should be designing for first. They were taking a general approach, but I showed them that designing upload flow for uploading Artist Events first was the most important thing they could do for their users. This also served as their North Star design.
Process Overview
1) I began by doing a comparative analysis of our competitors and apps of similar function - Artsy, Behance, & Instagram.
2) I interviewed people we’d want to be a part of our user base.
3) I synthesized our research into persona’s to help use scope our work together.
4) Initial wireframes & flows.
4) Testing prototypes.
5) Push to Beta
6) Discuss next steps with PM & founder.
Research
I spoke to people who were both artists and art appreciators and decided with the PM that we should prioritize populating the app with events from our curated group of artists and organizations to reduce the scope of work. Catering to art appreciators at this time would stretch our team too thin for amount of time we had and the amount of features we needed to build.
Building & Testing
Constraints
Designing for a start-up with limited time and people was difficult, but the PM and I found a process that worked for us. We evolved design & product concurrently, updating flows as we solidified a core product. We kept an updated and exhaustive document owned between the two of us, that would serve as our North Star for product flows. We utilized this doc so our team could visualize how each section related to one another and how a users would access each section of the service.
Before & After
Iterations
We prioritized the upload flow for art works and events. We tested iterations of different ways to upload from the bottom navigation toolbar. Two things have to be true about our toolbar:
1) An Artist or Organization can upload from any main page.
2) Leave the bottom nav open ended enough to serve our future Art Appreciator users.
We decided to use a FAB to add events & projects for the Artists & Organizations because it could keep our toolbar consistent with Art Appreciators.
Shipping Theseus’s Paradox
Outcome
By the time we launched, we had 173 artists and organizations on our platform! We’re gathering feedback from them and will be working to prioritize those into better flows and features.
Learnings
There’s still much work to be done as we start seeing some feedback from our first group of users. I learned how sometimes you just need to move fast and learn from your users.