A Team Project aimed at developing a messaging platform specifically for digital artists.
Duration: January 2021 – March 2021
Role: Design Lead
Team Members:
Arshay Rao, Miranda Osiow, Ramzy Oncy-Avila
Project Motivation
Your cursor is hovering over the send tweet button. You’re about to post your most recent digital drawing to your dozens of followers, many of whom you have never interacted with, and you hesitate. You start to feel a wave of self-doubt and flinch your cursor out of view. You want to be able to share your art, but you don’t feel comfortable putting it out into the world yet.
Problem Statement
Digital artists have access to more references and ideas than ever before thanks to the internet, however they may suffer from decision paralysis and find it difficult to commit to projects.
User Research and Stakeholders
We chose to interview several artists who identified social anxiety and decision paralysis as major hindrances when creating art. One takeaway from the interview process was that artists wanted support and encouragement from their peers, however they did not know of any spaces that offered these qualities privately.
Our Solution
Our intention with ArtReach was to create a platform that freed artists from the intimidation of posting their works online while also giving them a space where they can get feedback and show off their progress on projects. The way that this would be accomplished would be by allowing artists to create chat rooms called projects and invite other artists to these projects. These projects differ from regular chat rooms by having tools that incentivize collaboratively working on art pieces.
The Design Process
We started off by looking at various existing platforms to identify which features users were most interested in and what we could do to improve the user experience. We ended up deciding that a messaging app, similar to existing platforms such as Discord, would act as an excellent base for our design.
Paper Prototypes
We designed two very basic paper prototypes to sketch out the basic interface of ArtReach and asked a couple of our classmates to walk through the process that we had envisioned. Our first prototype was designed to look like an image sharing website such as Pinterest that allowed more freedom when it came to posting projects online. Our other prototype resembled a traditional messaging app.
Heuristic Evaluations
Our three testers were given a list of Nielsen’s Evaluation Heuristics and critiqued our prototypes based on any violations. Our testers also assigned severity scores (1-5) to indicate how big these violations were. Positive feedback, or adhering to the heuristics, was met with a (positive) note.
Based on the feedback we received, we decided that our second prototype would serve as a stronger base for our platform. We also felt that this second prototype was closer to our original vision of ArtReach. With this decision in mind, we moved on to create wireframes for our project to give us a better understand of how we would go about implementing our design.
Wireframes
This basic wireframe served as the template that we would use for our final build. We went through iterations of different color schemes, settings, and orientations in order to find the layout that worked best for us. Once we settled on a concept, we felt ready to start implementing this design on an actual platform.
Implementation Challenges
Building our website and designing the interface proved to be challenging on a technical level. Our group was still learning the basics of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS which meant that our progress was slow. We eventually got to the point where we could create lists via json files which served as the basis for our project list, friends list, and messaging list.
Features of Our Design
We wanted to mimic the basic functionality of various messaging apps. This meant that we wanted to give users the ability to add friends, create projects, and message other users or share images within these projects. We were able to implement all of these basic features however there were many others that we were not able to add within the time constraints of the academic course. A few of our additional goals are listed below.
- Editing images within projects
- Drawing images and posting them to a project in real-time
- Pinning messages within projects
- Archiving projects once they are complete (so users can refer back to them but not send additional messages)
Final Product
Our final iteration of our design showed a much cleaner interface than what we were able to brainstorm for our wireframes. As stated earlier, we envisioned additional features that would give ArtReach a clear identity compared to other similar platforms that exist.
ARSHAY RAO 