Ways To Empower Marginalized Artists — a UX Case Study

Problem

I would like to address the problems of Marginalized artists who are interested in growing their network and needs a way to connect with other creative communities. These artists needs a platform to display their art because other social networking web sites provides a non-creative career path and can not display their creative work in a creative way.

Solution

In a two-week design sprint, I was tasked to research and design a user-centered mobile app solution to a problem faced by marginalized artists. Our plan was to propose a user-focused solution within a two-week timeline. With all my research, I aimed to create a mobile app that would tackle these problems and would help marginalized artists showcase their work, and connect with other artists.

Design Process

Following a design path, I split my design process up into three sub categories. First I did my research to understand the main pain points of the marginalized artists. Next i designed a mobile app solution for those problems. Then I have received feedback and i improved my app accordingly.

Research

For the research part I interviewed a few people. I conducted a few user interviews with classmates, some old friends.Out of the 10 interviewees, 3 identified as female and 7 identified as male. Their ages ranged from 25–47 years old, and they were located in India.The main purpose of these informational interviews was to understand the behaviors and pain points of people and identify main problems to design a solution for.

Interview Questions

• What type of art do you create?
• How do you showcase your work?
• Who is the main audience of your work?
• Has there ever been a time when you wanted to create something but you did not have the platform to achieve your goal?
• How do you connect with other marginalized artists from your community?

Affinity Mapping

After interviews, I used an affinity mapping technique to group and sort all my observations and interview answers in order to discover the the high level insights for my research. I noticed a few things in topics that interviewees discussed: they talked about their background , their learning resources and unemployment. they talked about how they showcase their art, and how they connect with other creative communities.

Design

This is the second part of the design process i started the process by creating the user flows. using user flows i then began on my sketches. After sketching i moved to paper prototyping.

Prototypes

After my user flows I started building the prototypes and gathered some feedback on my prototypes. After prototypes i moved to the balsamiq to create clickable prototypes. I created a low fidelity, clickable prototype to demonstrate the key features of this application.

At this stage, I received feedback regarding some slight changes. I was able to implement some of these suggestions and i did improved the prototypes accordingly.

Iterate

After usability tests, I received more feedback and did more changes. At this point i would say that the feedback was the most part of the process every time I spoke with someone new, a different part of my prototype was improved. Every piece of my prototype was touched by user feedback. User feedback really helped me a lot to make my prototype more realistic.

Next Steps

1. I will conduct more usability testing on the prototype and implement any feature necessary.
2. I will develop a high- fidelity prototype to create a more complete user experience.