“Audiences are never something homogeneous…”
Overview
I was the last piece of the puzzle on this project for a great non-profit organization supporting and championing all arts. Being a painter myself, I won’t hide it - I wanted to work on this project and am very grateful I was selected to lead the UX design effort for it. The American Alliance of Artists and Audiences - 4A Arts is a robust web platform that showcases all arts across America. As a genre and event-agnostic web platform 4AArts.org features arts, artists and cultural listings such as performances, exhibitions, events, and arts education and cultural advocacies.
CLIENT
American Alliance of Artists and Audiences
4AArts.org
TEAM
Project Management: Chris Jordan
Visual Design: John Emerson
4A Arts Logo Design: Jamie Leo
ROLE
Lead UX Designer
PLATFORMS
Web, Mobile
To create a usable web-based platform for listing and finding art and art-advocacy events across the US. How do we make a website for listing art events to be used by the largest possible pool of audiences?
Challenge
The project was impeccably organized from day one. I led the user experience design effort through the span of 12 two-week sprints, a research and discovery period, a user testing workshop, QA, and UAT period, during which the team utilized a highly iterative agile methodology.
Process
Discovery
Uncovering who we are building for specifically was of foremost importance. On the one hand, we have our Artists - anyone, from individual content makers to large arts organizations. On the other end is, of course, the Audience - everyone and anyone who would consume art. So: How would they all come together to meet in the middle?
4A Arts had done a tremendous amount of audience research. Data and surveys from organizations such as The National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for the Arts, The Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Wallace Foundation, among others, gave the team a plethora of material to get immersed in and extract the most impactful results for our development efforts. As the UX Designer, I inherited this wealth of information and started using it to learn and build.
Some more notable texts include, but are not limited to:
How a Nation Engages with Art - Highlights from the 2012 survey of public participation in the arts, National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Research Report #57
A New Framework for Building Participation in the Arts, by Kevin F. McCarthy, Kimberly Jinnett, RAND
The Road to Results, Effective Practices for Building Art Audiences, by Bob Harlow, Wallace Studies in Building Arts Audiences, The Wallace Foundation
Thriving Arts Organizations, Thriving Arts, What We Know About Building Audiences for the Arts and What We Still Have to Learn, The Wallace Foundation
Our user audience came down to two buckets of users, one on each side, further broken down into groups.
Partners:
- Large and Small Cultural Presenters
- Art Advocacies and Service Organizations
- Educational Institutions
- Creators
Visitors/Members:
- Specialists
- Enthusiasts
- Opportunists
- Stalwarts
The specificities we extracted from each separate user group and its characteristics determined the user stories, helped write the scenarios and map their user journeys.
User Stories - Visitor
PERSONA - Stalwart:
A supporter of specific arts organizations, who wants to join because it is the right thing to do with the goal of supporting the arts.
Tom, a retired lawyer and his wife of 43 years are long time art and music lovers and supporters of arts organizations, specific to chamber classical music. They join, sponsor and donate to such causes, because they (love music) feel it is the right thing to do. Their goal is to support the arts.
One of the couple’s habits is to entertain themselves about a couple of times a month with a concert and night on the town. The couple have annual memberships for museums in town that almost renew on a loop and belong to several Boards of local cultural organizations. They go to Foundations dinners, Opening Nights and Galas and are the first ones to get invited once Fundraising Auctions and Benefit Evenings Spring up in the calendar.
This upcoming season Tom is looking for something new to impress his wife with and perhaps an option that would add their names on a list of sponsors on either a Donor, Benefactor or Angel level. A more ambitious goal would be to even join an advisory board.
Tom is looking for an activity as part of an organization that is active, has a quality ongoing repertoire, a place where he and his wife could also meet peers. He gets most of his information by mail, with some internet engagement although limited. Today someone at a concert he frequents has told him about this website where he can find lots of new things that has cultural postings of events directly from the artists and organizations. Although not very good with computers he is very excited and has decided to try and look for it. Once on the website Tom looks for events specifically involving classical chamber music anywhere in the city he lives in. Although distance to their home is important it is not a dealbreaker and money is no object.
Journey Maps - Visitors/Members
The rest of the Journey Maps for all Visitors/Members
User Stories - Partner
PERSONA - Educational Institution:
Gibney Dance Center offers dance classes and wants to attract students.
The company website is the only place one can find out more about Gibney Dance and sign up for classes. As it is always looking to attract more audiences and dance students, it needs an additional platform to increase engagement with the world of dance and the arts.
Journey Maps - Partners
The rest of the Journey Maps for all Partners
Wireframing
The end of research and discovery led to kick-off of wireframing each page of the website. This is just a small selection of pages.
Wireframe for Submit Programming page.
Wireframe for User Dashboard page.
Testing
The user testing workshop ran midway through the process - it was a great way to check if we are on a path of understanding with actual members of both artistic institutions and lifelong art lovers. Reaching out to them with a usability testing workshop is always a foremost part of development - a favorite procedural moment for me as a designer, which is always very rewarding. We showcased our process and led interviews with a group of executives from leading art organizations (Carnegie Hall, NYFA, among others) and a core user group - the Stalwarts.
Mid-sprint testing workshop with some users from large cultural presenting organizations.
Visual design testing session with our visitors/members user group, 12 participants over the age of 75.
Development: Interaction Flows
Some more complex interactions needed a UX flow laid out, mostly for the engineering team.
Gift Membership purchasing flow.
More wireframes…
Membership purchasing screens sequence.
Account Deletion Flow and Flow for Becoming a 4AArts Member
Membership Flow
Visual Design
Designer John Emerson created the extensive and all-inclusive 4AArts.org Style Guide. After the final page wireframe approval, he built the visual design for each sequence of pages.
Finalizing visual design.
Visual design for Venue landing page - desktop.
Visual design for Venue landing page - mobile view.
Outcomes
4AArts.org launched in March 2020, one year after the project drew its development team. For a website promoting live events to come out in public space at a time when a global pandemic breaks out was rather unfortunate. But it persevered. It stayed in the interaction and visual design form showcased here through the pandemic for about two and a half years. At the end of 2022, the organization had changed leadership and created a more generic look to the application, keeping only the Search feature page from its original design. It will be educational to witness how it does and all the lessons that result from this unprocessed and unannounced user interface change.
Find Arts and Culture dropdown menu.
Search results, dropdown menus.
Search results, checked custom filters.