“Audiences are never something homogeneous…”
Client
American Alliance of Artists and Audiences
4AArts.org
My role
Lead UX Designer.
I was the last piece of the puzzle to be brought on a team of 5 to build this project for a great non-profit organization supporting and championing arts and culture. Being a painter myself, my role really fit with the overall objective, which was to build one art agnostic web platform featuring events by artists, arts education and cultural advocacies of all dicsiplines, and for audiences of all economic and cultural tiers and abilities.
Platforms
Web, Mobile
Challenge
Create a 0-1 usable web-based platform for listing and finding art and art-advocacy events across the US, Canada, Central and South America and soon Europe. Make it for the largest possible pool of audiences of all backgrounds, tastes and abilities.
Process
With the help of a really robust Agile organization in place, I led the user experience design effort through the span of 12 two-week sprints, which included a research and discovery period, a user testing workshop, QA, and UAT period.
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?
4AArts 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 started using this wealth of information to learn and build.
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
Journey Maps - Partners
User Persona: Educational Institution - Gibney Dance Center offers dance classes and wants to attract students.
Journey Map - Visitors/Members
User Persona: Stalwart
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.
Testing and validation
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.
Membership Purchase
Checkout Transaction
Becoming a 4AArts Member flow and Account deletion flow
Visual Design
Designer John Emerson created an extensive and all-inclusive 4AArts.org style guide and all visual design.
Outcomes
4AArts.org launched in March 2020, one year after the project first drew its development team. For a website promoting live events to come out at the start of a global pandemic was rather challenging. 4AArts.org stayed in the form showcased here throughout 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 website, keeping only the Search feature page in its original design.
