Project Overview
Artists who identify as women face unique challenges in their careers, such as lack of representation and exposure in creative disciplines. As Christopher Bollen points out, less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art section of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art are women, but 76% of the nudes are female. Laura Baker cites that the gender divide across all music industry related jobs is 67.8% male and 32.2% female. To help bridge this gap and empower women artists to support and collaborate with each other, I created a mobile application that allows women artists to showcase their work and connect with other artists based on creative discipline and mutual interests. The goal of this project was to focus on the functionality and interaction design that would best serve women artists in a collaboration app; graphic design was not a major focus.
Tools
Prototyping Software (JustInMind)
Screen recording software (Screen Record Pro)
Skills
UX Design
UX Research
Usability Testing
Audience Analysis
The Process
Audience Analysis
To make sure I was providing the best possible service to women creatives, I conducted an audience analysis by interviewing women members of a local arts collective called Spiderweb Salon. The participants represented a range of artistic disciplines and all had different goals. I collected demographic information, asked them about their experiences working in the arts, discovered what features they would want in an app for women artists, and found out what technologies they used most.
Discerning Design
I used the information I gathered in the audience analysis to create paper sketches, low-fi prototypes, and then a sophisticated, interactive prototype. I tested the low-fi prototypes with two participants to get their feedback on the design and incorporated their insights into the final interactive prototype. I found that participants wanted to be able to find and create projects with a high-level of specificity based on their genre. For example, a fiction writer who wrote dark, weird fiction short stories wanted to be able to precisely categorize her work in this way and be able to use such specific categories to find similar writers. I also found that when a particular website dominated the online world for their genre, such as BandCamp for musicians, the participants wanted to easily integrate the content from those sites into their portfolios.
The Product
Personalized Profiles
The create profile welcome screen explains the mission of the app and walks the user through
creating a profile.
The user sees specific genres and types tailored to the artistic discipline they choose.
The above image is an example profile of a fine art photographer. The user viewing the profile can tap the yellow message bubble to send the profile owner a message or tap the heart to save the profile to their favorites.
The user can add tags such as “dark” or “experimental” to customize the description of their work. These tags also enable users to search for profiles of other artists with similar interests.
The portfolio page provides a home base where the user can include information about the main focus of their work and showcase the art they have created. To enable users to get the amount of specificity they want, I created custom options based on the discipline they chose. Because genres of art can be very specific and are constantly changing, I also allow users to add tags to further describe their work.
Gorgeous Galleries
Every artist is proud of their work and deserves a space to display their work the way it was intended to be experienced. I created custom profile functionality for each different artistic discipline, so artists could showcase their work in a way that made sense for their genre. For example, the portfolio page for a visual artist allows them to create a gallery of their works with an art
museum feel.
Showcasing Specialties
Many of the artists I spoke to were interested in creating multiple types of art. For example, one woman I interviewed, Bess, is mainly a poet, but also plays drums in a grunge band. To enable users to showcase secondary projects and find other women artists to collaborate on these projects with, I allow them to create project pages. Project creators can add links to their project pages from their main portfolio page. Other users can discover project pages through viewing profiles or through search.
Creating Connections
The women I spoke to expressed a variety of search needs. They wanted to be able to search for specific genres and tags in their geographical area, but also wanted to be able to browse categories and groups. To facilitate this, I allow users to search for people, projects, or groups, and specify medium, location, and tags. The user can also tap the “Groups” icon on the bottom menu to browse and create groups or view groups they are a member of.
Usability Testing
To test the designs I created, I asked women artists from Spiderweb Salon and from the local community to participate in a usability study. The prototyping software I used, JustInMind, allowed me to create a fully functional prototype that a user could access from a phone and interact with by tapping, swiping, etc. I gave the users three scenarios and asked them to perform the tasks listed to make sure the app met their needs. I used a screen capture software to record their tests, so I could review them and find any pain points users had while using the app. At the end of the tests, I ask them for subjective feedback about the app and any features that were missing or needing improvement. I used my findings to influence the final design of the prototype. The women artists all expressed excitement at the possibilities that an app like this one would hold for them and felt that FemmeCollective would help them to gain exposure, collaborate easily, and be more creatively productive.
