Atlanta Art Guide Website and Zine
I took on the roles of visual designer and researcher of my team. Atlanta Art Guide was created to highlight Atlanta's art spaces and to promote local artists. The website and zine we created offers Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to encourage users to discuss and share their thoughts on the art that they are viewing. My team and I followed the Goal Directed Design (GDD) methodology by Alan Cooper. Goal Directed Design is a user-centered approach that identifies the goals and behaviors of users through research, modeling, requirements, frameworks, and refinement. We worked through these five different phases to reach our end product.
We started off with a Kickoff meeting. Our team lead, Tatiana, gave us an overview of her project vision. Since this was a class project, we were not required to contact any stakeholders. We assumed the roles of stakeholders and created our product problem statements. We also determined the target audience and developed user research goals and questions.
During this phase, we needed to write a literature review. Our goal was to gather information about art guides to build context. We reviewed internal documents, industry reports, and conducted research on analogous services.
For our competitive audit, I searched for similar art guides and competitors to see what people enjoyed and disliked about the existing products. Tatiana had shared an informative Zine about visual thinking strategies (VTS) that she made in a previous class she took. It served as our introduction to VTS. We conducted heuristic evaluations on competing art guide website and applications based in the Atlanta area.
To get a better understanding of our users and their goals, we conducted five virtual interviews with our fellow classmates and professors. I was the facilitator for all five interviews. After each interview, we analyzed our findings in affinity maps.
Some of our interview questions included:
►Describe your ideal art-viewing experience.
►What is your relationship with art?
►How do you discover art, art spaces, and artists?
►What are your thoughts and experiences with art guides?
We took the information we gathered in our affinity maps and analyzed it for patterns to create our persona. An important part of creating personas was being able to comprehend our user goals and any significant behavioral patterns. As a team, we worked on Miro and filled out our own persona worksheet. After discussing our work with each other, we came up with our persona, Jules.
Jules' goals inspired our problem statement, vision statement and our affinity map of the guide's required functions. We needed to establish what features Atlanta Art Guide needed for our Persona to succeed.
The current state of Atlanta art guides has focused primarily on guiding users to locations and providing minimal information about the art. What existing products fail to address is that tools for engagement, discovery, and interaction with art and surrounding spaces could enhance user experiences. Our product will address this gap by introducing Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) to guide users through local communities and engage them in thought provoking discussions around art.
The new design of Atlanta art guides will help users achieve engaging and interactive art-viewing experiences by allowing them to discover art in safe physical and virtual spaces while using VTS to guide reflection with greater emphasis on comprehension, comfort, and community, and without the constraints and discomfort that they currently experience. This will dramatically improve users' art viewing experiences and motivation to participate in these experiences while supporting their local community.
The team and I worked on Figma to create wireframes for our prototype. Our goal in this phase was to produce a coherent low-fidelity prototype using a key path scenario and multiple validation scenarios. We made the key path scenario by introducing our persona to Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) on the homepage, an events page, and a page for the local art. We also had a contact and “meet the team” page in our wireframe. We also worked on the zine, a document form of our prototype.
We tested the design with five of our fellow classmates and professors using A/B testing against the original design to see what users liked and disliked in both versions.
We asked the participants to use the think-aloud-protocol.
I facilitated these five user testing sessions.
We also analyzed UX/UI and the visual design of the prototype.
After our interviews, we gathered some key takeaways:
‣positive reactions to the overall aesthetic, the form, and education section
‣negative reactions to accessibility, navigation, and redundancy
‣surprised that users found some features distracting or confusing
We tested the design with five of our fellow classmates and professors using A/B testing against the original design to see what users liked and disliked in both versions.
We asked the participants to use the think-aloud-protocol.
I facilitated these five user testing sessions.
We also analyzed UX/UI and the visual design of the prototype.
With this project, I completed the Interactive Design degree program at Kennesaw State University. I feel very accomplished and can see notable improvements between my first project and final project following the Goal Directed Design process. Our team meetings, whether virtual or face to face, were always pleasant and productive. I enjoyed sharing and discussing our final project with other students, faculty, and visitors who came to see our work on our showcase day.
