ARTinerary: A Case Study
ARTinerary is a unique resource for art critics, students, tourists as well as gallery and museum staff that enables the user to create an itinerary of gallery exhibitions from our extensive directory in New York City. Offering a variety of pathways to search, there is also a discoverability element to ARTinerary through reviews and featured exhibitions.
Discovery Research
Focused on making art exhibitions more accessible to a wide audience, it was important to first define ARTinerary from an aesthetic perspective. A mood board was created to help establish what the look and feel of the site would be and helped to guide the design principles throughout the entire project.
Next, research was conducted focused on understanding the user. Two archetypal personas were created in order define the user’s demographic, personality and interests in order to better understand how and why they would use ARTinerary.
Once the user group was defined, a competitive analysis of two similar sites offering gallery directories in New York City were evaluated. Focusing on appearance, navigation and content, what worked and what was lacking were assessed. A survey was also created and administered to 11 respondents who fit the user group criteria. The following user brief discusses these findings, which were then integrated into the next step of the design process.
Interaction Design
In order to define the product’s key experiences and effectively communicate the value of those key experiences to the user, a storyboard was sketched out depicting a scenario in which the users from both personas interacted in a setting where a need was created for them to employ ARTinerary. Next, an experience map describing the guiding principles of the customer journey helped us to understand the entire process of using ARTinerary.
After evaluating the interaction design deliverables, it was clear that the most viable product of ARTinerary was it’s ability to concentrate a myriad of resources in one place, which would allow the user to save time and increase their discoverability of new exhibitions.
The following flow diagram depicts the ideal route the user would experience during their journey to achieve the task of creating an itinerary while using ARTinerary.
Wireframe and Prototypes
Using critiques and feedback from the user task flow it became clear that a final itinerary page as well as a broad search function to access the database of artists and galleries was necessary for the user to achieve their goals when using ARTinerary. Based on these insights, digital prototypes of both a desktop and mobile version of the site were created in sketch and made interactive in InVision to demonstrate the MVP of ARTinerary.
