.png)
.png)
Artists often find themselves losing motivation to continue to create, or "Artist's Block". This leads to artists struggling to come up with ideas, seeking perfection to their own detriment, and feeling stressed.
Relax Art is a mobile app that helps artists overcome their "Artist's Block", by providing art prompts, art challenges, and the ability to view and share art. Additionally. features like Daily Affirmation, Breathe, and Vent, focuses on tackling the stress that artists' feel when creating.
During the research stage, I was responsible for carrying out the interview process, and documenting our findings into user stories to understand our users' pain points. I then visualized our key takeaways to help us move to the design stage.
Starting the design stage, I consolidated the team's proposed solutions and surveyed potential users to help us narrow down a solution. I then outlined the user task flow and the information architecture for the main functions of the application. Using Figma, I implemented the user interactions for our High-fidelity design, which gave us a prototype for usability testing.
During the evaluation stage, I oversaw several usability testing sessions. Additionally, I assumed responsibility for analyzing and synthesizing the collected data to help iterate the high-fidelity mockup and prototype.
Interviews
To learn more about our target users, I took the lead to conduct several semi-structured interviews with individuals who create art, whether it's for school, a profession, or a hobby. Some of my main findings include:
User Stories
After conducting the interviews, I consolidated and categorized our interviewees into their own User Stories. This helped the group focus on our target users, and their needs and pain points.
After analyzing the findings from our interviews, it became evident that artists come from many different backgrounds, and they may or may not share the same sentiments towards creating art. We decided to use those commonalities to group our artists into two user groups: the Working Artist and the Expressive Artist. The Working Artist focuses more on the quality, the efficiency, and progress of their output. The Expressive Artist values how art can help them express their emotions, and the impact they can make on others.
.png)
.png)
Based on our user research, we conducted a brainstorming session, where we discussed possible ways we could deliver a product that met the needs of our users. Our ideation process consisted with an open discussion using “How Might We” questions to guide us to a solution.
After our brainstorming session, we came down to two concepts to help our user group. One concept leaned more to addressing the concerns of the "Working Artist", and the other focused on the "Expressive Artist".
Concept 1: Relax Art
Our second concept focuses on the user's problems with the various emotions they may feel when creating art, and creating a space where artists can combat their 'Artist's Block'. Artist's expressed how they may feel anxious about their art not looking good enough, or just themselves as a creator.
Relax Art would be an interactive and calming mobile application that allows users to:
Concept 2: Quick Accessible Arts
Our first concept focuses on the user's problems with their creative output. Artist's expressed the challenge in making time for their art, because it takes a lot of motivation and focus it takes to start. Another focus is on user feedback for artists that choose to upload their work.
Quick Accessible Arts would be a minimalistic designed mobile application that allows users to:
After narrowing down our ideas to two concepts, I showcased them to our interviewees to get feedback. I accompanied this showcase with storyboards we created to exemplify the practicality of each concept.
Based off the feedback we received, we decided to proceed with Concept 1 (Relax Art) as our core concept, and integrate a few features from Concept 2 (Quick Accessible Arts) into our final design.
I created a Venn Diagram to visualize the final features of Concept 1, and what features we'd adopt from Concept 2:
.png)
I created a user flow that visualizes the main staple of the application, which is the user's ability to post their artwork, and view features like the Art Prompts or Daily Affirmations if needed.
.png)
After finalizing the features we wanted to implement, I created our info architecture.
I created a Low Fidelity wireframe to visualize the information architecture, and help my group with the High Fidelity mockup and prototype.
.png)
My team used my Lo-fi designs to fully realize a High Fidelity mockup of Relax Art. We leaned towards a cool toned color palette consisting of purple, blue, and green colors as they help us set a relaxing environment for users. Once the designs were complete, I used Figma to prototype the various interactions of the application.
.png)
To assess the effectiveness of our design, I helped carry out a series of usability testing sessions with the artists I had interviewed, and an additional user group of artists.
Following an introduction to the project's objectives, we presented them with a sequence of tasks to complete:
We then asked them about their experience navigating the prototype, how effective it could be on their life, and the frequency at which they’d use it.
In general, our users liked the prototype because:
Based off the constructive feedback we received, and our own vision, a few improvements we’d make for our next interaction would include:
If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!
noorhaider708@gmail.com
.png)