Client: Student project for the Google UX Design Professional Certificate.

My role: The entire process for the product including research, designing and testing

Project time: 3 months (with several design re-iterations subsequently)

A user navigating the booking page of the final prototype.

Overview

For this project I chose to make an app for an art gallery. The purpose of the app would be to increase conversion rates for users to book tickets to events being held at the gallery.

This would primarily be done by integrating the function of booking tickets in the gallery app itself (without recourse to something like Eventbrite or other 3rd party apps).

Competitor Analysis

• 2 direct competitors: Tate Modern (a museum based in London) and Gropius Bau (a museum based in Berlin).

• 2 indirect competitors: Art Rabbit and See/Saw (apps listing art exhibitions in various cities)

Overall, while these apps offer solid user experiences, each could improve in areas like performance, booking integration and visual clarity to enhance user satisfaction.

Survey

To gain a better understanding of possible pain points when booking tickets for an art gallery exhibition, I devised a questionnaire. I sought out volunteers from a range of ages, genders, ethnicities and living locations, in order to find out if there were any common pain points across a diverse array of social backgrounds and factors.

Commonly reported pain points included:

• Being overwhelmed or spoilt for choice with too many options resulting in users choosing nothing at all

• Being unsure of accessibility considerations (e.g. flashing lights at an exhibition for someone with epilepsy or unusual terrain for a wheelchair user)

• Art exhibitions insisting on buying tickets “at the door” with no online option and often selling out.

Building Empathy

With the qualitative data from the questionnaire, I used this information to define two target groups in the form of two separate personas; Alan (45) and Andrea (24).

Establishing a user narrative

Task Model

To better visualize the process a user would go through when booking a ticket for an art exhibition, the following task model lays out a user’s steps:

Customer Experience Map

In order to illustrate the decision making process of booking an exhibition on the art:agochi app, a customer experience map was helpful in building empathy for the users as they navigate this process.

Information Architecture

After constructing a user journey map that shed light on potential pain points and ways to solve them, I designed the information sitemap to be the following:

The ideation phase

To get an initial impression of potential design flaws and navigational issues,
it was useful to sketch out the design of the app as paper prototypes.
This allowed for rapid feedback and early identification of possible pain points.

The design system

Usability Study

I conducted several interviews (both written and live) to participants of various genders and ages, asking them to work through two userflows:

1.) Book a ticket for an exhibition at the art:agochi gallery

2.) Navigate to an artist’s bio page to find out more information about them

Round 1 findings:

• Users found the user flow generally intuitive

• Users thought that the UI was effective

• Users want to see more features about artists

After making a series of changes to the prototype, I then conducted another round of feedback to see if the key pain points had been addressed.

Round 2 findings:

• Users enjoyed the improvements to the UI but found booking tickets difficult.

• Users thought that the artist bio and exhibition info elements had improved

• Users wanted to see more images and videos of artists’ work

After the first round of feedback, users reported that they would like to see more visual content on the artist bio page. I created a scrolling sideshow of images so users can get a better sense of an artist’s work (which you can see via the component.

Accessibility considerations

It is important to place emphasis on the equability and accessibility of a UX and UI design project. I took several considerations into account when making my designs, including:

1.) The black text on the pink background (#F8B3FF) passes the accessibility contrast checker on WebAIM meaning that those with visual impairment will still be able to access the app.

2.) Accessibility icons for the exhibitions are displayed on the exhibition info pages.

3.) Consistent UI components help users who have difficulty reading and makes the functionality of the app more predictable.

A recurrent issue in the 2nd usability study was with how to proceed with payment after booking. Before, arrows were displayed at the top and after they were replaced with text-filled buttons at the bottom.

A user navigating the exhibition info page of the prototype

Areas for improvement

• UI Issues:
  As the Google course was very focused on UX over UI, there are some UI issues such as thin padding on buttons, at times a lack of hierarchy, and the bold use of colour in ineffective places.

• Further iterations and usability tests:
  It would have been a good idea to keep re-iterating the design to produce an even more streamlined project.

• Adapting for other device types:
  It is worth considering how I would need to re-conceptualize the design for desktop and tablet users with adaptive or responsive designs.

Conclusion

This was my first project that I completed in 2023 when I was learning the core concepts of UX and UI and getting to grips with Figma as a design tool. Picking a project that was focused on the arts industry allowed for novel and experimental choices in my designs that helped get me further in a short amount of time than if I had decided to pick a “safe project”. I also learned about the importance of feedback and how it can shape iterative design.

In terms of how this could drive conversions and traffic for a profit-based organization, the ultimate question still remains: when targeted social media ads are able to inform app enthusiasts of programs and exhibitions tailored to their interests, how would a dedicated app for a gallery do the same or even better job?

As this was my first project I don’t think I have necessarily “solved” this question, as this kind of business strategy also involves marketing, advertisement and data analysis. In any case, I think this project was definitely a “way in” to start to ask myself these business-oriented questions which I believe I took further with subsequent designs.

Another key take-away of this design as well as from the Google UX certificate course was the need to think about a diverse range of potential users. Whether that be users in the developing world or users that might have visual impairment issues, I enjoyed learning about how to be inclusive in my designs which really came into full fruition by the time I did my capstone project for the course.