ArtWalk Project Brief

Hook: Designing connection through an arts arts and community app

Tagline: The world is your gallery!

Project Description:

ArtWalk is an app designed to connect people with the art and humans in their surrounding area. With combination of fitness and social goals, along with an engaging interface, users will be motivated to explore the world outside their font door. Rather than encouraging comparison culture which can result in feelings of isolation, ArtWalk encourages users to seek meaningful connection and community.

Upon opening the app, new users will answer a series of onboarding questions which will determine their location, physical activity goals, social goals, and arts-related interests. Then, each time users access the app, they will be able to choose between generating a personalized walking or biking art tour and browsing through curated arts-related meetups to attend. The app will feature challenges and other gamified elements in order to motivate and engage users. Whether they're interested in connecting with people they already know, having a solo experience in public art spaces, or attending social events to meet new people, ArtWalk has users covered.

The UI will be bright, playful, and engaging. Hand-drawn illustrations and textures mimicking art supplies like paint and paper will connect to the app's theme and work to challenge the conventional smooth, flat experience users may expect from an app. This is intentionally echoing the way the functionality of the app works to challenge the superficial experiences users may expect from a social app. In all ways, ArtWalk seeks to add depth, color, and texture to the lives of its users.

Keywords:

Community, art, human connection, mental health, physical activity, interaction, walking, biking, socializing, tour, augmented reality, playful, joyful

Research:

Interviews and Survey

For these, I had 19 participants. Some were interviewed separately, in a face-to-face setting, while others took an online survey. They were asked questions about art, their mental health, technology and social media use, physical activity, and social preferences.

Ethnography

I sat in a busy area near the cafe on a university campus and observed the interactions and behavior taking place there.

Diary Study

A group of four participants logged their human interactions and technological interactions over the span of 2 weeks, tracking their feelings after each.

Identifying thought and behavior patterns helped me to set some priorities with my design process.

Additional Key Takeaways:

Many users interviewed and surveyed expressed discomfort surrounding meeting others organically. They prefer to be alone, with people they already know, or to attend an organized gathering of like-minded individuals with clear plans.

Ethnography showed similar results, as individuals in the busy shared space were either sitting alone with body language suggesting they, for whatever reason, didn’t wish to engage with others (headphones on, engrossed in phone, laptop, or book). If they weren’t displaying this body language, they were with friends. The only time I witnessed strangers interacting turned out to be the first meeting of a group of potential roommates.

My research process thus far has also included literary review of articles focused on social isolation and the connection between physical activity and mental health, and books focused on UX research methodology and best practice.

Like-Minded Examples:

I drew inspiration from walking and biking arts tours, Pokemon Go, and fitness apps like Fitbit. Initially, the idea for ArtWalk came from imagining what it could be like to have personalized, on-demand access to experiences similar to the studio tours or gallery night events cities host. From there, I began imagining the unique and playful opportunities an app format could provide, looking to Pokemon Go for scavenger hunt type gamification inspiration and FitBit for fitness goal setting and challenge inspiration. Visually, I took inspiration from colorful public murals and art supplies. Although I was able to find pieces of inspiration in all of the examples shown or mentioned above, I have not found an example of an app combining fitness and social goals with art within a gamified structure in the specific ways I plan to do with ArtWalk.

Model Project:

ArtWalk began as a Design Studio project in the MAGWD program. At first, my focus was on researching mental health and app design, ideation, logo iteration, and branding. I then brought that foundational work with me to Experimental Interaction, where I began to create wireframes, experiment with Adobe Aero for augmented reality purposes, and create the first draft of my Figma prototype. In User Experience Design, I deepened my research, this time focusing on the users and the design problem. I applied what I had learned throughout the UX course and a UI workshop I attended to my prototype. Through this process and usability testing, my overall design and prototype improved. I added a meetup flow based on user research findings, began building a design system within Figma, made improvements to the interface, and made some updates to my logo.

I am happier with the state of my current prototype than I was with my previous prototype. However, I would like to continue making changes, including creating hand-drawn illustrations to replace the illustration pack I had found through Figma Community. I am also looking to add some additional flows in order to add additional gamification details and to give a full picture of the app's pages and functionality. I plan to keep an open mind as I seek and receive additional feedback throughout the process, making other changes as appropriate.

Existing Assets:

Existing assets above. I intend to make some changes to the logo suite, icons and imagery, and develop a more robust design system.

Audience and Potential Partners:

Once I had notes from my interviews, entries from my diary study, and responses to my survey, I created an empathy board. This helped me to develop an understanding of my target audience which in turn helped me make choices about my design.

The above images are the result of brainstorming arts-related organizations to reach out to for further research and real-world connection. As a starting point, I began compiling a list of arts tours, galleries, and museums in Wisconsin, Chicago, and Minneapolis. During our first class, we discussed the value and importance of using these connections to inform my design choices in terms of how this group of users (the ones creating the art or facilitating events) will get their work or events into the app for other users to find.

Beginning With The End:

Deliverables I plan to include in my completed capstone are next to the turquoise paint marks, while specific goals I plan to accomplish along the way are listed next to the pink paint marks.

To be continued!