Week 8— Senior Thesis II — Learning About Different Artists
This week’s agenda is to interview some artists and show them the prototype I have created. What really surprised me was the first participant gave me a lot of good insights that I went back to revise my interview prompt before the second interview. So I’d like to say my interview process was iterative too.
My main focus this month is finding out how artists tell their stories and what ways? What kind of stories capture the essence of their work? And my job is — how might we create a “toolkit” to help artists tell their own story. The Artif is a story-driven e-commerce app that showcases artist’s life and their work in-depth to collectors and buyers.
Participant #1
I came up with some very basic and simple questions to start the conversation with artist #1 Peter, an amateur artist.
- What kind of work do you make?
- What medium do you use? Why do you choose to use this medium for these work?
- What is the story behind these work?
- Where do you get your inspiration from?
Peter never really thought about these questions, but as I kept asking these questions, he began to open up more about his experience. What amused me is that Peter couldn’t stop talking about his art. To summarize Peter’s engagement — there are artists who know their story but they don’t know where to start.
Peter also mentioned these questions reminded him the questions they ask lon Hinge dating app. So I took Peter’s insights and looked into how Hinge structures their questions for their user.
Hinge has these questions set up for user’s profile. These questions are specific and creative. They are also quite cognitive — it engages the user to really think about themselves.
After did some benchmarking on Hinge app and searched some good questions to ask for artists, I prototyped a high-fi screen as the “toolkit” to guide the artists through their Artif journey.
Participant #2
For the second participant, I showed them the new screens and the main page screen I made last week. As a student, they said a lot of young artists he knows don’t know to define their work yet, so these questions definitely can be useful for making the artists to think and articulate their work.
The second participant also mentioned that these questions made him think of the “artist interview” once their professor have showed them in class. To take this insightful comment. I also search bunch of artist Q&As to add more in-depth questions in to the list.
However, the second participant suggested that there should be an easier way to see this an artist’s “About.” Instead of using a click-in section for “About”, we can implement some scroll down or 3D press to access “About” quickly.
Other New Screens
I made these new screens following the section of “About You”. The purpose is to help artists to package themselves in the most compelling way to show every aspect of their work.
For Next Week
- The interview process is as iterative as prototyping process. I will prototype as I interview. It helps me to evolve my ideas and core features.
- More interviews are scheduled for next week too.
- Consolidate all of the screens into a flow
