Allison Thibault

Localart is a concept for a mobile application centered on sharing and finding art. Artists can use it as a place to showcase their work and use as a lightweight portfolio site, while art seekers can use a combination of their location and the subject, medium, and attributes of the art that they are on the hunt for to explore new artists.

To identify the functions and flows required for this app, I first did some background research on existing platforms for sharing and finding art, and talked to several artist friends to identify their pain points in how they go about sharing and finding art online. A gap that was confirmed through this research is the ability to combine multiple attributes (typically tags in other applications) along with location to find artists, which also applies to artists that are trying to market their own artwork. The endless scrolling of other applications is another pain point identified that Localart aims to address.

User personas were created to focus the concept on the needs of two primary user groups, the artist and the art seeker. A storyboard was then drawn to represent the higher level experience of an art seeker specifying how they would go about searching for a specific type of art in their location.

Throughout this ideation phase, sketches were made whenever an idea struck - in planner pages, on whiteboards, or with stylus in a quick note. As these sketches were iterated on, more structured wireframes and flows began to materialize. Low fidelity wireframes were then generated using Axure that showcased the primary state changes of the application.

Colors, styling, and interactions were then added to land at a high fidelity prototype with a fully built out primary search flow and several smaller side flows.

Several design challenges that were overcome throughout the design process included:

• How to simply visually represent the style/medium/subject search paradigm - which meant hiding the search controls when not in use and distinct colors to differentiate each category of tag.
• How to allow a user to get around the primary use case of looking for art in a specific location by including a clearly marked ‘anywhere’ option in the search parameters that does not constrain the user into using the zip code field.
• How to represent artists that do not have a physical studio location - which translated to including an ‘off the grid’ indicator on the map to include artists within a general area that may be open to commissions without the need for a specific address to be included in search results.
• How to allow the user to ‘poke around’ the application if they do not have a specific search in mind without the inclusion of an endless scroll model - which was tackled by creating a home page with recommended search terms and a ‘shuffle’ button, and allowing app users to add several of their favorite artists and pieces to their own profile so the art seeker can quickly hop from one artist to another through a chain of recommendations from previous artists in their search.

Lance & Leaf is a conceptual ecommerce site for house plants with a focus on pet friendly plants. The goal of this case study was to create a convincing ecommerce experience for end users through building out a realistic brand and applying it to an interactive prototype.

Market research was conducted to understand how other house plant storefronts market their products and apply company branding to their pages, and to understand how to shape Lance & Leaf branding competitively within the marketspace. This led to the creation of a Lance & Leaf Style Guide.

This branding strategy was then applied to Figma wireframes, which were brought into Axure to add interactivity. Interactions were focused on a single flow, taking a user from the home page to the New Arrivals category, to the page for a Rattlesnake Calathea plant. Once on the product page, the user could add the plant to their cart and complete the checkout process.

User testing was designed and conducted, with tasking tailored to guide the user through the built out interactive workflow. The test was structured where the user would complete a single task and answer questions about their experience for that specific task. The survey administered also had several up front questions to gain more insight into user’s expectations for an ecommerce site and as a baseline for each user’s background.

The resulting feedback from this user test indicated several areas where the design could evolve to improve the overall user experience, which were then applied to the mockups. Including an animation to emphasize the state change of adding another item to the cart was the primary pain point that was addressed, and style changes were made to improve the overall design, with feedback implemented on the site’s overall aesthetic.

The Epic Pass provides season passes to ski resorts across the United States and world. Each pass has different levels of resort access, such as varying levels of holiday restrictions or limited days at specific mountains. This case study focuses on the redesign of epicpass.com – specifically on the Passes page, the Compare Passes page, and the Benefits page. View the full site evaluation to see a detailed breakdown of the issues covered below, including insights from user testing.

The Passes page contains details on each of the passes that Epic offers. At the time of evaluation, the content of this page was split into separate pages for each pass type. The redesigned Passes page brings the details for each pass into one centralized location with interactive elements that allow the customer to change the details they are viewing without the need to go to a completely separate page, including the ability to tab through different pass categories and expand or collapse the details for specific pass types. This is similar to what the Epic Pass website refers to as their ‘Compare Passes’ page, but displays this information in a more visual and flexible way.

The redesigned Compare Passes page has been restructured to only show the customer details of the passes that they have selected. Each pass has a column, with details underneath. This gives the customer the ability to easily see side by side comparisons of information such as price, which mountains have holiday restrictions, and which resorts are available. On the current Compare Passes page, the details for the different passes are listed vertically, which made it difficult for users to tell what the differences are between passes and required a considerable amount of scrolling.

The Epic Pass site has many separate pages covering the benefits that they offer, as well as a relatively hidden page that acts as an aggregated view of these benefits. This page has a large amount of redundancy and is visually dense. The redesigned Benefits page acts as a landing page to pages with more details for specific benefits, and gives a high level view of the benefits that Epic offers, showing details on hover in a logically grouped way .

These redesigned pages streamline the large amount of content that is currently on the Epic Pass website in a way that is easy to navigate and provides the customer with relevant information at the right time.