Project overview
Click here to view prototype: Connect Dots
Problem space
52% of Canadian artists are self employed compared to 12% of all Canadian workers, while the Median income of artists is 44% lower than the average Canadian income. Young artists attempting to go into a creative career can find it difficult entering the field especially freelance work due to the somewhat amorphous nature of finding work. Because of the difficulty of finding work in their chosen professions freelancers often need 1-2 “day jobs” in order to support their career work.
Research
- A typical artist has employment income of $17,300, a figure that is 56% lower than the median of all workers.
- Studies show that opposed to being solely competitors other freelancers can be valuable assets, because they can share advice as well as referrals from multiple different clients.
- 66% of visual artists self-employed, the highest percentage among the nine most common arts occupations.
- Freelancers are often required to wear many hats in their profession from producer, accountant, PR and managers. This requires them to be proficient in fields outside of their training.
Interviews
Following secondary research, I wanted to learn about how freelance artists start their careers and what’s their biggest pain points are. Their personal experiences would help me continue with my assumptions or pivot if needed.
I conducted 5 qualitative interviews with people who met my participant criteria and were willing to share their experiences.
Opportunities
After confirming that the research supports the problem space I was able to continue with developing digital solutions. Going over the pain points and current products in the market I found that for freelancers there's an abundance of job sites and portfolio sites as options, but freelancers were still having issues landing jobs. So I decided to pivot and focus on networking for freelancers between each other.
How Might We
How might we improve the probability of getting jobs for new artists going into freelance careers in order to support themselves in their chosen field.
Insights
Connections
Interviewees found growing a contact list to be very important for a freelance career, but this usually takes time sometimes even years to build up not only client contacts but peers and mentors as well. For Kate having a larger contact pool would allow for more opportunities and the possibility for consistent work.
Jobs
The main goal is to land jobs for freelancers and sometime just finding the right jobs that suit the freelancer can make the difference. If a filter system can be direct freelancers towards jobs what better suit their skill sets it can save on time and effort
Portfolios
A common insecurity with freelancers, especially early in their career is whether their portfolio is good enough to help land jobs. having a way to help best present their portfolio so their work sells their greatest assets can take alot the stress of new freelancers.
To help determine how my solutions would deliver value to users, I created multiple user stories based on my persona that I developed.
I chose two to turn into functional features that support Kate’s goals and needs.These features will be the main function and support my minimal viable product.
Product Features
Before I started sketching, I wanted to map out what features I thought would be helpful for Kate and what would ultimately help her reach her goals. This gave me more of a foundation and guidance for my digital solution.
Jobs
Users will have easy access to job postings from the web with information on prerequisites from where the job posting was taken from.
Connections
Users will be able to see other users work they’ve posted and contact each other to help build bonds.
Suggestions
App will be able to suggest jobs, and show content users might be interested in based on input user provides during the onboarding process and how the use the app so forth.
Bonding
Users will be able to create groups where they can collab projects and critique each others work, pushing interactions between users.
Sketching
With solid product features in mind, I moved into sketching these functions out.
My main priority was to have two tasks flows that were completed successfully during user testing and then adding in additional features that also benefit the users.
Wireframes
After creating my sketches of each task flow, I translated them into mid-fidelity wireframes. I went through 3 versions of my solution with user testing after each iteration.
User testing
For each round of user testing, I had 5 participants move through my task flows. This was essential to learning how my product functions, what works and what doesn’t, and how it made users feel.
I developed a user testing plan, app intro script, user guiding script, tasks and scenarios, and an overall testing results chart.
Each round of testing gave me more insight to my developing product and from this, I iterated on multiple features. Below are features that were a top priority to improve the user experience.
Change #1
Profile picture
Profile picture was too large taking attention away from more important information on the screen. Profile picture was shrunk and moved to make sure user new they were still logged in.
Change #2
Friend groups (circles)
How the groups were originally displayed and categorized felt too gimmicky at first. user tests felt it was more important to clearly display names. lastly having the groups displayed in collums and rows would would allow for easier stacking when users accumulated a larger number of groups.
Change #3
Onboarding
Original onboarding had too many screens. created a lot of work to start using the app and created an unpleasant onboarding process.
Branding
Going into the branding of my product I try to keep in mind what the purpose of this app is and what message it wants to say.
I explored colour, imagery, typography, and high-fidelity design elements.
Along with research, the visual part of process is one of my favourites. The elements I pulled together were looking like a great fit and were also relatable, which gave me a good feeling to where the brand was heading.
Mood board
Wordmark logo
High-fidelity design
Click here to view prototype: Connect Dots
Responsive Marketing Site
Feature highlights
Marketing site prototype
Click here to view prototype: Connect Dots Marketing Site Desktop
Click here to view prototype: Connect Dots Marketing Site Mobile
Future Plans
Continuing the development of this app my goals would be
1 To increase the apps stickiness beyond group critiques and chatting and allow for users to be able to collaborate projects with each other similar to how figma works
2 To broaden the audience medium from currently being mainly illustrator and graphic designers to allow for freelancers who work primarily outside of digital mediums and freelancers who operate outside of visual arts such as dancers or personal trainers by adding video sharing functions
3 Create iPad versions because of the nature of the app I feel users would want to have the option to be able to view their content at a larger workable scale and an iPad would allow them to draw on the screen when critique each others work.
Key learnings
Through 10 weeks I went through the full design process. Applying design thinking principles allowed me to work in an agile manner exploring my problem space and really getting to understand how to create solutions from a user centered point of view.
I found keeping empathetic to the users needs and allowed for easier navigation acting like a north star it really informed the design process. Allowing myself to be open to play and evolving ideas gave room to develop designs but also kept me from stalling from the pressure of time constraints.