UMUSE

Project Overview

My Role: UX/UI Designer

The challenge was to create a tool that could help artists and creatives find personalized sources of inspiration in a way that felt intuitive and user-friendly. The platform needed to provide a customized experience that accounted for different creative practices, while remaining accessible, engaging, and cohesive. By focusing on user-centered design principles, our goal was to bridge the gap between inspiration and action for a diverse creative audience.

Case Study

Problem: Creatives struggle to identify and maintain their consistent style, especially across artistic disciplines and often feel uninspired by generic suggestions for inspiration.

Challenge: How might we empower creatives to discover, define, and maintain their unique style across artistic disciplines, while providing personalized and meaningful inspiration?

User Research

To refine our scope and better understand our potential user base, we conducted a quick in-person interview with our classmates and professor, exploring their creative processes and how they draw inspiration for their creative endeavors. Since this was a design-focused class, most of our classmates were creatives in some capacity so their feedback proved to be extremely valuable to us. Our key takeaways were:

• Pinterest is the main platform from which inspiration is taken, but it can often feel generic or hard to customize perfectly.

• An application that personalizes to users through more than just an algorithm based on likes, saves, shares etc. may be beneficial.

Informed by the interview, we together created a user journey map and an affinity map to highlight the key needs and interests of potential users. I personally created two user personas.

We then developed wireframes to refine user flows and the layout of UMUSE. As a team, we aligned on the app's core feature: the 'artistic signature'. This feature would identify each user's unique creative style, interests, and proclivities through an in-depth onboarding process, where users engage with preference tests and questions about their mediums, practices, and styles. The goal was to empower creatives with a deeper understanding of their artistic identity.

Building on feedback from our classmates and professor on these wireframes, we designed higher-fidelity screens that better aligned with our vision for the final app's look and functionality. Additionally, we created an initial web landing page to serve as a visual value proposition and a logo to incorporate in the next phase of user research and testing.

Usability Test

With these elements, we moved on to the next phase of user research, conducting testing with individuals outside our class. Through the platform Useberry, we conducted research with ten users aged 18–24 to assess their experience with our product concept and early wireframes.

Testing Statement: "We aim to evaluate the effectiveness, intuitiveness, and user satisfaction of Flow 1, which is comprised of the onboarding process, artistic signature presentation, and home page experience. Our intent is to understand the comprehensibility of the onboarding journey, measure the usability of the home page, and determine the resonance of the insights introduced. We hypothesize that a straight-forward onboarding, combined with a concise summary and user-friendly home page, will enhance user alignment with their artistic preferences. Potential friction points might be most prominent in the VVP due to limited ability to convey all features of the app."

Demographic Data: 10 participants, ages 18-24, 80% women, 80% Pinterest users, 70% hobbyists.

What We Learned

Personalization Enhances Engagement. Users value applications that feel personalized to their preferences and needs. While they appreciated the individualized Artistic Signature, they also identified opportunities for greater customization within the app interface, such as sort/filter options and the ability to hide results.

Valuable usability feedback must be actionable. While general comments can provide context, specific, implementable suggestions drive tangible improvements in screen design. Therefore, research questions should be crafted to elicit precise, actionable insights.

Context matters. Despite clarifying the low-fidelity nature of these prototypes, users struggled to focus solely on the layout, often distracted by the absence of images.

User Pain Points

• Lack of Clarity on outcome of button action and progression of flow.

• Style Validation Quiz Questions were confusing for some users, particularly those that required an understanding of basic design principles.

• Artistic Signature could be enhanced to include more examples with greater detail.

Development

After reviewing the research results, I created an audit to assess the various elements within the low-fidelity wireframes. This allowed us to refine the wireframes into higher fidelity, incorporating feedback from usability testing as well as insights from our classmates and professor.

We then began developing the final high-fidelity flows. I contributed by designing three different desktop homepage concepts for the team to review and refine into the final product. We ultimately chose the first design shown below.

Additionally, I designed the upload and Artistic Signature flows below and collaborated with a teammate to co-design the remaining flows also seen below.

The Flows

Onboarding Flow
After evaluating our research, we altered the onboarding flow with Leah the artist in mind. The pain points we aimed to solve with this flow were:

• Leah struggles to define and grow her photography style. UMUSE Feature: A style validation quiz allows Leah to express her preferences, assisting her in refining her style and enhancing the platform’s recommendation accuracy.

• Leah is lost in the sea of generic online content and needs personalized inspiration to navigate creative blocks. UMUSE Feature: A style validation quiz allows Leah to express her preferences, assisting her in refining her style and enhancing the platform’s recommendation accuracy.

• Leah struggles to define and grow her photography style. UMUSE Feature: The inspiration feed delivers a curated selection of content that not only matches Leah’s style but also introduces new creative disciplines, broadening her artistic horizons.

  
  

Project Management Flow
After updating our initial low-fidelity onboarding flow to a higher-fidelity version catered to the artist persona, we chose to design another flow that caters to the professional persona. The pain points we aimed to solve with this flow were:

• Jamil needs an efficient way to organize and access various projects to manage tight deadlines. UMUSE Feature: The 'Your Projects' dashboard allows for quick management and access, streamlining Jamil's workflow and helping him stay on top of deadlines.

• Jamil strives to find design inspiration that resonates with both his and his clients' styles without compromising his creative integrity. UMUSE Feature: The 'Project Page' enables Jamil to tailor each inspiration feed by editing project parameters, ensuring the suggestions align with the specific creative vision for each project.

• Balancing his creative style with client expectations and creating a distinguishable personal brand is a challenge for Jamil. UMUSE Feature: 'Project Settings' offers customization options such as sharing settings and creative medium tags, allowing Jamil to fine-tune how his work is presented and maintain his brand identity while fulfilling client needs.

Final Reflections

Leveraging User Research to Uncover Needs Without Directly Asking

While conducting user research, I learned that the questions that allowed for the most helpful answers were those that focused on the user’s experience while viewing and interacting with the interfaces rather than hypotheticals about the app. Although it was tempting to ask opinions on potential features or theoretical problems that users could face when in a creative rut, these questions were ultimately too vague and did not allow for reliable and usable answers in return.

Intuitive Design is Subjective

Our user research revealed that what I considered intuitive design was not universally perceived as such. This insight prompted me to enhance clarity across the user journey by introducing elements that displayed a user’s progress and adding a question feature within the style validation quiz flows. These adjustments ensured a smoother, more understandable experience for a wider range of users.