open.studio
new product | iOS app
A platform for creative professionals to showcase their work, resume, CV, events and connect with fellow creatives!
Methods
Topic Map
Screener Survey
User Interviews
Affinity Mapping
Persona Development
Journey Mapping
Competitor/Comparator Analysis
Design Studio
Sketching
Wireframing
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Specification Document
Tools
Sketch
Invision
Team
Christiaan Montgomery
Role
UX Researcher
UX Designer
UI Designer
Research + Synthesis
User Interviews: Used a screener survey to find 7 users by focusing on their experience with social media, how they feel about it, the posts that they felt were the most influential and what content they actually engage with.
Affinity Mapping: Found the common insights and trends between users based on those user interviews.
Persona Development: Created a persona with behaviors, goals, needs and pain points based on the insights and trends found to get a full understanding of the open.studio user.
Journey Mapping: Created a journey map to further flesh out the pain points and help us focus on a specific pain area.
User Insights from Research
Persona
Piper, 30 Freelance Photographer From New York, NY
Grow her professional network while finding inspiration for her work
Needs to maintain her current connections, and to filter her feed to avoid distractions that are not relevant to her current objective.
Uses posts from other photographers to find inspiration but she dislikes how hard it is to build connections due to the popularity of social media apps.
“Social media connects me to people who are significant.”
Problem Statement
People use social media to make/maintain connections, find new opportunities and for entertainment.
Due to Piper’s distracting social media feed, she finds it difficult to focus on her professional goal at hand. How might we maximize her time on social media so she can engage with content that matters to her?
Ideation + Iteration
Design Studio
To get an understanding of what we both were thinking about the design, we quickly sketched and brainstormed our ideas for the layout and a couple pages.
Create-Discuss-Document-Repeat
Feature Prioritization
To learn more about what features users found most important we conducted a competitive analysis and MoSCoW map.
Wire frames + User Flow
Iterating on our designs and features, we created wire frames and a user flow which led us to our usability testing.
Prototyping + Usability Test
We then prototyped the wire frames in Invision and conducted 1 round of usability testing with 3 users to ensure our solution solved the problem.
Feature Prioritization
We looked at features in:
Sites that are more communication driven
Increased emphasis on networking and connecting with others
Sites that are more content driven
Increased emphasis on sharing and feedback
Sites that are specialized
Increased emphasis on a specific topic
Sites that are general
Encompasses all the above topics, without a specific focus
Prototype Features
After conducting the competitive analysis we decided that a filter feature was essential to the users to avoid any distractions and stay on track.
To help users feel connected with others and network we added the message system but included options to view the user's CV or upcoming events.
Usability Testing
We conducted one round of usability testing with our mid-fidelity wireframe prototype with three users to see if we solved the problem and/or if we needed to iterate on the design more.
Mid-Fi Wireframes
The path predicted for the users during the usability test.
Usability Test Results
Prototype
Final Thoughts
Working on this project proved to be a challenge, as we lost a team member mid project, but we faced this challenge head on, confident with utilizing the UX process. Knowing we couldn’t do anything about human behavior we were able to focus our direction on the primary needs. Open.studio solves the user’s problem of using social media to network and find inspiration. It allows the user to take away the distractions that arise with other social media apps, it gives them the opportunity to network and talk to other artists, as well as showcasing their work.
Moving forward we would love to explore some options given to us in our user testing and further exploring the professional networking aspect.