Art Pigeon Redesign
Explore and Discuss Public Art in NYC
OVERVIEW
If you have ever been to New York City, you must be impressed by the rich public art here. Have you ever wonder what are the stories behind those art pieces? Who made these works? Art Pigeon is here to help people explore outdoor art in NYC. It delivers information on both a website and a mobile application.
The goals of this particular project were to identify any usability issues with the mobile application and deliver a more user-friendly version of the application.
ROLE
User Research, Usability Test, Visual Design
TEAM
Xueyi Xu, Zhuo Wang, Ruilin Huang, Kate Almquist
DURATION
1 Month
Understanding the Problem
Who Are the User?
We identified two types of user for Art Pigeon, visitors and locals. For each type of user, we created a persona.
Selena is a 35-year-old New Yorker who loves art. She works in non-profit advertising and is constantly looking for new inspiration for her projects. She believes public art is important to the city and wants to support it.
Goals:
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Exploring NYC to find its "hidden gems"
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Participating in NYC's cultural discourse
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Finding inspiration in everyday life
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Learning about NYC's local art history
Leon is a 20 years old college student from Portland. Aside from school, he’s a part-time photographer who owns an Instagram account that has more than 1M followers. Currently, he’s planning a short trip to New York for 7 days.
Goals:
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To visit famous places that other influencers have been to. Take photos and hashtags them so that he gets more exposure on Instagram.
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Visit as many places as possible. Be efficient with his time.
What Is the User Experience Like?
To better understand the usability of this app, we identified 4 tasks that covered most of the functions of the Art Pigeon and performed a hierarchical task analysis for each of the tasks.
1. Find the information about Flabbergast by Todd Gray
2. Find a subway art piece and read a relevant article about it.
3. Ask Art Pigeon a question.
4. Find the nearest art piece and the route to get there.
By conducting the hierarchial task analysis, we found that there were redundant interactions for some of the tasks. Furthermore, it was hard to search for a typical public art piece in the application. The guide Art Pigeon provided was more like an adventure for people who knew nothing about public art in NYC. It didn't provide any short-cut for the expert. So So we managed to solve these problems in the redesign.
A usability test was also conducted with users. The usability test had three parts: pre-task interview, 5 tasks, and post-task interview.
In the pre-task interview, we asked the user some demographic questions as well as how they involve art in their daily life.
After the pre-task interview, participants were asked to perform six tasks on the Art Pigeon app. We recorded the task-performing process to compare the completion time of each task. The 6 tasks were:
1. Find a subway art piece and read a recent article about it.
2. Find the closest art piece and the route to get there.
3. Find the newest public art in the city.
4. Let's say you are a tourist who is coming to visit New York City and is looking for a route to explore the city and the art. How will you use the app to fulfill this need?
5. As a tourist, you are interested in Flabbergast by Todd Gray. Can you find the location and information of the piece?
In the after-task interview, participants talked about what they liked and didn't like about the app. They also gave us some suggestions about how to improve the app and what functions could be added.
The usability test helped us to recognize more problems within the app. First, the design of icons and buttons were not intuitive and causing confusion. Second, the categories were insufficient and unclear.
Last but not least, a journey map was also created to outline how Leon would integrate this app within his journey in NYC.
The journey map helped us to identify more issues within the app and more opportunities for improvement.
Making Design Decisions
What to keep, add, and change?
In this ideation process, we conducted a brainstorming session that combined what we have learned from the usability test and our vision as designers.
We divided a whiteboard into three columns to identify:
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Features that were liked about the app.
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Features that should be cut from the app.
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Features to be added or improved for the app.
After each of us filled every column, we gathered together to discuss every idea we wrote and decided which idea should be applied to the application. Then, serval sketches were created to show the result of the brainstorming session.
First of all, we decided to add a search bar which allowed the user to locate an artwork easily.
Secondly, we added a "Star List" to the app so that the user could save the artwork they loved. They could also get access to the work they saved easily through the menu.
Thirdly, we changed the "Influencer Favorites" section to "Artist Favorites". Our usability test and analysis revealed that the "Influencer Favorites" lists were not very attractive to our users because the criteria for being an "influencer" was not well defined. Artists seem to be more credible in recommending artworks.
What Is A Good Menu?
Both the user and our team found the navigation was troublesome because of the menu. There were only 5 sections on the menu which made it hard to find a certain piece of art. To make the menu more intuitive and user-friendly, we decided to redesign the menu by conducting a participatory design workshop with 3 users. We gave the user a list of items that could possibly compose the menu. Then we asked them to design the menu and explain their design.
Based on the workshop, we redesign the menu.
Original
Lo-Fi
Hi-Fi
Prototyping
Lo-Fi Prototype
The lo-fi prototype delivered a preliminary presentation of our design ideas. It also set the tone of some design details in the hi-fi prototype
Most users could easily complete the tasks in the Lo-Fi prototype. We also received some important feedback:
1. Some of the buttons look wired.
2. The top navigation bar should be visible all the time.
3. There should be text to indicate the status of the "Star List".
Hi-Fi Prototype
With all the feedback we collected from users, we developed the high fidelity prototype. In comparison to low fidelity prototype, high fidelity prototype mainly focused on improving 4 elements:
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Keeping menu function available throughout pages
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Remove making “Art Pigeon” title as the home button and make sure everything is two clicks away from the home
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Maintain a better consistency between icons’ style
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Find a better placement for “Collect” star button and “Direction” button on each artwork page
