Case Study: Designing an app to connect muralists to business owners
By: Henry Busch
Tags: UX Design, Case Study, UI Design, Junior Ux Designer, UI

Mockup Screens with the help of Free Clay Mockups

Disclaimer: This was an unsolicited educational design project, I’m in no way affiliated with SFAC or StreetSmARTs.

Context

StreetSmARTs is a program that connects artists to building owners who need to cover or deter illegal graffiti. As of today, the program is a largely pen and paper process and very limited.

Source: SFAC, 2020

My team was tasked with exploring how we could expand a current program for the non-profit San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC). Our team focused on creating a platform that was inclusive of all business owners and artists to help to cultivate what SFAC’s mission is when they launched StreetSmARTs: “…to create vibrant murals on their buildings, enhancing the character of their property and surrounding neighborhood…” (Source: SFAC, 2020)

Timeline, My Role, and Tools Used

Role : Project management, UI Design, user flow, wireframing, and prototyping

: Project management, UI Design, user flow, wireframing, and prototyping Team : Scotty Holcomb and Paula Garcia

: Scotty Holcomb and Paula Garcia Tools : Figma, Zoom, Miro, draw.io, Trello, Google Drive

: Figma, Zoom, Miro, draw.io, Trello, Google Drive Timeline: 2 Week Sprint

Design Process

We followed a very standard design process — Discover, Define, Design, Deliver.

Source: CareerFoundry, 2019

Empathize & Define

Talking to artists & business owners

We reached out to current artists and business owners to understand how they would go about finding work or commissioning work, what their inspiration is, and whether or not a digital product like StreetSmARTs would be successful.

I’ll share four quotes directly from our interviews that I feel do a great job of setting up the problem we set out to solve.

“A big area I struggle in is being able to identify where those opportunities are.” Artist “Having artists all in one place that have the skill set to do a mural is appealing” Business owner “The main motivation for me is just a broader ability to communicate to a larger audience.” Artist “It’s a challenge figuring out where to begin.” Business owner

Additionally, we were curious if folks would prefer a mobile app or a desktop site. We weren’t surprised to hear that they would think both would be ideal, however, more leaned towards a mobile app. And to be honest, this took me by surprise. This was the first time in my UX career where my own bias and assumptions were turned on their head. This was a humbling learning experience for me. It also presented a huge challenge of designing a mobile-first solution and then scale and test on desktop as well.

Competitive and Comparative Analysis

Optimizing a product for two primary users (artists and business owners) is not an original idea. We looked at the current landscape, what they require to accomplish user goals, and pulled from that to make StreetSmARTs something easy to pick up and successful. Looking at Fiverr and Upwork as competitors in the freelance market, as well as Airbnb and Rover as products in an adjacent market (Airbnb with their host-guest relationship, and Rover with their pet sitter-owner relationship), we highlighted some of the key features and asked: “Does StreetSmARTs want this?”

One key takeaway here is that we need to have two-sided outreach. Meaning, we need to allow businesses to reach out to artists and allow artists to reach out to businesses. Both can start the conversation. This is a key finding we pulled from our user interviews.

Personas

As mentioned earlier, we needed to have a complete empathetic understanding of two personas: an artist and a business owner. Both personas have two totally different goals.

Meet Jack the Artist, how might we help Jack spend less time trying to promote himself so that he could spend more time focusing on creating?

Alternatively, meet Jill the Business Owner, how might we help Jill begin her search for an artist when she doesn’t know where to start?

Solution

So in the end, we’ll know if we are successful if we can deliver a product (on both web and mobile) where artists and businesses can discover freely, communicate effectively, and accomplish their goal of either painting or getting a mural on their building.

Ideation and Prototyping

Ideation

As a remote team, we learned that sketching and sharing sketches was a little slow and not as exciting as a big whiteboard and copious coffee. However, with the time that we had, we were able to get some sketches down that allowed us to brainstorm and turn those sketches into mid-fidelity wireframes.