Day 1
For this design sprint, my task was to design an application that could improve the in-person experience of viewing art at a museum. I am not much of a museum goer, and it was hard to think how to better improve the museum experience when I barely visit museums myself. All there is to do is go and see the art, right? Several lightning demos of industry competitors gave me a starting point for GalleryPal’s design.
I then sat down and outlined the user’s end-to-end experience.
Day 2
Then, I took to sketching. I decided to use the Crazy 8’s exercise where I tried figuring how the app’s most critical screen, the artwork information screen, should look. The idea is to have enough information so that the user does not feel like they’re missing anything, but I don’t want the user to feel like they’re sitting through a graduate level art history course either. I went ahead and tried sketching how the screens before and after the artwork information screen would look.
Day 3
Afterwards, I spent an entire day creating a hi-fidelity prototype of the most critical screens. I maintained a neutral palette: whites, blacks, grays with dark purple and gold. Since the user will be viewing artwork and reading information, I did not want the app’s aesthetics to distract the user from his or her art viewing experience. Keeping all of the information organized was definitely a challenge, and I had to make some adjustments to my original designs to account for this. Even so, I was happy with the results!
Day 4 and 5
Finally, I went through a series of in-person and remote user testing. The general consensus was positive: the testers were able to use the basic functions of the prototype with ease. They enjoyed the app’s layout and its color scheme and could see themselves using the app if they were actually a museum. If I were to make changes based on feedback, I would develop an information page devoted to artists and try to give more categories for users to browse through in the Explore section. You can take a look at the live prototype here.
Even though this was a challenging design sprint, I thoroughly enjoyed it and feel that I have learned a lot from it!
What I Learned
This project was my first full design sprint. I actually had to attempt this design sprint twice. The first time, I was able to get to day three before I felt that I could not produce a viable product within a single day. I tried using prototyping tools with pre-made resources and templates, but I felt that I could not use the tools effectively since I was completely unfamiliar with them. Instead of using those, I tried to produce a prototype in Figma. What I came up with was not ideal.
I was quite discouraged by my product and decided to start the design sprint anew as a result. Looking back, I tried too hard to “match” the design styles I saw on Dribble and Behance. What I then learned is that there is beauty in simplicity. I stopped stressing so much about the user interface and instead focused on building a functional, engaging product. When I did that, I finally got a clear vision of what I wanted to do, and the screens built themselves so to say.