A Brand-new Educational Toolkit to Make Art Archives More Accessible
EAI has been a non-profit organization for art video archives since the 1970s. They have great content, but the website looks messy and confusing. Our team evaluated the educational streaming service of EAI and provided solid redesign and branding improvements.
Info
- Timeline: Oct 2024 - Dec 2024
- Team: Allison C, Mia G, Conor M, Hridya N, Iris Sun(me)
- My Role: User interview, wireframing, Hi-fi prototyping, group meeting
EAI - a great art video archive platform with a poor visual design
Why? – They have used the same IT team since the 1990s and rarely update.
What does the user see?
A long list of artists' names without any images or descriptions. I had no intention of clicking on any of the links.
Define the Research Question
“How might we make the EAI website more like a webpage for art and attract more attention from students and researchers?”
Redesigned, Rebranded & Developed New Feature - Making EAI a better art platform for art educators
What did we do?
- Redesigned the homepage, artist page, and educational page
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Rewrote the position statement of EAI
- Introduced new feature - The Educational Toolkit (Citations, Timestamped note-taking, Similar video recommendation, Personalized video collection, Discussion boards)
- A Revised Mission Statement to make the users understand EAI quickly
We redesigned the homepage to add more visual elements and implemented the mission statement in the hero image.
- A Clearer Navigation Bar to help direct the users to find the artwork
We redesigned the navigation bar, added the thumbnail feature to make a clear hierarchy.
- A Brand New Educational Toolkit to make art research convenient
All of the interviewees were satisfied with the features and thought it would be helpful for their art research.
View the hi-fi educational toolkit
A zig-zag iteration process within one and a half months
“6-8-5” brainstorming to find the initial redesign focus
Our team brainstormed sketches (6-8-5) and voted for the ideas in the weekly meeting. The initial decision is to redesign the search page (me), artist page, video page, homepage, and some spicy ideas about the user profile feature (they don’t have that).
A baseline interview found that the user did not understand what EAI was about
According to the baseline interview with 3 art students, the users did not understand what the website was.
So we decided to refine the homepage and rewrite their mission statement.
Then we got lost due to the unrealistic workload and the client’s limited budget
After making the wireframes, we realized there were too many tasks to be done, while the whole project was only a month long. Besides, our design decisions were limited by our client’s very limited budget. They expressed an unwillingness to make big changes.
Whatever, think big!
But we decided to think big and ignore the client’s limitations inspired by our professor, as the client could decide to apply whatever part they like of our deliverable to their website. We can still stay on track and make some fancy deliverables.
Still, there’s a trade-off: We gave up some pages and focused on Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
We decided to focus on the MVP quickly - the educational streaming and make it a useful tool for educators.
The main focus is the artist page, and video page with educational toolkit.
While doing the redesign, we kept the weekly check-in meeting with our client and they seemed satisfied with the progress. And we made a design guide and component library to keep the consistency within the team.
The user is always the priority: we conducted 5 rounds of usability testing to pick the best version of our design, targeting art major students
As we focus on the educational service and Pratt has a partnership with the service, we targeted our interviewees as Pratt students.
I did three interviews, each of which was done at different stages. When doing the mid-fi prototype testing, we provided two versions of the designs and asked for impressions. When doing the MVP and hi-fi interviews, we tested the version that stood out in the mid-fi interviews and asked for further impressions.
The endeavor finally paid off - EAI liked the idea and applied some features to the website already
We presented to EAI at their Chinatown office, and they all said the suggestions were helpful and contained some aspects they never thought of. They also adapted some features into their current website (e.g., the educational tookit!)
Reflection
- Our prototypes look gorgeous
- Keep weekly internal meetings and check-in meetings with clients
- Everyone was working hard on the whole work
- Active group chat
- Had a good direction
- Did not limit the ideas to the client’s requirements, especially budget
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Express our thoughts more directly (Sometimes we get confused by others’ opinions or thoughts but don’t express them in time)
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Only focus on the major points at the beginning (we thought too big and did a lot of irrelevant things and wasted time)
- Have a better contribution balance between the group leader and teammates (the group leader did a lot for the whole team, but sometimes I felt guilty and did not know how could I contribute more to them)