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, while they have great content for art workers and students, the user experience of the website is unpleasant. Our team focused on the educational streaming service of the platform and provided 3 solid suggestions for the website redesign and structure.
Info
- Timeline: Oct 2024 - Dec 2024
- Team: Allison Chen, Mia Greenburg, Conor Mack, Hridya Nadappattel, Iris Sun(me)
- My Role: User interview, wireframing, Hi-fi prototyping, group meeting
Client Presentation
Prototypes
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.
When I browsed the EAI website for the first time, I saw a long list of artists' names without any images or descriptions. I had no intention of clicking on any of the links. My teammates felt the same, so the major problem is to make the website more like a webpage for art and attract more attention from students and researchers.
What did we do?
- Redesigned the homepage, artist page, and educational page
-
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 zig-zag iteration cycle within one month and a half
We started with brainstorming to find the initial redesign focus
Our team decided to have a brainstorm sketch on our own, which is known as “6-8-5”, and vote 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 was EAI about
After conducting the baseline interview with 3 art students, we realized that the users did not understand what was the website about during their first use. So we also 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 and discussing meetings and classes, we just 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!
Thanks to the enlightening from Professor Taylor, we decided to think big and ignore the client’s limitations, as it’s just a consulting work, and the redesign was just a plus, the client could decide to apply whatever part they like of our deliverable to their website. So 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 then decided to focus on MVP quickly, so we gave up the search page and made our redesign goal clearer – focus on the educational streaming and make it a useful tool for educators. The main focus is the artist page, and video page with educational toolkit. But we also knew the homepage was important as it makes an impact on the user’s first impression, the homepage design was also added into our task.
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
The usability test is a core during the whole design iteration process. As we focus on the educational service and Pratt has a partnership with the service, we targeted our interviewees as Pratt students. To make the most use of the usability test, one of the focuses was Pratt art students so they could share their thoughts on the artist page and video page, another focus was information students that could provide professional insights on our overall design and features. We used our own network to approach the art students, and we sent out a Google form in the school of information google group to reach out to information students. These both helped us collect the participants quickly and efficiently.
I did three interviews, two with art majors, and one with information majors. Each of them was done in different stages, which were mid-fi prototypes, MVP, and final hi-fi prototypes. This helped me gain useful insights into our design. We used different testing methods for different stages, when doing the mid-fi prototype testing, we provided two versions of 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.
After finishing the interview, we all left comments in Figma to make sure each teammate could get the latest feedback, and we also left meeting recordings and notes in Google Drive as archives.
The three suggestions that made EAI a better art platform for art educators
- A Revised Mission Statement to make the users understand EAI quickly
- A Clearer Navigation Bar to help direct the users to find the artwork
-
A Brand New Educational Toolkit to make art research convenient
View the hi-fi educational toolkit
The endeavor finally paid off - EAI liked the idea and applied some features to the website already
Our final presentation was one week ahead, but it went well with the endeavor of the whole group. We went to their Chinatown office, and they all said the suggestions were helpful and contained some aspects they never thought of. As a UX consultant team, we overworked and created prototypes that were much more complicated than the requirements. But as a prototype itself, it can still be developed in terms of its homepage design, interactive artist mapping, and artists cataloged layout. I would continue working on the interactive artist mapping, as I think it’s an interesting feature that can be put on the homepage as a hero image, and the same feedback was received in the usability testing as well. But overall, the prototypes look gorgeous.
Reflection
- 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
-
Express our thoughts more directly (Sometimes we get confused by others’ opinions or thoughts but don’t express them in time)
-
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)