TheArtMag
An art magazine for a wider millennial audience, TheArtMag brings art into our normal routines: scrolling, browsing, looking for something interesting, and trying to find meaning. It’s Art for Everyone.
Role: Full Stack UX Designer
Software: Adobe XD
The Problem
Most people, especially millennials, want to see more art, but they don’t because it’s out of their routine or they can’t find meaning in it.
Art for Everyone
The content of the site is intentionally diverse to attract a wider audience of users, while also being skim-able for the modern online scanner.
15 Sub-Categories
Articles populate the site so that users can browse by three themes, mediums, and styles, art categories, and artist categories.
Art, Explore, Artist
Three high level categories to browse makes looking at art more approachable and straightforward.
The Process
Interviews
Do people want to see more art? How do they like to see art? What do they like about art? Dislike about art? The goal of these 6 interviews was to understand user behavior, preferences, and pain points with seeing art.
Personas
The user personas captured different problems: one feels alienated if they don’t know the artist’s intention, one doesn’t see art because it’s out of routine, and one likes to see art because it’s fun, interesting, and novel.
Ideate
How might we make the Spotify of visual art? I used the activities How Might We and Crazy Eights to ideate, and then conducted a competitive audit of 4 other art magazines.
Site Map
It was really important to create high level categories that were simplified: art, explore, and artist. Within each of those categories, users could dive into 3 more categories (Such as style, mediums, and themes under explore).
Paper Wireframes
Paper wireframes help to quickly iterate to solve the key issues. This project’s included how to balance specific articles with categorical searches, how to capture users interest, and how to create a skimable interface.
Low Fidelity Digital Prototype
I then used Adobe XD to build digital wireframes. Instead of building a separate page for each sub-category, I made one main one so that I could get to user testing before making too big of a commitment.
Moderated Usability Study
I planned the study, including set tasks and study goals. I monitored how users did on specific tasks, including their click path, behavior, quotes, and feedback. Then I analyzed the patterns and drew actionable insights.
Iterating: 6 articles for 15 subcategories
The biggest feedback: it’s hard to find something interesting when every article is the same. The problem: if I have so many categories, how do I populate the site with enough content? The solution: planning and information architecture.
Populating the Website
To provide a more realistic experience, I manually”randomized” the order of the articles and used multiple pictures for each article’s cards. This way, while the site only had 6 articles, the user got the impression that there was more, so they would more authentically interact with the product.
Design System
The magazine’s brand needed to balance everyday humility with artistic style. The color palette is diverse, yet the colors are toned down and muted so as to create a calming, humble effect. The type hierarchy is modern and legible, providing clear structure.
Components
I designed a series of components, including the explore header tab, a carousel for the articles, and a pop-up to sign up the newsletter.
Final Website
Impact
Art for Everyone
With a skimable interface, meaningful categories, and diverse content, TheArtMag allows people to meet their goal of seeing more art.
Takeaways and Next Steps
Information Arhitecture
For a site with a lot of content. it’s so essential that the information architecture’s topic categories are truly the most essential and distinct, and from there the designer needs to create similar styles of categories. There also needs to be tags so that users can search by theme or other pattern.
Videos
The website is highly video based because we live in the Instagram age of art. That said, there are no actual videos in the design yet, just placeholders. It would make a much more authentic experience to have videos.