Aidan Donahue Art
My personal, professional artist website that commodifies my portfolio for collectors, facilitates networking opportunities with gallerists, and represents my personal brand amongst the general public.
Role: Full Stack UX Designer
Software: WordPress & Woocommerce
The Problem
Create an easy, enjoyable way for collectors, gallerists, and the public to access the current offerings from my professional art career.
Elegant, Bold Galleries
Photo galleries on the homepage and Gallery page show the portfolio in a beautiful and minimal style that mimics the Instagram scroll.
77 Woocommerce Products
Using WordPress and Woocommerce, I built a full e-commerce experience that conforms to all user expectations.
The Process
A UX career is born
I began this site before I knew I was a UX designer. In fact, I learned here how much I enjoy it. I made the site so that I could make income as an emerging artist and reach a personal goal to show art in galleries.
Competitive Audit
I explored how other artists presented their work. What visuals did they use? How did they talk about it? What key actions did they have? What text did they use?
Galleries
An art portfolio is highly visual, so I wanted to highlight this with a minimal, image focused layout.
Content and First Launch
After putting together the information architecture, photos, and words for the various site needs, I published the site! (note: I wish I took better screenshots! This one is obviously missing an image).
One Goal Reached
I used the website to network with people, and eventually was able to show my work at a gallery!
Iteration: a New Beginning
With this new success, I found myself in a position to market art for sale. The challenge: developing an e-commerce website with more than 75 works of art.
User Research
With a new focus on collectors, I wanted to research what they cared about. How much do they care about the visuals? The story? The artist? The price? I used secondary sources because I don’t know any collectors.
Product Categories
Each work of art is assigned a value within 7 categories to allow users to find the exact type of art they want.
Iterated Information Architecture
I simplified the IA to 3 high-level groups to more closely focus the user journey on the target users (collectors go to shop art, gallerists go to exhibitions, and any one who wants to see my best work goes to select works).
A New Home(page)
With the changes, the users needed a homepage that smoothly navigated them to all three sub-pages.
Responsive testing
After a moderated usability study, I quickly realized that the website was not sufficient for mobile, so I iterated.
Final Product
Impact
An artist becomes professional: I can now sell my art.
Takeaways and Next Steps
Early UXR and Wireframes
I know a lot more now that I did when i started this project. If I could go back, I would do a lot more baseline research to understand what people like about art, pain points, etc., and I would do more paper wireframes to quickly iterate.
Links on gallery images
I want users to be able to click a piece of art in a gallery and be instantly linked to that pieces product page. The plugin I use to hyperlink images in galleries doesn’t currently work with my WordPress theme, so I need to solve that issue creatively.