In the world of art the most expensive pieces get the most attention. Everybody is excited about the “Mona Lisa” but not the next door painter's new piece. Our website's priority is to help our artists promotes themselves and sell more of their art pieces.

Gallery '94 is based on a simple idea: Help to promote the local artists, help them sell their products and introduce the news and events to the people who are not regulars

In terms of research we wanted to look to our competition first. We picked ArtMajeur, Spacey, Bettershared as direct competitors and Lisson gallery as an indirect competitor. We wanted to do a competitive analysis so we can compare their main features on the site, and a SWOT analysis so we can see their strong and weak sides.

Then we wanted to set our main personas , find the key needs and frustrastions for them and make a user flow and user journey to see how they react on our website. Lastly we wanted to set the website architecture and create our structure so we can see all the pages in one place.

In terms of feature difference we discovered that our competitors are not that different and use the same logic to show the product, with few different details in presenting product card, some have artist location, some have price - directly on the product card ...

In terms of layout they all adapted the minimalist approach , they all had options for users to buy without creating profile, more info on availability on product cards, and an advanced filter.

We had some negatives also , like not good structure specificly on homepage, too much white space , text too far from the image of the product, not clear what product goes to what category...

At first, it might seem that everyone is experiencing the same flow on the website, search for product - buy it… but upon closer inspection the user research made clear that there were divergent motivations and paths.

Creating personas helped bring some clarity to those differences, which would become important reference points as functions developed.

As research and design proceeded, We focused primarily on two personas because they represented heavy emphasis of two key functions: Regulars who search for new art products ; and artists who look for new places to sell their art, buy decorations and look for events near them.

By creating and exploring the journey map and flow for the primary persona and their typical tasks, I uncovered key emotional/procedural moments that our website needed to address. The excitement someone might feel, when they visit the website. While searching for a product it is a necessity to look for similar products. To ensure the user's flow - uncut, we need to overcome these problems.

This site map, organizationally shows the three key task that the high fidelity prototype would focus on:

1. Onboard experience and navigation through main categories. 2. The journey to buy products and payment section. 3. and the registration of new artists to the website.

Sketching in FigJam allowed us to explore design patterns and similarities between pages, helping us to understand what we needed to implement in the layout of the website. It also helped us to to identify the types of pages that we have where we can use components, due to same layout so it would be quicker and easier to design them.

Sketching allowed us to better understand how users expected to complete the tasks they needed to do on the website. By studying the flows we understand what needed to be changed and fixed for better experience. We managed to make these changes and be able to complete the flow for a more fully realized high fidelity prototype. Small details such as actionable and consistent iconography, and consistent paths to get back, would become important elements of the design system.

After transforming the wireframes into pages with colors and images and apply our actual design we managed to make a prototype of all the pages of the website, and presented our solution to the client. If you want to you can check the desktop version of the design as well, or if you are interested in the whole Figma file you can view it from here. Enjoy!

Because the nature of the website , the art itself gets the domination with big images and clear text; simple button states and clear iconography would help make tasks feel more manageable; and a single, modern sans-serif with large, open counters ensured legibility and clarity in describing the products.

After finishing with our project we had a discussion about issues who needs addressing in long term development:
1. Adding more types of art to the category for more attraction.
2. The opportunity to sell art equipment for artists who are already part of your website.
3. Exploring the possibility of creating more complex profiles with option to add images of art pieces in ambient...

When dealing with minimalist design you need to be consistent and careful so the main features have the priority.

Placing the right information od product card is crucial, if you want the user to search faster and discover more products.

The filter is the main feature for users that know what they want.

Having artist's info is helping the user to get familiar, find similar art and make the product more personal.

The news and events part is not part of the sales items, but it attract people and the website have more users.