Board Artist Group Website Redesign

The Board Artist Group (BAG) aims to create a fair market platform for the hardworking artists in entertainment industry. BAG seeks to create a direct connection between artists and clients as well as one another. By creating a digital platform that promotes both premium work and strong community values, BAG will liberate creatives to focus on what matters most: the work.

Project Objective

The UX Team was responsible for redesigning the web site and finding ways to create both artist to artist and client to artist connections - think social media.

My Role

Assisted with all parts of the project including:

Took Point On

  • High Fidelity design

  • Make final design choices for high fidelity prototypes and keep the design consistent and at a professional level as possible

  • Assisted with all parts of the project including Research, Interviews, Information Synthesis, Ideation, Sketching, Wireframing, Low-Fidelity Design, Mid-Fidelity Design, High Fidelity Design, Artifact and Deck Design

Research

We quickly realized that our research would need to be done with two groups of users.

Clients - Those that would be doing the hiring

Artists - Those creating the artwork

While the current site for the Board Artists Group had limited functionality, we couldn’t learn a lot from it. We were able to find many competitors, and evaluate their site’s functions and features, which gave us a good idea of what we would need to incorporate on this ground-up redesign to be competitive.

The majority of our research was done through video interviews.

The client for this project was incredibly helpful to us. She had connections all through the movie and artist industry, and gave us access to producers, writers and artists alike, allowing us to gain insight and information from a wide variety of sources, and gain great perspective on the problem of connecting artists with clients. We had many informative discussions with a variety of working professionals in the movie industry.

The work for this project took place during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and going out and talking with people face to face was not an option. We originally thought this would be a huge obstacle, but we were able to find people at home and conduct interviews over video chat, and this was important for us to get access to people we otherwise would not have been able to meet in person.

We learned the following from our research:

  1. We need to create a safe online community with relationships built on trust

  2. Jobs for artists come primarily from personal networks and referrals

  3. A secure payment system and legal agreement is required

  4. Clients want direct access to artists, with video chat capability

  5. The filtering system needs to be efficient and deep

  6. A Mentor match feature is highly desirable to the artists

Key Insights from the Client side

  • The clients wanted to see visual work samples right away

  • They wanted to know which artists were available right away, to facilitate the immediate nature of the movie business

Key Insights from the Artist Side

  • They wanted to show their work and display their skills and to be found easily for their capabilities

  • They wanted the ability to connect with other artists and work together on projects

Secondary Research

Our client runs a Facebook group with over a thousand members. We posted a survey in that group, and got good information on how those artists interact with each other and how they get their work.

Key Insights From Survey

  • The artists use Social Media and their personal network to connect with clients and other artists

  • They were very interested in a Mentorship system

Affinity Mapping

We created affinity maps for both the client side and the artist side, and this helped us to prioritize our features, and decide which ones would be the most beneficial to each user.

Knowing and understanding our users through these affinity maps helped us to understand what types of things were most important to them. This helped us to create our Feature Prioritization Matrix.

 

 We developed two personas

Our research was clear from the beginning that we needed two personas since there are two sides to this interaction, the client and the artist.

 How we incorporated this information into our design

We kept in mind the main goal of the client was to find an artist type that they need for their project quickly, and one that is available as soon as possible. 

The main goal of the artist was to advertise themselves on the site, show their work, and be hired with as little hassle as possible.

To start to answer those questions with design, we began our design and testing phase, while incorporating the feedback we received and making iterations on our designs.

Design, Testing and Iterations

We started our design process with a low fidelity prototype. We found that our testers:

  • Wanted an explanation on the homepage of how the website would work

  • People liked the sign up process

  • The general layout of our elements was good

  • Clients wanted an “available” element on an artists profile, so they could know if they could hire them immediately

  • Adding an IMDB or Studio System link to the profiles would lend credibility to their profile, and give viewers an idea of their past work history

    Without more visual information, we realized we couldn't get more helpful feedback. We may have done this too low-fidelity, as we ended up explaining lots of the functions and interactions. While this wasn’t ideal, we did end up with good feedback, but we quickly moved on to digital mid-fidelity designs, to be able to be more visually communicative and get more specific feedback from our users.

With that in mind, we moved on to Mid-Fidelity designs

After testing with the mid-fidelity designs, we learned a few more things.

  • We were missing some simple navigation buttons on the site, back buttons and submit buttons

  • We needed to add separate onboarding flows for each type of user

  • We needed to flesh out the Message feature with a search function to facilitate easier communication

  • We revised the copy on many of the pages to be more instructional

With the feedback that we had received, we moved on to High Fidelity for the finished product, final polishing and presentation to the client.

Outcomes

The client was very happy with the finished design and prototype. We were able to discover the needs and the wants of the two groups of core users, and come up with some interesting ideas to fulfill those needs.

We learned that our first low-fidelity designs need to have more information in them to really be useful in the testing phase. We weren’t able to maximize the feedback we could’ve received if we had included more details in that phase of our project.

We really learned to listen to the users for this project. After a few brainstorming sessions we thought had some good ideas, and those ideas were not really aligned with what our interviews showed us. It was good for us to have those preconceived notions and then have to adjust those, because it really taught us to listen to the research and then users.

Next Steps

We would like to set up a calendar integration so that client and artists could schedule meetings with each other, similar to Calendly, just by seeing the openings in their schedules and making those appointments. 

We would also work on the messaging and chat functionality. We’d like to expand that a bit so that it was more capable of really connecting clients with artists to get jobs coordinated and arranged and more people working at a quicker pace.