Connecting the Skid Row art community through an accessible and cohesive platform
Jan - Jul 2023
(7 months)
UX Designer
(Contract)
4 Designers
8 Developers
Figma,
Illustrator
As a member of LA Blueprint, I had the opportunity to design a mobile community app for the Skid Row Arts Alliance (SRAA), a non-profit with a consortium of artist-driven organizations in Skid Row, dedicated to creating art, fostering community, and advocating for residents.
For this project my primary role was to design the Gallery, Zine, and Filter feature. Outside of collaborative research processes with three fellow designers, I devised and conducted user interviews with our participants.
The Skid Row Arts Alliance is a non-profit consisting of multiple arts organizations driven by artists residing and working within Skid Row. Their collective aim is to cultivate art and building a sense of community within the Skid Row area.
Community photo from organization website
Currently, the Skid Row Art Alliance relies on multiple platforms to promote its events and host resources from the various organizations within. This leads to an unorganized distribution of information and a potential lack of visibility for the community members the organizations aims to engage.
To further understand the issues and current experiences within the Skid Row Arts Alliance community, we conducted user interviews with 2 SRAA administrators and 3 artists involved in the organization. Following this, we created an affinity map to identify trends and grouped them based on specific categories.
Affinity map with insights categorized from our user interviews
After organizing our findings, we found 4 important points from the research:
01| Information and Event Overlap
Organizations within the Skid Row Arts Alliance often had overlapping events due to the lack of communication of their schedules
02| Technology is a struggle
Users express that they often have difficulties when navigating mobile apps and interfaces
03| Resources are difficult to find
Locating community resources, such as the Skid Row Arts Map and Zine, are a hassle as they are primarily shared as physical copies
04| Sense of disconnect
Users find it difficult to share their art and connect with other local community members
Additionally, as a large part of the Skid Row community experiences homelessness, we were concerned with the accessibility of our potential solutions. However, we were informed by interviewees and secondary research that actually a vast majority of homeless individuals own mobile phones, which alleviated our initial worries.
From our user interviews, we created 2 personas to better empathize with our target audience. This helped us understand user pain points more clearly and address their specific needs accordingly.
User personas created based on our research
Subsequently, my team and I began devising solutions to combat the challenges that we found. With this, we came up with a mobile community platform with the following core app features:
Accessible Map of Skid Row with events calendar and resources available from local organizations.
Digital Zine Reader with the latest and previous community zine articles.
Art Gallery where users can share their works and profiles with other members of the community.
As many of our users conveyed that they were not digitally proficient, it was important to create a clear framework to allow for easier navigation. As a result, we made an information architecture to help us maintain better structure of the app.
Information architecture of our primary app features
I was tasked with designing the Zine Reader along with the Art Gallery, which included an Art details and Filter page. To explore different layouts for the screens, I went through multiple rounds of lo-fidelity iterations. During this process I took into consideration our user goals and pain points.
A few examples of the many lo-fi wireframe iterations I did for each assigned feature
Mid-fidelity iterations made after team feedback on lo-fis
After the initial design iterations, my team and I began conducting usability tests with our prototype to validate our designs and look for potential problem areas. The tests were conducted over Zoom with both an artist and an admin.
Usability test done with an admin
Usability test done with an artist
Through the testing, we were able to get valuable feedback on our designs that helped us refine our final designs. However, certain aspects where brought to attention in where improvements could be made to further enhance the experience:
Users struggled with selecting the various filter tags and picking multiple in the same category. To fix this, I updated the filter layout to a design more consistent with the rest of the app, with select all buttons for better accessibility.
Changes done on the Filters page
On the Art Page, users found it difficult to find share and save options. They also struggled to navigate to artist profiles. To combat this, I placed the share and save buttons in more visible, standard locations. I also created an "artist section" for easier profile navigation and encourage users to learn more about the artist.
Along with this, I decided to also add a popup when users save the art piece to show that the action was completed and reduce effort needed to navigate to saved location.
Revisions made on the Art Page
Although the Zine Reader allows for single page navigation by tapping and swiping the side of screens, users suggested for more clear methods. I decided to add arrows next to the page scroller for additional navigation.
Accessibility additions on Zine Reader
Design system we created for visual consistency and branding
Browse and filter for surrounding events, while planning for upcoming ones through the map and calendar.
Explore a community-submitted gallery of various mediums of art. Find further information about each piece and its artist through the art page.
Easily access the latest and past collection of the Skid Row Arts Zine anytime, anywhere.
The project is currently in the deployment stage, our team is working hard with the Skid Row Arts Alliance in the release of the mobile app. We are projected to launch the mobile app in both the Google Play Store and App Store by late Fall 2023, stay tuned for updates!
With this project, there were many valuable lessons that came as a result of working on the mobile app:Importance of communicating with developers
Early on while exploring different solutions, I found that many features that I wanted to initially design were not possible for our developers due to our project's time constraint. As a result, I frequently communicated with our developers to find compromises or options in regards to potential designs. This collaboration taught me to work with realistic constraints, pushing me to look for alternative solutions when needed.
Designing with tech literacy in mind
Something that I failed to take to account while in early stages of designing the project was how confident our users were with technology. As I designed lo-fi prototypes, I found that users could not recognize common icons and general skeletons of mobile apps. Understanding this helped greatly as I moved on with later designs as I was able to empathize, keeping in mind of accessibility and ease of use to avoid making the same mistake.
Me and my awesome team!
