ArtConnect

• Design and implement a welcoming marketplace for venues and artists. Venues are able to book talents and artists are able to find places to perform.
• In this initial phase of the project, design the platform from the Artist perspective.
• Create a lively and colorful marketplace that shows the personality of the users.

ArtConnect is a marketplace for venues and artists. Our sponsor, Laura Beken from UCI Beall Applied Innovation, wanted a "more functional and efficient venue-to-artist marketplace without falling to the same miscellaneous pattern like other marketplaces. "

The goal of the project is to create a personalized, efficient, aesthetically pleasing website for artists to connect to venues while communicating energy, passion and creativity through UX.

In this project, I was in charge of the product design.

One of the biggest potential competitors is Gigmor. Gigmor provides live music booking service similar to ArtConnect. In the analysis with the team and our sponsors, we determined points that Gigmor is nailing down as well as disadvantages that we should avoid when designing a product from falling into the same pattern.

To have a better understanding of our users' needs, I created two personas. Katie is a cafe owner that performs as a venue manager while Nikki Sixx is a musician that might use our product to find venues to perform at.

Persona - Katie

Persona - Nikki Sixx

To take advantage of the user stories our team came up with, each member of the team gave a number from 1 to 5 to rank each story with 1 being the most important and 5 being the least important. After the anonymous voting, we calculated the points and determined the order to implement user stories.

4 of the User Stories

The user, after entering the homepage of ArtConnect, can quickly search and browse the venues/artist available on the platform. They can manage their performances through a tab called "Your Performance". For venues, they can use Dashboard to publish new events/concerts to recruit artists.

I sat down with 2 other designers on the team during a design meeting. We browsed through the color system from Material Design to find our brand colors. After a few experiments, the primary colors, green and purple, are chosen because it feels vibrant and energetic. I hope to use a green and purple gradient as the brand color to inspire people to bring music everywhere and to convey a message of lively and welcoming. In addition to the primary color, I also designed a logo based on the idea of "music" and "connecting".

As a result, we presented the final deliverable to our sponsors, Laura Beken from UCI Applied Innovation, and Professor Denenberg from UCI Informatics.

Final Deliverable / Stage (Home page)

Final Deliverable / Stage (Home page) (Hover)

Final Deliverable / Browse page

Final Deliverable / Dashboard page

Final Deliverable / Profile page