Ian Fan
Ping-Yu Chiu Fashion Artist
Ping-Yu Chiu is a fashion artist based in Taiwan. He gets sense to catch people’s the most fashionable side by watercolour, ink, and acrylic paintings. He has his own studio providing in-person painting classes and hosting customized events. He was reaching out for redesigning his studio e-commerce website.
After the first client meeting, we mapped out the client's main demands:
in Touch with the Client and Users
I constantly reached out to the client and his students with the latest product design in low-fidelity or high-fidelity format looking for data from the old website and more feedback.
Growth Design Strategy
I designed, prototyped, tested, and delivered the progressive showcase feature as a long-term website development for his class community and reputation estabilishment.
Plus 1 Designer and 2 Engineer
While planning for the web redesign, I was collaborating with the other product designer to sort out design prioirty. I provided UX design options and organize discussions to get aligned on plans and decisions with feedback.
Our client mentioned that his long-term plan was the career concentration shift from class instructions to independent fashion artist. It's important for artists to accumulate their reputations and gradually establish their personal brandings.
All artists will encounter a dilemma between their artistic value and realistic commercial benefits. No matter how famous or advanced these artists are, their customers will always ask three questions in three levels as an evaluation: who are these artists, what can customers gain from them, and how much will it cost. It's important to balanced in between to satisfy both artistic clients and their potential customers.
The first impression largely determines if customers want to know more. As for artists, customers usually value their appearance, personalities, professional skills, aesthetics, reputations, awards.
Impact: Design the homepage presenting these factors in the simplest way, so that visitors will keep browsing with interests.
Most people don't have much patience. It's important to show how effective a class is with an authentic evidence.
Impact: Exhibiting students' work with a before and after comparison within a time period can meet the most of customers' demands.
The best advertisement is the rate and recommendation from people studying there.
Impact: Designers and artists can't force other people to help the promotion. But estabilshing a class community helps to build up a well-known reputation.
Prioritizing and simplifying client's key achievements and services prevent users from the visual exhaustion and confusion when entering the site. We encourage users to explore more in the site looking for the information and services that they potentially need.
Help users position themselves and let them know what they can gain through the class introduction page.
Active online interactions make a community alive. On the one hand, students start to establish connections between each other. On the other hand, it helps to shape instructor's personality attracting more people to know more about him.
Gallery emphasizes both instructor's capability and students' growth as a whole. Our design conveys the idea of an inclusive and intimate community that the artist is creating for their mutual improvement.
Being well-known requires a long-term dedication and a bit of luck. However, artist can accelerate the process by exhibitions and social media, etc. For our client, I designed the showcase system as an instructional tool to share his and students' painting progress. This tool is a one stone two birds deal, spreading his name due to his educational painting references and presenting students' growth and instructor's comments as one side of class experiences to attract potential customers.
The progressive archive collects students' and instructor's painting methods and process. It functions as a guidebook providing references for people who are interested in watercolour skills. The idea of worldwide sharing and learning helps the artist build up reputation gradually.
Based on the study, 80% participants suggested they were confused about the UI around the showcase window. Besides, they didn’t know that they can unfold the album of each painting in the first place.
Some participants suggested that they didn't notice each painting represent a collection of work and it's clickable.
Most users didn't realize each painting represented an album that they can further dive into for more relative information.
Here's the success metrics summary of the current design performance:
Based on the summary of usability study, we concluded and presented to our client that our design had achieved client's primary goals. All participants could complete the tasks of class browsing and purchasing without extra help. And all of them expressed the showcase feature could assist in their decisions.
Most participants said that our client is incredible and profesional. However, it's hard for them to realize the educational value of the progress showcase feature, by which they can start to learn painting logic and skills from their peers.
Interaction design sometimes needs to focus on micro details to improve user experience within the work flow. However, seeing the larger picture and considering primary goals constantly lead to a successful commercial project, after all. In this website project, our client has his currently goals and future plans, both of which we need to involve in our design considerations.
We communicated with the client often to guarantee our design direction and left spaces for his future development, supporting his career shift from painting instructor to independent fashion artist. Therefore, our client can save time and money from redesigning his commercial website adapted to the career shift in the future, while the current website design can contribute to his reputation development worldwide.
