Phantasia is a platform that merges social networks, financial support, and collaborative features to a multi-sector art marketplace.

UX Skills

Discover: Competitive & Comparative Analysis, User Surveys & Interviews, Affinity Map

Define: User Persona, User Journey 

Develop: User Flow, Wireframing, Sketching, Prototyping, User Testing

Deliver: Mid & Hi-Fidelity Prototype, Presentation (20 mins)

Overview

Welcome to our Phantasia client project, let us take you on our UX journey from the past few weeks. Full of highs and lows, laughter and tears, this project had it all, and if nothing else taught us how to work together in perfect harmony …eventually.

Phantasia is a social marketplace for independent artists and art seekers alike. Merging social networks, financial support and collaboration between artists into one platform.

Phantasia’s creator and CEO, Adrien Laden is a creative himself. He worked  as a musician and freelance photographer throughout his masters in Applied Physics. With he, and most of his closest friends being independent artists, Adrien truly understands the struggle, and what it’s like to break into any creative industry.

The Brief

So we dived into our brief, and highlighted the three key features, these were:

• The ability for users to sort, arrange, and customise their own profiles themselves.

• Create an innovative and usable bookmark feature.

• Explore a way to connect collaborators together.

With the brief under our belt we started making a list of our research goals and assumptions.

The Industry

Phantasia have identified key problems in the arts industry as a whole, those being:

• Segmented ecosystems for creators and consumers. Creating a very cliquey environment making it almost impossible for up and coming artists to promote and sell their work successfully.

• There’s also a very low financial return for these independent creators.

• And a loss of sense of curiosity and discovery of quality content, with the blame being pointed squarely in the face of platforms such as Instagram, where the algorithms spoon feed us our content based on the top earners and whatever’s going viral at the time, while our brain’s slowly turn into mush.

As the previous cohort had already undertaken much of Phantasia’s initial UX work, we would be looking to improve on some of the existing features. This had its pro’s and con’s.

• The Pro’s being: there was an existing design guide for us to follow when prototyping.

• The Con’s being: us trying not to compare ourselves to the previous cohort like some sort of jealous sibling.

Perhaps we just needed Adrien to say: “he loves us both equally.”

User Interview Results

In the Summary of our research, we confirmed that creatives were indeed frustrated by the Art industry, where they thought things “Just aren’t fair!” “The industry is controlled by gatekeepers” and it was “All about who you know.”

When searching for meaningful collaborations creatives required more to really gauge whether they could work with each other, aligning mindsets and inspirations.

For customisation creatives desired a place where they could have a unique representation of themselves online.

Lastly with bookmarks We found that creatives find inspiration from everywhere, which had to be organised, but having the ability to choose privacy settings was important.

The Dilemma

We had a lot of research after this, which included four affinity maps, which when combined were visible from space. It was starting to confuse us, if we continued to travel down this path we’d have three of everything.

We decided, we would rather do one feature well, than three average ones, which would benefit nobody.

So we took a step back, looking at the research as a whole, and there was one feature that our artists were consistently having a problem with.

It was their profile pages.

We listened to our users. We now had a direction.

“It’s actually shocking when you think about how we're literally changing and compromising our art for social media!”

User Persona

Meet Sienna, 29, from Peckham. She’s our artist and reluctant barista.

Since graduating from the University of the Arts London, she’s found the industry to be incredibly cliquey, and almost impossible to get her talented little foot in the door! She therefore relies on promoting her work online, using numerous platforms which constantly need updating!

This feels like a full time job in itself, and Sienna’s a busy woman and has precious little time between: creating her art, smoking rollies and working in her local coffee shop, serving overpriced lattes to bored housewives. 

Her goals are simple: she wants a fair chance to be able to promote and sell her work online, without them getting lost in social media algorithms. Then ultimately, once this injustice is taken care of, Sienna wants to work as a full time artist, dedicating all of her time to her craft … Don’t we all Sienna!

She has many frustrations. Having the time to create new and attention grabbing posts and reels, to promote her art, is one. She knows this is essential in order for her to tell the story behind the art, but the process is laborious. Another is that the detail of her art is getting lost, as there’s only one aspect ratio on Instagram (the platform she currently gets the most traffic from).

Sienna’s Journey

Opportunities

There were three opportunities staring us in the face after this!

The main one, and root of the problem being, offering various templates within the platform, allowing Sienna to upload her work the way it was meant to be viewed, which not only makes it look nice, but promotes it in the right way. She can then start selling more of her art and stop working at that soul destroying coffee shop

The second opportunity would be including everything Sienna needs within one platform, saving her valuable time, every day, from scouring other platforms and updating her numerous other “socials”

Finally Adding a “preview work” section would allow Sienna to see how her updated page would look before committing to the post. This removes any guess work or doubt and would  also remove Sienna’s rage. It’s a win win.

Problem Statement

So this brought us to our problem statement for Sienna, her frustrations were crystal clear to us now, so we went with:

“Sienna needs a simple way to create & display her content, so that she can tell her story without compromising its quality.”

This felt right, we wanted to help her as best we could, we’d all grown very fond of Sienna.

How Might We’s

Next we started thinking about our “How Might We’s”. We had our problem statement, so how would we break this down into bite-sized chunks? We all typed up our own, shared with the group, and these were our favourites.

• HMW allow Sienna to tell her story? 

• HMW arrange Sienna’s profile that best reflects her? 

• HMW display various shapes and styles of art?

But the one that truly caught our attention, and would be taken on to our design studio was:

“How might we provide Sienna with flexibility to customise her profile”

This gave us enough freedom to be creative with our sketches in the next step of the process, whilst still hitting Sienna’s main pain point!

Design Studio

We set up a design studio to define and then refine to find a solution.

This process is always enjoyable and gets the whole team aligned … As long as you set some clear ground rules and the odd safe word.

The four of us and Adrien all went about sketching six quick solutions to Sienna’s HMW in five minutes and there were some ‘innovative’ solutions shown here.

But how could we do this for the thousands of other types of artists who also want to create that special space. We give them freedom.

We acknowledged that creatives come in many forms who all require something slightly different. But whatever the requirements, we could provide a variety of tools which the users will have at their disposal. They would then have a space on their profile to make it their own.

User Flow

The next stage was to develop a flow which could fit into the existing Phantasia site.
The existing setup once the users complete the onboarding process. 
A profile page is created with a banner profile section which is consistent across the site.
Below that, there are three tabs: 

• Posts.

• Shop. 

• Services.

User Testing

Now we’d completed our research, identified trends and carried out a design studio, we had the foundation for the design which would allow the users of the site to create and customise their profile to reflect themselves and their art.

We started off by making a list of assumptions we could test against. The main assumption and something we could quickly test was that, 

“Creatives would all have their own preferences on how they would personalise their homepage.”

We carried out two tests to show how we could prove this assumption.

Card Sort

The first test was a hybrid card sorting exercise where we used optimal workshop software to allow users to group customisation tools in 3 main categories

User Moderated Testing

Now that we know what users want on their profile, the second test we carried out was to further understand how the user would arrange their work on the page, if given the freedom to do so.

We conducted a moderated test where we gave 7 users the same ten items which consisted of:

5 x different sized pictures.

1 x Large key quote.

2 x Text boxes.

1 x Video reel.

1 x Audio file.

We ensured each of the users came from varying creative backgrounds which would reflect Phantasia’s target market. Our key findings included:

• Too much freedom can be a bad thing and lead to indecision and potentially giving up on profile builder and Phantasia

• Creatives all wanted a little bit of structure, something already predetermined with multiple options.

• Links to other work, social media and websites is essential

Prototype

With this knowledge we created our first iteration of the prototype which gave people the ability to create a space to reflect their craft, packed with the tools our new army of creators could use at their disposal.

Our prototype interweaved all the findings from the initial testing which included the ability to create semi-structured sections where they could rearrange, position and customise specific chosen elements to create a representation of themselves.

The Banner section structure was left consistent to allow the Phantasia brand to be part of our creator’s story in a subtle way.

Testing Assumptions

Before testing the prototype we came up with a few assumptions to test against which would help us gather valuable insights into any potential blockers our testers could face. The assumptions included:

• Users might not realise where the edit icon is on the homescreen.

• Users will get confused about what can be uploaded.

• Users might not understand how to upload their content once they’ve selected it.

• Users will not understand how to move the element sections.

Testing Prototype Maze

 High Fidelity Prototype Walkthrough

Moving Forward

So how can we make it better? this is the question we ask ourselves as UX Designers

• First we would do more testing on the latest hi-fi prototype to gather more insight into colours, icons and usability.

• We would then work with the developers to finesse the drag and drop functions as we were quite limited with Figma.

• Next we would move forward with the hi-fi prototype for our other user flow that enabled creatives to duplicate layouts into their editor from inspiration taken from other artist’s profile pages … Remember it’s never “copying” just “taking inspiration.”

• Lastly we have ideas to generate income through storage & template options. With the latter being a more premium option where far more detailed templates and sections could be added for a small subscription. Phantasia, although a wonderful solution to artists prompting their work, is a business after all! 

Conclusion & Key Learnings

Ok, truth time. This project was incredibly challenging and really opened my eyes to how working in a team with such contrasting personalities and strong opinions could drive someone to the brink of madness. The solution itself was quite a simple one, however it took weeks to realise this and at times it felt like wading through treacle to just align ourselves to one direction. 

Dividing and conquering was the solution, splitting the strongest personalities and separating the tasks where we could. 

Productivity increased. Frustration decreased. We were one big happy family again. It’s just a shame I aged about thirty years in the process.  

They say it’s the hardest times that teach us the most valuable lessons in life, and this project was no exception.