Artisan Center Virtual Tour

March 2022 - present

Overview

I am currently enrolled in the Google UX Design certificate offered through Coursera (with five out of six courses completed). To demonstrate the concepts, students were asked to create an app based on a prompt. The prompt I received was to design a virtual tour app for an art studio. Since the NWTC Artisan Center was up next for virtual tour scanning, I decided to make it the focus of my project.

Artisan Center virtual tour on a mobile device

Artisan center virtual tour low fidelity tour page

Solution

After completing user interviews to determine the needs of our Artisan Center users, I moved forward with a combination of class registration and virtual tour. While the event registration application for this exists in the real world, I decided to approach this as if I were re-writing it from scratch with the virtual tour already integrated. This allowed me to look past the limitations of our existing technology and think of the project from an entirely user-focused viewpoint.

Research

User Interviews

I conducted interviews with eight students of the NWTC Artisan Center. Each participant was asked open-ended questions about their experience taking art related classes and the signup process, as well as questions designed to gauge their need to visualize or see the studio space prior to class registration. During the interview process we discovered that students were highly interested in touring the studio space for a variety of reasons including:

Seeing the studio space and tools available (especially those that would be cost prohibitive for them to purchase) justified the expense of signing up for one or more classes.
Gauging whether the space could accommodate them and their friends or additional students at the same time.
Accessibility concerns (these included mobility and anxiety issues)

Usability Study

We asked five creative artisans to participate in a usability study based on a low-fi prototype. Participants were given a list of five tasks to determine where in the process of signing up for classes or viewing the virtual tour they got stuck or experienced confusion. This study led to the following insights:

Users expected the interface to change when they added a friend to their registration to reflect that they had completed the task successfully and any changes to the cost of the class.
Most users had trouble returning to the class they were viewing prior to entering the virtual tour.
Some users relied on the left navigation menu to navigate to different areas within the app while others indicated a strong preference for using search.

Ideation

Sketches

Artisan center refined wireframes for user flow

Low Fidelity Prototype

I started with a low-fidelity prototype and completed usability testing with Artisan Center students to identify pain points and gain understanding of their needs.

View the low-fidelity prototype

Figma prototype of Artisan Center virtual tour app

High Fidelity Prototype

After initial usability testing I adjusted the prototype to reflect the insights we discovered during testing and added visual elements in line with the existing Artisan Center brand.

View the high-fidelity prototype