Artlogic Private Views App

This work was completed during my employment at Artlogic.

The Artlogic PrivateViews App is a critical tool for art galleries, artists, and collectors, enabling them to present and share high-quality artwork presentations seamlessly, even offline. It serves as an indispensable sales tool for art fairs and client meetings where connectivity is unreliable.

My role: lead product designer & design advocate

Upon joining the team as lead product designer, I became an integral part of the product trio (product, engineering, design), championing user needs and design thinking. The team had previously operated without dedicated design resources, resulting in UI inconsistencies, usability challenges in key workflows, and product decisions often lacking direct user validation. My focus was to establish a user-centric design process, improve the app's usability and consistency, and implement data-informed decision-making.

Key Contributions & Impact:

1. Establishing design leadership & process:

• Challenge: Product development lacked a structured design voice, leading to usability gaps and missed opportunities for user delight.
• Actions: I integrated design practices into the team's workflow by establishing regular design reviews, introducing user journey mapping and usability heuristics evaluation during planning, and consistently bringing user research insights into strategic discussions within the product trio.
• Impact: This fostered a more balanced development approach, ensuring user desirability was considered alongside technical feasibility and business goals from project inception, leading to more user-friendly and effective feature releases.

2. Enhancing the design system & UI consistency:

• Challenge: The app suffered from UI inconsistencies and lacked adherence to platform conventions (Apple HIG), creating a fragmented user experience and slowing development due to redundant component creation.
• Actions: I conducted a comprehensive UI audit, identifying inconsistencies and areas for improvement. I then defined and documented a refined set of reusable components, aligning typography, spacing, colour, and interaction patterns with both Apple's HIG and Artlogic's brand guidelines. I collaborated closely with engineers to plan phased adoption.
• Impact: This initiative significantly improved visual consistency, making the app feel more intuitive and familiar. It also streamlined development, reducing UI bug reports and accelerating the implementation speed for new features.

3. Implementing user analytics for data-driven decisions:

• Challenge: Product decisions were primarily based on assumptions and anecdotal feedback, lacking quantitative data on actual user behaviour within the app.
• Actions: Recognising the need for data, I pushed for Pendo to be implemented in the mobile app as we were already using it on the web platform. I subsequently performed initial cohort analyses to understand key demographics and their usage patterns.
• Impact: This marked the team's first use of user analytics allowing the team to set the baseline for beginning to track adoption and other metrics within the app. It is already beginning to provide objective data to help us prioritise the roadmap and it gives developers valuable context on user behaviour, leading to more informed product evolution.

4. Building a user-centric design approach through customer collaboration:

• Challenge: Design validation was often internal or non-existent, risking misalignment with the specific needs and workflows of professionals in the art world.
• Actions: I proactively established relationships with key customers fitting our target personas identified through the cohort analysis, creating a small, dedicated user feedback group. I facilitated regular sessions (e.g., remote usability tests, prototype reviews, feedback interviews) to test concepts and refine solutions collaboratively before development.
• Impact: This direct feedback loop proved invaluable. For example, iterative testing on the artwork status update flow with this group led to critical design changes that addressed previously overlooked workflow nuances, resulting in higher task success rates and positive user feedback post-launch.

5. Creating comprehensive design documentation for continuity:

• Challenge: As the sole designer initially, ensuring design knowledge was captured and transferable was crucial for team efficiency and future onboarding.
• Actions: I created and maintained an extensive Figma library and documentation file. This detailed not just final screen designs, but also core user flows, component variations and states, interaction patterns, and the rationale behind key design decisions.
• Impact: This resource became the single source of truth for design, significantly improving cross-functional understanding between product, design, and engineering. It proved invaluable in enabling a smooth and rapid onboarding for the incoming product designer.

6. Overhauling the onboarding experience:

• Challenge: The initial text-heavy onboarding was failing users; analytics indicated significant drop-off, and support queries suggested confusion about core functionalities like offline sync.
• Actions: I analysed user feedback and drop-off points, storyboarded a new, visually engaging onboarding flow focusing on core value propositions, designed interactive prototypes highlighting key actions, and conducted usability testing to validate clarity and effectiveness. This was completed in collaboration with the marketing team to ensure it aligned with the brand.
• Impact: The redesigned, visually engaging slider-based onboarding significantly improved clarity, leading to a better first-time user experience.

Outcome

Through these strategic initiatives focusing on user experience, process improvement, and data integration, the Artlogic App evolved into a more user-friendly, consistent, and effective tool. This work laid a stronger foundation for future development and better positioned the app to meet the demanding needs of art professionals worldwide.