Designing the next iteration of art investment.
Art investment, made easy. Invest in your favorite artist’s work through a digital medium.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
2 product designers
2 engineers
Duration
4 weeks
/01 Context
How do we create a dashboard for artists without an established design system?
Unveil labels themselves as a “redefined art brokerage for the emerging artist”. They are dedicated to empowering emerging visual artists to take control of their financial outcomes by providing a platform that allows them to put their pieces in front of their community for fractional ownership. As an early stage startup, features have not taken full shape yet and a design system does not exist. I was given the opportunity to lead a design team through this four week project in which we developed a design system and dashboard for Unveil’s upcoming launch.
/02 Competitive Audit
Has it been done before and if it has, what does it currently look like?
When starting this project, we knew we needed a baseline. We needed a place to start that allowed us to gain the most amount of insight without investing too much time on over-researching. A competitive audit allowed us to see what current companies in this industry are doing and understand what works or what doesn’t for the context of the project. My team and I did a thorough audit of seven different companies within the same space as Unveil. We were able to see commonalities in design decisions as well as unique strengths and weaknesses.
/03 Design System
Designing with scalability and the mission in mind.
Unveil is a modern take on art investment. How the product looks and feels should reflect that. Evidently, that meant finding a good mix of the regal and classy feeling of art and the digital and futuristic feeling of current investment technologies. We turned to the U.S. dollar bill for inspiration. Why? It’s a piece of notation with exceptional detail, intricate designs, and a recognizable color scheme. But it also represents currency, finance, and investments. It embodies the past, present, and future.
The design system also needs to be future-proof and allow for scalability. As Unveil grows larger, they must have a design system that is able to grow with them. A unified place where components and collaboration meet.
/04 Product Requirements
What features should the dashboard have?
Through the competitive audit and the company's existing research, we were able to bring to surface a list of features that would be a good-to-have for the dashboard. Some of these features would be industry standard and some would be unique to the product itself.
Wireframes were then created to visualize each feature and to confirm the feature’s viability.
As I presented the wireframes, a new issue was brought to my attention. I was informed that representation of some of the data within the metrics feature would not be viable with the current system’s API. Along with the new restriction, a new feature was requested that would allow artists to have a place to view their past transactions. Now knowing this, I began to design the first iteration.
/05 High-Fidelity
Bringing it all together by applying style to the skeleton.
High-fidelity designs allow the company to see their vision fully realized without needing to implement any coding. This is the phase where designs are near completion. The main thing I wanted to focus on during this phase of the project was to make these designs look and feel as finished as possible so that the team can understand how each feature should work.
Home Page
Notifications for the user to update them on current statuses
Ability to see current listings that the artist has
Ability to see current and previous listing applications and their status
Piece Listing Flow
Allows user to see in-depth view of their listings
Ability for user to create and submit a new piece listing
Metrics Page
Metrics section allows user to see details and data of their current listings, sales, and artist profile
A date filter allows user to modify the data that is shown based on selected dates
Index Flow
A place for artists' previous transactions to be stored and viewed
The ability to create a new index for logging
Settings Flow
Settings page allows users to modify their artist profile details
Option to change profile photo
Ability to submit the profile changes for review
After receiving feedback…
Genre selection for profile settings is suggested for a change in order to match the genre selection of the listing form and to maintain consistency.
Index page is suggested for a change to be able to contain more records with one glance.
Create another route that connects the home page and the index page.
/06 Final Iteration
Implementing revisions for a smoother experience.
Knowing that the designs are far from polished, I took the critique I received from the team and started implementing the changes in order to push out a final iteration for the beta launch.
A couple of coffees and many Figma layers later, I was able to provide a version 1.2 of the current designs for the team at Unveil.
Home Page
Added a section for accessing indexes
Index Page
Remodeled Index Page to allow for more records to be present on one screen.
Settings Page
Changed genre selection method to be more consistent with piece listing flow.
/07 Outcomes
What did the company think of the designs?
Unveil ended up loving the final iteration of the designs. We were praised by the company for "hitting the nail on the head" with the designs and ended up using them for the official launch of their beta in September 2023.
/08 Next Steps
If I could change a couple of things…
As the designs began to finalize, I noticed some issues as well as inconsistencies that I felt could have benefitted from an extended timeline as well as more communication from the very beginning between the design team and the engineering team.
For future iterations, I would like to be able to re-design the metrics page to allow more meaningful information to be represented. Additionally, having more time to rethink the method for genre selection would have been great. That's why for the next iteration, I would like to see a method that is simpler than the scrolling method we ended up with.
/09 Post Project Reflections
What I learned…
Working on this project made me understand the importance of collaboration and efficiency. Making sure everyone is on the same page is the biggest thing before jumping into a project. I also learned that sometimes additional time might be needed to make sure everything is working as intended.
This was also my first time being a Lead in a design team. Though nervous at first, I embraced the responsibilities head-on and pulled my team through this project with focused initiative and unrelenting confidence. I would love to be able to work with Unveil and my team again.