A community for creativity through peer motivation.
Facere, which translates to “make” in Latin, is an exploration of the creative process of artistic hobbyists. With knowledge gained in research, I developed a Hi-Fi concept for an app that would help them be creative more often. Originally a two week sprint focusing on user research and UX as the final project of my time at Flatiron School, I added a third week sprint to design the project's UI after graduating.
Lead UX/UI Designer
Figma
User Research Guide, Competitive Analysis, Affinity Map, Problem Statement, User Flow Diagram, Mid-Fi Prototype, UX Evaluation Guide & Report, Moodboard, Style Tile, Hi-Fi Interactive Prototype
Three week sprint from January 17- February 3 2023
For the research phase of this project, I developed a set of semi structured interview questions that would be used for participants that are creative hobbyists. Being a creative hobbyist was important for this interview process as the point of this research was to encourage people who aren't creating to create more often and to inspire each other. Professional artists, while they can of course use the product that would be developed, are in theory already creative and are not the center of this focus.
A constraint of this research process was a lack of direct competitors. Due to this, a competitive analysis amongst other types of accountability and wellness apps was conducted.
Strava
Flora
Brainsparker
BeReal
Four creative hobbyists were interviewed remotely for 15-20 minutes. The participants’s hobbies included:
I crave a non judgemental community that would inspire and motivate me to create and share with my peers.
Distractions make it hard to focus on my artistic goals.
I try to prioritize my creative time.
What I see in the world inspires me.
With the insights gained from research, I identified a core problem that would provide value to creative hobbyists if we were able to solve it. I crafted a problem statement to give that problem context and provide something I could ideate around and compare solutions to:
Artistic hobbyists need a space where they and their friends can share when they are doing something creative in order to encourage each other to be productive more often.
Through rapid sketching I came up with a list of features to choose from. Using the MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't Have" method, I prioritized which features were going to be most useful to the target demographic of this project: creative hobbyists. The features that the product must have included:
To come up with ideas for user flows, I made rapid sketches of products from the competitive analysis attempting to solve the problem. The products that I used for rapid sketches were Bereal, Strava, and Brainsparker.
Strava's inherent nature of encouraging others by showing what their peers are doing felt the most in line with the problem at hand, so I decided to use the app as inspiration for the Facere user flow.
Using Strava as inspiration, I designed a user flow diagram with a task scenario of "Task Scenario: Log in to Facere, record a new activity with the “select time” option, enter an amount of time, name your activity, and save it".
The usability test was done remotely with 5 participants who are all creative hobbyists. The sessions included a short briefing of the app before completing the task scenario listed above using a mid fidelity prototype. They were encouraged to think out loud about their thought process during the task scenario and I asked them my research questions afterward. In total, the sessions were about 15 minutes each.
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While the participants felt generally positive about the app concept, several features that could use improvement were revealed.
With tons of new ideas to converge on a final concept, it was time to ideate on how everything would look. Before mood boarding, I went back to the interview transcripts with hopes of identifying where my participants drew inspiration from. All of them at one point or another said that they were inspired by nature - specifically mountains, forests, the sky, and outer space. With that in mind when mood boarding, I was consistently finding shades of purple and turquoise in the photos I was choosing. These colors made a lot of sense for a creativity platform as they both convey spirituality and creativity while also producing tranquility. Alongside this, the mood board's soothing and natural essence inspired me to create a water animation that would play while the user is in their activity of choice.
When I am mood boarding I like to find music that I feel will go along with it as well. In this case, the colors that were coming together pushed me toward the album "Life Of Leisure" by "Washed Out" and inspired the font choice of Plus Jakarta Sans for body copy. To compliment the smooth nature of Plus Jakarta Sans, I chose Merriweather for Headings.
With a font hierarchy, an updated user flow based off evaluation, and a color scheme, I converged into a hi-fi concept.
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After bringing the Hi-Fi concept of Facere back to the participants who tested the Mid-Fi version, they were very pleased with the iterations I made. Does this app idea solve the need for creative hobbyists who want to be motivated to create things more often? It is hard to say as the app doesn't exist yet beyond this project, but the hobbyists I have spoken to seem to be very enthusiastic to use something like this.
A lesson I learned through this project was the importance of the curb effect. Alongside the creative hobbyists I interviewed, there was one professional artist in the mix as well. The professional artist was more interested in an app design that would have creative tools rather than a community that would inspire each other. While some of these tools could be useful eventually down the line, designing with professionals in mind first would not be inclusive to all artists. Designing for the people who simply want to make art is designing for everyone.
