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Meet Artland: a platform for daily prompts & a thriving community to help artists grow

Team

Solo Product designer

What I did

Designed an app to help amateur artists produce art consistently & form communities.

Duration

Aug - Dec 2024 | 4 months

Skills

Product design / User research / Visual design / Interaction design

Why this project? 🙋🏻‍♀️

As an amateur artist myself...

I want to product more art & meet new people in the field.

Yet being solo in the journey & lack of time make it hard to do so.

That’s when I realized...

Amateur artists often struggle with creating consistently & finding the right community for support.

The solution 🎨

Introducing Artland: an organic way to connect with other artists & form communities!

Daily art prompts

To keep users accountable for producing art regularly & help with creative block.

Feedback exchange

Facilitate interactions & help artists grow and learn from each other

The outcome 🙌

People love Artland!

“Reyna brought a great passion and ingenuity to her projects, always excelling in her work both in content and in concept. She was a star student, producing some of the best work I've ever seen in all my years of teaching, including producing a final project that to this day I share with designers in the industry about how to structure great case studies. If you're looking for a hard working, constantly curious, well rounded designer, look no further!”
Anthony Conta
Award Winning Product Design Leader @ Amazon Music
"I love Artland! The way you presented your project was simple, effective, and easy to follow. When you first presented it, I related to it immediately. I also draw and paint, and I often have a hard time to work on my art everyday. I really like your competitive analysis - I can really see the opportunity within the landscape in a very quick, simple, and effective way. I love the 'looking for feedback' feature - I haven't seen that in anywhere else before - I think it's really innovative."
Jayse Lee
Functional Product Designer, Lithe UX Researcher
“I was smiling the whole time through your presentation. You might just actually be in my mind because couple years ago, I had the exact same realization about my art. The How Might We statement is written and formatted really well; the illustrations in your project are visually pleasing and add a personal touch to the app. In your design, I love how there's no like buttons or any other popularity aspect content. "
Caroline Olsson O'Toole
Principal Product Designer @ Zocdoc
“Reyna brought a great passion and ingenuity to her projects, always excelling in her work both in content and in concept. She was a star student, producing some of the best work I've ever seen in all my years of teaching, including producing a final project that to this day I share with designers in the industry about how to structure great case studies. If you're looking for a hard working, constantly curious, well rounded designer, look no further!”
Anthony Conta
Award Winning Product Design Leader @ Amazon Music
"I love Artland! The way you presented your project was simple, effective, and easy to follow. When you first presented it, I related to it immediately. I also draw and paint, and I often have a hard time to work on my art everyday. I really like your competitive analysis - I can really see the opportunity within the landscape in a very quick, simple, and effective way. I love the 'looking for feedback' feature - I haven't seen that in anywhere else before - I think it's really innovative."
Jayse Lee
Functional Product Designer, Lithe UX Researcher
“I was smiling the whole time through your presentation. You might just actually be in my mind because couple years ago, I had the exact same realization about my art. The How Might We statement is written and formatted really well; the illustrations in your project are visually pleasing and add a personal touch to the app. In your design, I love how there's no like buttons or any other popularity aspect content. "
Caroline Olsson O'Toole
Principal Product Designer @ Zocdoc
“Reyna brought a great passion and ingenuity to her projects, always excelling in her work both in content and in concept. She was a star student, producing some of the best work I've ever seen in all my years of teaching, including producing a final project that to this day I share with designers in the industry about how to structure great case studies. If you're looking for a hard working, constantly curious, well rounded designer, look no further!”
Anthony Conta
Award Winning Product Design Leader @ Amazon Music
"I love Artland! The way you presented your project was simple, effective, and easy to follow. When you first presented it, I related to it immediately. I also draw and paint, and I often have a hard time to work on my art everyday. I really like your competitive analysis - I can really see the opportunity within the landscape in a very quick, simple, and effective way. I love the 'looking for feedback' feature - I haven't seen that in anywhere else before - I think it's really innovative."
Jayse Lee
Functional Product Designer, Lithe UX Researcher
“I was smiling the whole time through your presentation. You might just actually be in my mind because couple years ago, I had the exact same realization about my art. The How Might We statement is written and formatted really well; the illustrations in your project are visually pleasing and add a personal touch to the app. In your design, I love how there's no like buttons or any other popularity aspect content. "
Caroline Olsson O'Toole
Principal Product Designer @ Zocdoc
“Reyna brought a great passion and ingenuity to her projects, always excelling in her work both in content and in concept. She was a star student, producing some of the best work I've ever seen in all my years of teaching, including producing a final project that to this day I share with designers in the industry about how to structure great case studies. If you're looking for a hard working, constantly curious, well rounded designer, look no further!”
Anthony Conta
Award Winning Product Design Leader @ Amazon Music
"I love Artland! The way you presented your project was simple, effective, and easy to follow. When you first presented it, I related to it immediately. I also draw and paint, and I often have a hard time to work on my art everyday. I really like your competitive analysis - I can really see the opportunity within the landscape in a very quick, simple, and effective way. I love the 'looking for feedback' feature - I haven't seen that in anywhere else before - I think it's really innovative."
Jayse Lee
Functional Product Designer, Lithe UX Researcher
“I was smiling the whole time through your presentation. You might just actually be in my mind because couple years ago, I had the exact same realization about my art. The How Might We statement is written and formatted really well; the illustrations in your project are visually pleasing and add a personal touch to the app. In your design, I love how there's no like buttons or any other popularity aspect content. "
Caroline Olsson O'Toole
Principal Product Designer @ Zocdoc

So how did I do it? Let’s start from the beginning!

Defining the problem

Getting support is important for amateur artists, who often struggle with creative block, lack of accountability & time.

From my interviews with 6 users who are all amateur artists and had joined a community before, I found out 3 key insights:

Insight 01

The top 3 challenges artists face are...

Insight 02

Getting feedback & support from community is important for artists

Insight 03

Artists enjoy learning from others when creating their own work

Who's our user?

I organized all my insights and turned them into a persona…now introducing Emma!

User story

As an amateur artist, I want to find the right artist community, so that I can get support & accountability in my art journey.

Emma's journey

Turning Emma’s pain points into opportunities

Getting some ideas

What are the current solutions & what’s missing in the market?

I analyzed 8 direct competitors, most of which were mentioned by my interviewees. It seems that the current market is missing:

Let’s visualize our ideas! 🎨

Brainstorming the main features: daily art prompt, feedback exchange, & rewards

I had a lot of fun using multiple methodologies to ideate on the main features. Since I’m working on the project by myself, I made sure to ask for as many feedback as possible. Feel free to click on individual methods to explore further.

One idea that really stood out to me is the daily art prompts feature. It’s unique in the market yet solves all the main problems I wish to tackle. From there, I settled on 2 other features that can also efficiently solve my problem.

So what if…

Now we got an idea...

Let’s start visualizing!

3 core flows to start the MVP 🔍

Brainstorming different designs through sketches 📝

And finally, turning them into mid-fidelity prototype for user testing! 🙌

User testing insight

Improving ease of use through user feedback

By interviewing 6 users, I got really good insights which helped me improve the usability of the design, making it easier for users to discover others’ artwork and feel more motivated to join streaks.

Style guide & Design system

Aligning brand identity & design components

Before constructing the high-fi design, I crafted a style guide and design system to establish a consistent visual language.

Setting the vibe of the app ✌️

Finalizing the details 🎨

Creating components with all states ✍️

The solution 🎨

Introducing Artland: an organic way to connect with other artists & form communities!

Join a streak to create with others

Time to submit your work!

Day 1 vs Day 24 of the streak

Let’s give feedback to others!

Check out others’ submissions to streak

Next steps

If I have more time, I’d love to...

Test & iterate on high-fidelity prototype.

Dive deeper into adding delights to the experience and ways to keep users motivated in their journey.

Further develop the design of user profile, chat feature, and rewards for streaks.

Reflecting on what I learned

Working solo on a project is hard, but I had such a fun time learning & creating! 😆

This was my first time creating a project entirely by myself, and I had to admit that there were definitely times where I had doubts! I remember struggling with recruiting 6 interviewees in the span of one week, using all different ideation methods yet still not knowing what I want to create, consistently iterating on the visual language since it’s just not speaking to me, etc. All these challenges, along with the delightful moments of learning new things, make this experience very unique and rewarding.

Atomic design really helped accelerate the high-fi design process and keep the visuals consistent! 🤩

This was also my first time applying atomic design in my design process, and I really enjoyed learning and using it. I realized that starting from the smallest components to completing all components with all different states really helped me create a consistent visual language, and it makes the rest of the design process so much faster. I can easily and quickly use the components to construct the designs.

Say hi through email or Linkedin! 🫶