Connecting Creatives

In a more connected world, with so many turning to online learning to expand their skill set and improve themselves, the area of creative learning presents an opportunity due to limited options for platforms.

With creatives depending largely on in-person learning to hone their crafts, I wanted to find out more about how creatives view and engage with online platforms.

Role: UX/UI Designer Tools Used: Figma, Miro Time Frame: 2 Months

Creatives needed feedback and connection

Many creatives are using in-person or online platforms to learn new skills. When using online platforms, they were expressing a yearning for the aspects of in person learning that they loved, but wanting to utilize the convenience and flexibility of the online experience. The creatives that were interviewed were not fully happy with the online products that they had been using. They really valued feedback from their peers as a prime element of growing and learning creatively, but there wasn’t a platform available that would allow them to interact with peers in the way that they needed.

Discovering the challenge

I interviewed 4 individuals in and age range from 30 to 75 years old, all of whom consider themselves to be lifelong learners. Each interview subject is in a creative field and 3 out of the 4 were artists and/or teachers. I asked a series of questions about their experiences in learning, particularly online, with an emphasis on discovering what was lacking from their experience and what worked for them in the past.

Asking the right questions

To generate quality questions for my participants, I first did some preliminary research into the online learning space, mined my own experience with creative learning, and finally by creating a mind map of potential questions from which I could distill the most interesting.

Through creating the affinity map, my hypothesis that a social aspect to learning would be a concern to participants seems to have been confirmed, as a large number of the answers were able to be sorted into 7 categories that were all related to interaction with peers and/or instructors. These categories were “getting feedback,” “seeing others’ work,” “small group,” “sharing,” “person matters,” “social,” and “solo before group.” A couple of things that were surprises were that all of the participants believed that it mattered specifically who you work with in a learning situation and that they would prefer to work alone for a while before having interactions. I was cognizant that these answers were coming up during the interviews, but wasn’t aware that every single participant had brought it up until mapping out the answers. Conversely, I believed that “bite sized” learning had more importance across participants, but it was more of a concern to just two participants after mapping it out.

Empathize

From the findings of my user interviews, I was able to create a picture of the experience of a typical user and imagine the process that they would go through in search for the type of creative learning experience that the are looking for. Based on my user’s needs and friction points I was able to come up with a persona, Gretchen, that I would return to during the remainder of the design process.

After creating the Gretchen persona and sketching out her user journey, I went back to my competitor analysis with Gretchen in mind. I approached the various creative learning platforms available from the perspectives of her needs and goals.

After conducting the ideation phase, the MuseHive platform began to take shape as a space to bring creatives together and to facilitate their inspiration of one another.

I wanted users to be able to take short video courses and augment that coursework with a creative partner to provide feedback on their work.

Ideation

“How might we help creatives determine who would be a good match as like-minded peers and facilitate their collaboration in sharing work and getting feedback?”

The project started out as an effort to come up with an idea for a platform for learning new skills. It was narrowed down to being a platform for learning creative skills specifically, and then morphed into the new concept for a platform to facilitate collaborative learning and feedback between creatives.

To come up with this concept idea, I performed a series of brainstorming sessions that generated over 75 ideas and then selected the concepts that fit the users’ primary concerns and pain points the best. I then narrowed down the focus based on what has the best ratio of impact to feasibility. Creating a storyboard of a user’s experience with the concept helped to further grasp the potential of the product for helping the user.

The concept was shaping up to have the potential to make a splash in the online learning market as it is unique and serves a large, but niche group of people. I was seeing an opportunity to do something new and be an innovator in the space. I initially planned on designing at least 12 features that would have a positive impact on the user's experience and help them to achieve their goals in improving their creative skills. The next steps would be to plan out the features in more detail and add/prune as needed to create a solid MVP mock up.

Site Structure

To determine the best way to organize a sitemap of the features for our new platform for developing creative skills and building a creative community.

I utilized 5 participants who are creatives and who regularly learn new skills or have recently participated in online learning.
The exercise was a Hybrid Card Sort conducted remotely via Optimal Workshop and included 41 cards and 7 categories.

Before creating my initial wireframes, I went back to my competitive analysis research and took note of the structure and look of other learning platforms. I also studied the layouts of successful platforms that present visual work, such as Dribble and Behance. I wanted to make sure that the imagery was going to be presented well and I wanted to keep the navigation as simple as possible. I started with a number of quick sketches on paper before fleshing out the best in digitally.

Refining the structure

Continuing to circle with iteration

The process of creating the wireframes uncovered issues with my initial ideas for the structure and navigation for the site. The top navigation was proving to be redundant and overly complicated as well as the extent of the options within the “My Studio” page.

Fleshing out the design

The high-fidelity wireframes were made with the task flows in mind. I wanted the user to be “pulled” through the sign up and matching process with as much simplicity as possible.