Project Overview
For PUXD Learning Studio 2 my team was tasked with creating an interactive web page that would solve a problem within the community. We were particularly drawn towards Purdue Arts after hearing accounts of negative experiences from our peers. Overtime, we have seen examples in which information about various art events were not heavily attended, due to ineffective communication efforts.
Thus, our team decided we could improve the current Purdue Arts website and make it more effective for Purdue students or prospective students.
Process
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Design Workshops
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Sketching
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Interviewing
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User Testing / Usability Test
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HTML, CSS
Team
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Natalie Newton
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Madi Loyd
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Addie Wang
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Caitlyn Hagen
Timeline
August 2024 - October 2024
Purdue Students Page
Create the Students page within the redesigned Purdue Gallieries website
Created Presentation of Work
To communicate our insights and solution I created a visual presentation
Co-design Workshop
Worked with a teammate to conduct a co-design workshop and took notes
Researched Problem Space
Reddit deep dived to futher understand personal anecdotes of the current experience
My Contributions
Purdue Online Galleries
We completed a variety of activities in order to understand our problem space and the needs of our user group, such as by conducting secondary research, interviews, and co-designs based on our user group.
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Through our activities we gained valuable insight we could use in our design going forward such as:
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Students have had a poor experience with the Purdue Galleries website
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A rise in digital engagement in the arts world
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Online galleries have become more prevalent since Covid
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A lot of art students feel that their hard work isn’t being promoted and recognized
Secondary Research
To understand how students feel about the Purdue galleries, we conducted a Reddit deep dive. This provided us with personal anecdotes that we would take into consideration for our final design. We also utilized peer reviewed articles that provided us with evidence-based information of best practices that art galleries should consider.
Reddit Findings:
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The online art scene is becoming more and more common
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Students feel that their hard work isn’t being promoted and recognized
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Opportunity:
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Promoting student artwork will give the sense that a student is seen and valued as a person. This opportunity will also allow them to grow as an artist and gain exposure.
Scholarly Findings:
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Exhibitions are an important part of the artistic process for students and artists, however, finding places to exhibit artwork can be very difficult
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A switch to online art endorsement is crucial to create a rise in art engagement at any scale (Raab, 2023)
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Opportunity:
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Deriving inspiration from physical galleries into a digital form could provide useful to engage users.
Co-Design Workshop
We conducted a co-design to better understand our users’ experience, while also gaining valuable information through their ideas of potential design solutions.
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To begin this, we did further research into activities we could use to involve our participants in the design process, along with what the typical agenda of a co-design session looks like. Through this process, we found a variety of activities that would be beneficial for our workshop such as...
Experience Banking
Have participants list 3 specific good or bad experiences they have had related to the problem space.
This provides insight into what they see as the problem, which allows us to narrow the problem space.
Test Existing Solutions
Present an existing solution to the participant. Have them navigate through the “solution” based on a specific scenario.​
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We can see the roadblocks they encounter when navigating the site and how they try to problem solve them.
Ideation Session
Ask the participant to draw out what they think/would like our website to look like.
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Understand what the user wants different in our design, along with giving the participant the opportunity to play a direct role in the design process.
Co-Design Session​
Sophomore Art Education major with a proficient background of painting, art selling, and art competitions.
After navigating the current Purdue Galleries website, our participant highlighted pain points
a. Confusing and irrelevant navigational system
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b. Small text on the main page adding to clutter and information overload
c. Expected to see the current and upcoming exhibitions happening around Purdue, not an archive of all of the past exhibitions.
d. Overlooked the small text towards the center of the screen that would allow them to navigate
e. Lack of minimalist organization and information overload
Sketches
Based on our co-design sessions and the found pain points from the original website, we created sketches to follow as we began coding our version of the Purdue Galleries Website.
This was my sketch of the student gallery page which I would use for inspiration when coding the final solution.
Final Design
Through user testing and co-designs we coded a redesigned version of Purdue Galleries. This redesign would be an all in one stop for art students to showcase their work and learn more about what the galleries has to offer. We created this design using html, CSS, and java from scratch.
