TL;DR
Beam is a locative art-sharing platform that lets users discover and share art in the real world. I redesigned the content discovery experience, improving the map interface, navigation, and search. The updates increased user satisfaction and engagement.
Area
Mobile, AR
Team
3 designers
Duration
2022 (3 months)
Tools
Figma
40% increased user satisfaction
Context
Sharing Art in the Digital Age
With social media, discovering art has never been easier. Galleries and museums are no longer the gatekeepers; art is now just a scroll away. Yet as digital consumption rises, physical spaces see fewer visitors, especially among younger audiences. This shift raises key questions. What do we trade for convenience and how is it changing the way artists share, monetize, and connect with their audiences?
The Problem
Artists and The Algorithm Rat Race
The world of social media is not one artists chose but one they were thrusted into, navigating reluctantly. Today, independent artists face constant pressure to compete with shifting algorithms just to share their work and stay relevant, a struggle that can drain motivation and hinder creativity.
The Solution
Bridging The Digital and Physical
Beam is a locative art-sharing platform that seamlessly blends the digital and physical, combining the discoverability of social media with the experience of encountering art in the real world. Through GPS and augmented reality, users can discover, explore, and upload digital art within physical spaces.
The charm of galleries, museums, and street art comes from the spontaneity of discovery, an experience often more memorable than scrolling social media. Beam aims to bring this experience into the digital space.
The Challenge
Content Discovery
One of my key responsibilities was researching, ideating, and designing Beam's content discovery experience, particularly how users navigate the map interface to find relevant content.
User Research
Finding Our Target Audience
We aimed to reach young artists and enthusiasts. My first step was to gauge interest in Beam, so I surveyed over 100 potential users to learn about their social media habits, preferred art mediums, and familiarity with augmented reality. Here’s what I found:
Surveyed users showed interest in Beam, but competing with platforms like Instagram and Twitter meant we had to stand out. To bridge the gap between physical and digital, I envisioned a more interactive experience and introduced the idea of a map for content discovery.
Wireframing
Designing For Discovery
The idea was to have all uploaded artwork as markers on a map, showing the title and artist. Users could bookmark and share locations, and access directions to view pieces through AR on their mobile devices.
Competitive Analysis
Rethinking my approach
While refining the design, I realized I was creating not just a platform for sharing art, but a navigational system for experiencing it. To improve my approach, I pivoted to map interfaces, seeing them as better examples for guiding users through spatial content and enhancing exploration.
Key challenges among competitors included GPS inaccuracies and unreliable search. For example, Geocache users often encountered misplaced caches, wasting hours, while Apple Maps, despite its intuitive interface, drives users to Google Maps because it offers more reliable search results for local businesses.
Initial Design
Focusing On Navigation
For the first iteration, I conducted an unmoderated usability test with 12 participants, maintaining a 3:2 ratio of art consumers to creators. I aimed to gather insights from both audiences to understand their perspectives on the design. This initial test focused on evaluating users' ability to navigate the map, locate markers, and share content.
The Final Design
Adapting to user feedback
Initial test results revealed several issues. User feedback demonstrated that we were not clearly communicating Beam’s purpose to users, particularly consumers. Here are the changes I implemented to address the problem.
Notifications and time limits
I introduced time limits to prevent users from "hoarding" locations while also creating a sense of urgency to drive engagement. Users can set notifications to alert them before their uploaded art is removed. Additionally, this feature could help optimize server data management if integrated into code.
Search functionality
An updated filtering system for users to search for artwork by category and distance.
Marker clusters
The final feature, clusters, was a bit experimental—designed for users to group multiple uploaded pieces into a single general location. While it wasn’t as polished as I had envisioned, I was still happy to see it implemented to some capacity.
Measuring Success
I was able to conduct another unmoderated usability test with 10 users following our final iterations. These were our final results:
Things I Would Do Differently…
Exploring what content moderation could look like on a platform like Beam is essential. Art is a form of expression, and defining the type of expression we want to support on our platform is not only crucial for our users but also for reflecting our core values.
Beam was designed only with iOS in mind, but we failed to consider integrating Apple's Mapbox for further AR development until much later in the project and there was not enough time left to experiment with it.
Labeling the navigation tabs. The icons we used were not intuitively recognizable to many users.