Area
Mobile, AR
Team
3 designers
Duration
3 months
Tools
Figma
TL;DR
Beam is a locative art-sharing platform that lets users discover and share art in the real world. I designed the content discovery experience, refining the map, navigation, and search to make sharing and exploration feel more intuitive, engaging, and visually cohesive. The design received positive feedback for improved usability and 40% increased user engagement and satifaction across the platform.
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:
Research Takeaways
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.
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.
Initial Results
4 out of 5 creators expressed interest in Beam as a platform, compared to 4 out of 7 consumers.
40% of participants overall demonstrated a clear understanding of the map interface.
60% of participants expressed the need for a more polished product before forming an opinion.
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:
Final Results
9 out of 10 participants reported increased satisfaction and improved clarity when using the map interface.
All 10 participants found that introducing time limits on uploaded content offered a fairer approach to user engagement.
9 out of 10 participants found the enhanced search functionality significantly more effective for discovering content on the platform.