Andy: Social Network For The Art World

I joined an early stage startup called Andy. Their vision was to create a social and professional networking platform exclusive to the art world, where users can connect with one another and share art related pictures and opinions. The team needed help in shaping the product experience and testing it's viability in the market. After 3 months of research, we designed and prototyped an MVP for iOS, tested it with people from the art world and pitched the idea to an incubator program.

I was brought in as a product lead and I was responsible of defining the product strategy and features, conducting user research, creating workshops with the stakeholders and users, designing the information architecture and wireframes, creating prototypes and performing user tests

Challenge

Being well-versed in the art world for many years helped us identify problems that we wanted to solve but in order to do so, we needed to test our assumptions: 

• Social networks are all-encompassing and communication is diluted in the vast array of existing content
• Users have to visit several platforms to have a rounded sense of what’s going on in the arts, art information is scattered
• Existing social networks are mainly used for information and sales, online networking within the art community remains minimal

How might we design a social/professional network exclusive for the art community?

Concepts

Users can stay continuously updated with the art world happenings through a Newsfeed and can:

• Follow other friends activities and inspirational figures of the art world
• Stay updated about the on-going happenings and check the “trending topics” feature, such as“Whitney Biennial”, “Frieze opening”…
• Engage within the community - share art-related pictures and opinions

Users can personalize their profile and find interesting people

• Using the Profiles views – check other users’ profiles, see common connections and relevant information about their role in the art world (i.e.: Artist, current show, gallery representation etc.)

User can look for people of their interest – using the advanced search tool by keywords, i.e.: “curator + Los Angeles + MOCA”

Users can ask to be introduced by one of their connection to someone of their interest

Users can enlarge their circle of connections - if a person follows them back, they can exchange private messages

Users can fill in their virtual business card and exchange it with people

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Wireframes

In the early stages we designed low fidelity wireframes and user flows

View Full System

Discover and Define

In the early stages we focused on the following tasks:

• Looked at competitors like Facebook, Instagram and Linked In and analyzed the information architecture and features of the products
• Conducted research with art enthusiasts, collectors and gallerists by writing interview scripts, performing interviews and sending surveys
• Designed personas and user journeys that helped us identify the main features of the application