DigitalASO's Ecosystems Map

Developing a digital matchmaking platform to foster connectedness in the Canadian arts and culture community

Project Overview

The DigitalASO's Ecosystems Map is an effort by our client, ArtsPond, to bridge the communication gap between local arts communities across Canada. Launched as a part of the larger DigitalASO project, the Ecosystems Map aims to visualize the inspiring diversity of digital champions and resources in Canadian arts and culture.
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Our team partnered with ArtsPond in January 2021 to create the first design proposal for the Ecosystems Map project. With ArtsPond, we had opportunities to conduct a survey within their network to understand the landscape and gauge requirements of the arts community. Based on this initial research and project description, our team began the journey of identifying pain points, designing solutions and creating a final prototype.

Client Partners

Jessa Agilo, Founder & CEO (ArtsPond)
Margaret Lam, Co-Founder (DigitalASO)

Team Members

Zahir Punjan
Kaitlin Boyd
Megha Singal
Savannah Kimmerer

My Contributions

User Research, Ideation & Usability Testing

Timeline

January ~ April 2021 (10 hours per week)

Problem Space 🔍

who are we working for?

what is our goal?

Founded in 2014, ArtsPond is a Canadian non-profit organization whose vision is to fuse collaborative values of social innovation and the arts to nurture healthy human ecosystems in response to systemic barriers, such as growing social precarity, economic inequity, cultural-spatial gentrification, and digital transformation.

With the aim of improving social, spatial, economic, digital, and accessibility justice for communities in arts and culture, Artspond initiated DigitalASO, a cross-sectoral effort with a 5-year mandate to empower the digital transformation of Canadian arts services through digital literacy research, training, alliance and platform-building.

Within Digital ASO, ArtsPond envisioned a project, the Ecosystems Map, to help identify and foster deeper understanding of the collective digital needs and opportunities of equity-seeking groups and boost awareness of innovative digital resources and champions in arts and culture from across Canada.
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In collaboration with Artspond, we embarked on the journey of conceptualizing the core features and designs of Ecosystems Map by understanding and identifying the needs of independent artists, especially a part of under-served groups, through user research.

User Empathy 💬

who is our user?

what are they experiencing?

Through user interviews, we identified the major steps involved in finding expertise or a resource that an artist goes through, which was organized as an affinity diagram and further as-is journey map.

With user persona and journey map created, we uncovered several pain points including ambiguity in defining their requirements, scouring the internet and their network for the help they need, evaluating and choosing among the options to find the most suitable match based on value alignment and requirements.

By mapping these gaps with our client’s goals and values, we quickly discovered the opportunities that the Ecosystems Map could address.

Ideation 💡

what do we need?

what is our solution?

We brainstormed ideas for the initial product design and, through multiple iterations (including ideation and low fidelity sketches), came up with a clickable mid-fidelity prototype.

To address the issue of finding the right resources easily and quickly, we propose to build an interactive database where artists can safely share their resources to foster a more accessible digital ecosystem in Canadian arts and culture. This way, DigitalASO Ecosystem Map captures basic functionality that the product aims to provide to its users:

Access information on a variety of resources including projects, people, funding and workshops so that they don’t end up browsing through multiple sources for prolonged periods
Reach out to communities and artists so that they can expand their network even without stepping out of their homes
Share their requirements and attract the right candidates by adding information about their projects and themselves
Decide what resource will satisfy their requirements by viewing the details shared by other users and organizations

Through these design solutions, the user pain points such as not knowing what to look for and not knowing where to look for resources will be addressed. Additionally, we envisioned that the Ecosystems Map would ensure value alignment between the user and resource/expertise, in the form of matchmaking.

Prototype ✏️

Functionality and form

User storyboard

We chose to adapt a mobile-first strategy for the design of the Ecosystems Map web-app, while the design can be modified and applied to a laptop and tablet version in the future.

In this prototype, the use of colour is minimal so as to allow the client to focus on the refinement of conceptual design and usability of the platform before making it more aesthetic. We used the colours in the logo of the DigitalASO project for our landing page.

The big ideas for this prototype are to share dynamic, interactive resources across the arts community and enable ‘matchmaking’ to help equity-seeking groups find the digital champions that can respond to their specific needs.

Solution Space ✨

how does our solution work?

how can we improve more?

Throughout our design, we aim to focus on designing a solution that provides value alignment between the user and resource/expertise, in the form of matchmaking. In addition to helping users in the creative community, our design aligns with Artspond’s need to develop a digital matchmaking platform to connect artists who are in need of certain resources with those who can provide them.

By designing a centralized ecology of resources (including expertise) where artists can gain reliable resources, Artspond can foster inter-connectedness and reduce inequalities for the art community members by contributing to increasing the ease of accessing information about resources.

As a whole, we expect that the resource-sharing platform will evolve into a knowledge-sharing environment. This is where artists would be encouraged to take action for their resource gap and share resources with each other so that they can help whoever experiences a similar problem of having limited network and resources. This will provide Artspond with the opportunity of facilitating alliance-building through mutual growth and accessible infrastructure to anyone regardless of their current internal resources, networks, and physical locations.

We gathered formative feedback from users to validate the design assumptions made in the mid fidelity prototype. 5 user testing sessions were conducted with the representative users who were members of the Canadian arts community.

For more details regarding the usability testing procedure and results, please have a look at our report.

Evaluation ✔️

Takeways 🧩

what did I learn and realize?

what can I improve next time?

Analyzing user research results, my group and I was able to empathize that the users have difficulty of finding resources outside personal networks and validating resource suitability with limited information. However, it was not until the ideation stage that I gained a more comprehensive grasp of the problem space; among various ideas for the initial product design, our group decided which one to further develop as core features. Since the product could incorporate only few features, I went through thorough discussions and multiple iterations to make sure the product successfully addressed all of the pain points. This allowed me to look at the pain points in more details and consider aspects I did not catch on in the previous stages.

Working with the key partner from ArtsPond, I was fortunate to receive abundant amount of feedback and guidance from my community partner organization. This greatly helped me examine my ideas critically so that I could identify which one to further develop, which reinforced my understanding of designing to the needs of the users. I also had a chance to run the overarching ideas regularly to confirm and communicate that our proposals addressed not only users’ needs but also aligned with the values and business objectives of the partnering organization.

All of these hands-on experiences and working with my community partnering organization throughout this project further evolved into great lessons and assets that I believe will be significantly helpful when I start my career in the field of UX design.