GoghGet
An app built to help emerging artists get the recognition they deserve - without the guesswork.
Brief
The project brief was simple - design something that solves a known user problem that is close to your heart. Next, create an intuitive and effective solution that enhances the overall experience. Through research, user insights, and thoughtful design, the goal is to develop an app that is both functional and meaningful.
Turning a creative passion into a full-time career is every emerging artist’s dream—but getting the right exposure and building a reputation can feel overwhelming and all over the place.
I’ll be diving into the current artist journey, uncovering the challenges they face, and exploring potential solutions using journey mapping, real stories, and solid research. The goal? To make this process clearer, smoother, and way less daunting.
Objective
I’m diving into the world of young artists—how they get noticed, the struggles of finding the right audience, and the best ways to put themselves out there.
The mission? To create a mobile app that takes the guesswork out of the process, helping artists connect, shine, and get the recognition they deserve—without the endless trial and error.
Constraints
The current process is a maze of tools, techniques, and know-how—so much that beginners can easily feel lost trying to piece it all together. It’s a lot to learn, collect, and make sense of, which can make getting started more overwhelming than exciting.
Research and Insights.
Understanding the canvas
Secondary research
Let’s ask the artists
Artist Interviews
In order to test my hypothesis and work to validate my assumptions, I worked directly with artists to understand their experience. I was able to sit down with 5 successful artists at varying stages of their career and discuss things that helped them with exposure as an up and coming artist.
I then extracted key learnings from these interviews to create a set of :
Pain Points
Motivations
Behaviors
Through my secondary and primary research it was evident that you need to cooperate with other artists and the industry if you want to succeed. Artists also need to know when to submit their entries and how best to present themselves to increase their odds of being accepted.
Multiple hats.
Expertise in marketing is at least as valuable as being able to paint/sculpt/sketch well. Some would say it's even more important! The ability to market your art can help turn a side hustle into a passion (or money maker).
Business first.
Artists need to have a business state of mind in order to market yourself and stay aware of all the opportunities. This means understanding facets of a broader business (HR, legal, PR, Marketing, Business plans). This does not come naturally to most artistic people and therefore must be learned alongside their craft.
What was the consensus?
Core Themes and Learnings
After sifting through the interview findings I was able to identify 3 core themes that targeted the motivations, pain points, and behaviors. These themes pointed me down a path for the digital solution - making the overall journey of gaining recognition for the young artist better.
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I kept coming across the theme of Networking and Collaborating with all the artists I interviewed. This had both a huge impact on their exposure, but could also be a pain point, depending on who you’re networking with.
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The second theme I identified was centered around the business side of recognition and the many layers of skills needed to market yourself and turn one’s past time into a career.
I kept being told that “you have to be your own best marketer” and “I had no idea what to do with a business proposal”. Naturally, this seemed like perfect category for a theme given the implications on the overall exposure of a young artist.
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Our last theme is that of offerings within the art world and the many organizations, benefits, and grants that exist for our emerging artist.
This theme encompasses a number of exposure centered activity, such as knowledge of local art organizations, workshops, art grants, and residencies. There was a common thread of artists just not knowing about the programs that are already in place centered on helping artists in a number of ways. These things exist, but young artists usually have no idea about them or where to start looking for information.
Understanding the User
Let’s create an ideal user
Primary Persona
I designed a typical and ideal user that I can work to validate the hypothesis and start to test the solution with. I will be able to focus the solution on the pain points and motivations of the persona, Will.
Where can I find opportunity?
Experience Map
The experience map really helped to find, and guide, the area of opportunity for Will’s pain points along his journey.
After examining my experience map and taking interviews into account - I decided to focus on the opportunity of promoting opportunities and applying with ease. I had many instances that point to problems in this area, where users weren’t aware of opportunities and could be intimidated by the entry process.
Refocusing the design challenge
How Might We Statement
Now that I understand the user better, I want to re-focus the design challenge to stay focused on their needs and pain points.
How might we make opportunities more apparent to young artists so they can gain exposure and recognition in order to pursue a career in the art world?
Developing the task
What must the app fulfill for the artist?
User Story, Epic, and Task Flow
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User Story.
“As a (user), I want to (action), so that (benefit).”
I went about turning pain points, behaviors and motivations into stories based on our persona and research.
I then collect the stories in to similar epics (groupings) in order to guide our solution.
As a young artist, I want to understand what opportunities for exposure are available near me so that so that I can attract a larger audience and start to devote more time to my craft.
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Epic.
The core epic I settled on was that of making the application process more streamlined for Will. I don’t want anything getting in the way of submitting his applications, with the hopes that taking out any barriers will promote more submissions.
Working with this goal and task in mind I will create a task flow to map our user’s journey.
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Task Flow.
My main task incorporates everything I’ve learned and will help make the overall process smoother and simpler - resulting in less stressful application process.
I will outline the steps Will needs to take to complete his task of ‘submitting an application’.
How will the user complete their task?
Task Flow
The primary task flow takes the user from the Home Screen all the way to the completion of the entry for an art contest (opportunity).
Will has already created a GoghGet account and saved his credentials for easy application. Will has just finished a few oil paintings and wants to start looking for a contest to submit his work for entry.
Sketching, ideation, and branding
Layout, features, and quick ideation
Exploratory sketches
I wanted to start ideating quickly and loosely. My beginning sketches are just that, loosely exploring layout, positioning and key features. I used a method called Crazy 8’s (8 one-minute sketches) and formed more solidified design after revealing key design features.
Narrowing the focus
Solution sketching
After sketching out numerous ideas, I started to pull out features that seemed to work for the flow, and throw away ideas that were too vague or unfocused on completing the overall task. These are sketches that are getting close to the final design, and good starting place to begin wire-framing.
Turning sketches into wireframes
Figma wireframes
I worked from my preliminary sketches and turned them into wireframe prototypes. I want to start testing the initial design with user’s to see what works and what needs to change. (spoiler alert, a lot needs to change.)
User testing & design
Does this make sense to you?
User testing
It’s now time to see how users interact with the initial prototype. I completed 2 rounds of user tests, totaling 9 individual records of user’s navigation and sentiment while completing their task.
I gave the users the core task of finding the Artist of the Month contest and submitting their artwork for entry. I added a secondary task of setting up notifications for the second round as well.
I then recorded how they reacted to each screen. Taking note of their understanding, pain points, and overall flow from screen to screen.
There was a lot of overall confusion during the initial user tests. Which gave me a lot to work on for round 2. Below are the most crucial priorities out of the 11 noted in the matrix.
Test results - prioritization matrix
3. Make the opportunities more uniform.
4. Less white space - give the user content.
5. Opportunity card - needs right set of info.
6. Opp details page overhaul :
- Critical info only (remove irrelevant content).
- Create tab view and allow the user to expand content.
- ‘Apply now’ to ‘start application’.
8. Requirements needs to be re-worded and add and entry uploader.
9. Add payment screen and confirmation.
Key screen iterations
There was some great feedback, and it pointed out that I needed to rethink a handful of crucial design choices from the first prototype.
I then re-designed the main issues that arose from the user feedback and went back to the users for another round of testing. The goal here was to make the flow more seamless, removing confusion, and improving layout.
After reviewing the feedback it was apparent there were redundancies on the home screen, and I wanted to present the artist with the option to scroll opportunities right away.
The requirements screen needed wording changes and overall simplification to make more sense to the artist and its purpose.
The Opportunity Screen caused a lot of confusion with users, and therefore needed to be completely re-thought. I wanted to push for urgency with “recent additions” or “newest” first. Then allow the artist to filter by type if they want (i.e. Grants, Contests, etc.).
I really wanted to show the most important details to the artist, and after feedback realized I needed to minimize some of the on-screen text and allow the user to view more.
Visual identity & branding
What mood should the app provide?
Brand values
I wanted to explore the mood and feeling of the brand. I started with thinking of the overall feel I wanted the app to have. I started writing down words that would embody the app for look and feel.
I wanted to give off a sense of enthusiasm, motivation and friendliness, with a clean and minimal identity.
Brand colors & typography
Designing for a mobile app, I wanted to choose a strong and easy-to-read sans serif font. I dabbled with using a serif font for the wordmark, but the combination didn’t really come together, and I ended up sticking with one font and using different line weights for emphasis.
I settled on Lato because I liked the roundness of the letters when compared to a common font like Roboto, it works with multiple weights, and is easily readable on a smaller screen.
Wordmark, logo, and app icon
I really wanted to stay minimal with the app icon design. I worked through multiple designs with gradietns, captial letters, and my secondary colors.
High fidelity design
Color prototype
Now that I have settled on branding and the color palette I want to begin testing how the colors can come together in the prototype to produce the visual identity I’m looking for. I added HQ imagery (which will provide a lot of the color in my design) and started sampling how to use the colors with different elements before settling on the final design below.
With GoghGet, users can now be notified of opportunities, upload their best artwork, and apply for opportunities all in one place.
Getting people on board
Marketing website and mobile web
With the app ready for launch I want to attract users on different platforms and screens. The main function, and design agenda, is to push artists and prospective users to download the app through the site and mobile web interface. This led to a layout that is designed to point out key features and allow the user to download with large callouts and CTA’s.
Multi-platform design
Tablet view
I wanted to see what the design could look like in another interface and considering artists/designers may be using a tablet, I thought this would be a good area to explore. Below is the Opportunity overview screen and clicking through to the Organization details screen.
Conclusion
Design impact
Key learnings and next steps
GoghGet has come a long way from the initial wireframes and user tests. It has gotten better along the way and continues to evolve the young artists path for exposure.
I’ve learned a TON throughout the process, below are some of the standout learnings :
Importance of good interview questions (and coordinated interviews).
Staying focused on the problem (very easy to start thinking about solutions).
Continuing to validate your solution on the Persona.
Keeping things simple, aligning color, and mood with the overall aim of the app is harder than it sounds, but pays off.
Line weight and typography have a huge impact when done correctly (and when done poorly).
Looking to the future
Moving forward, I think GoghGet could become a tool for a larger subset of users and not strictly the Fine Arts sector. There is a lot to do to keep making the app solve for our emerging artists like continue to user test and iterate on the feedback.
Next, I would need to start working with developers to ensure the features can be implemented to get the MVP to market.
Overall I grew exponentially throughout the process and I have a better idea of how to solve for user problems using the right tools and steps.