VALUART
NFT Masterpiece Marketplace
NFT Masterpiece Marketplace
There are a lot of collectors now who love to create their own Non-fungible token (NFT) collections thanks to the NFT marketplaces. These days, there are many platforms for sharing, selling, and buying NFT arts, and the community continues to grow. The ValuArt project is the new bridge between high quality and valuable arts, and NFTs. The platform has limited monthly auctions. The place has valuable art by famous artists, so collectors know how much their collection would be worth if they owned it.
Through research, I was able to make the design process more clear and find out what exactly we want, what is valuable to users and what the atmosphere of the new market is like. Additionally, it helped me develop more empathy for the users. To begin, I set some research goals.
It was important to me to understand the market and its importance, as we faced new approaches it would be better to know how I could think different and provide a better experience compared to other similar products. I started to read some news and articles of the NFTs, plus listening to some related clubs on Clubhouse and finding some users on Twitter helped me a lot during this research.
Based on my understanding there were some incredible facts about the market:
As a result, all demographic researchers showed the market grows, at this time I started to search more about the platforms and their users. This helped me to understand better what exactly I’m facing.
In order to find out how other platforms work and solve their user needs, I started to search and find similar platforms. A large number of NFT marketplaces existed. Nevertheless, some of them had unique art forms such as CryptoPunk. The reason why I chose foundation was that it has the largest community and will require admin approval for artists to sell items in it, so art quality there is high.
Similarly, there is Superrare, which has a close community and requires a video presentation, samples of work, and some other questions to join as an artist after they check you out. These two have more worthy auctions and artworks.
Furthermore, Raribale has a large number of users and a clean interface. In order to the marketplace, it is open to everyone, and it has low-value artworks, too. I also analyzed Chrstie’s, and it was closest to ValuArt. It is not a NFT marketplace, it has the world’s most famous art auctions.I decided to use SWOT for analysis, but in order to make the analysis more to the point and faster, I focused only on the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
Besides creating a table of the products’ solutions to certain design questions and doubts, I also created a table of how they resolved those questions. It helped me create my own ValuArt structure and how I can respond to our needs. The extra research made everything clear to me about these platforms. Moreover, this categorization allowed me to quickly check each platform later and compare which one is similar to our user problem.
For me, finding users to interview during the Pandemic was one of the most challenging parts of the research project. As a result of Lockdown, I was unable to connect with people, and the only way to find some users was through social networks. Twitter and Discord were the main communities for NFT. There I found some NFT Artists and Collectors who use other platforms. During this interview, I was able to explore our product goal and develop a connection and empathy with them. It was a good experience talking with 6 participants (3 Male and 3 Female) who helped me get to know them better. In order to know what questions to ask, I prepared a Guide for myself. While still having a good conversation with them, I also let them talk about topics that were not in my question. Additionally, I spent some time listening to the NFT clubs on Clubhouse where users shared their experiences.
In light of the interview, there are some points that confirm some of my assumptions at the beginning:
After gathering knowledge of the market and community, I began creating user personas to represent key segments of users. This allowed me to focus more on the problems and user needs. I was able to think as the users and understand their worries and doubts better since this made my research more realistic and close to the users.
To finish the research part, I use a Lean UX Canvas to have an initial picture of the process and market needs of user-centered design. After making Lean UX Canvas, I started validating some of the assumptions we had on the board. Nevertheless, I used to fill the canvas with validated assumptions, which helped me to conclude my research and present it to the other team members.
By using User Personas and interview results, I was able to select the essential needs that I had to meet. Then I wrote down the insights developed through the synthesis of the gathered information. I then combined them all into the POV template to categorize them and allow me to come up with HMW questions.
After defining How might we… questions, I sketched some solutions, then asked other team members to vote on them. As a result, I removed extra answers and focused on the best possible solutions. After that, I wrote down the highest vote solutions to do a wireframe, take a usability test, and choose the best one.
I used User Personas and the HMW method to writing user stories. By doing so, we could articulate how the product would deliver a specific value to users. Based on two different user groups-Artists or Owners and Collectors, I separated it into two sections.
In order to prioritize the features and determine which are most important, I created a User Value Matrix. I was able to see the importance of each feature and stop focusing on low-value and complex concepts. Moreover, this organization helped me to focus on high-value features and spend more time thinking about them.
Once I brainstormed and found the best solutions to some of the challenges, I moved on to work on the website architecture. The site map helped me to have an idea of the content and the hierarchy of the product. In this way, the relationship between pages and their requirements was much clearer.Thus, I decided to prioritize the main pages based on their importance in order to focus on the design that was most important first.
To design based on the user-centered approach and my previous research I had to consider a real user who wants to place a bid. In order to reduce the complexity of the design, I began to create a user flow map. As a result, I was able to think about all the challenges users might face while placing a bid and consider all possible situations in my design.
With all the thought and research I did, I started to sketch some ideas and test some of them then, to give it more detail, and choose the best solution, I designed wireframes of each option. Then I test it with some users and record their feedback. During the same time, I had several meetings with the team and voted on the best idea. To organise all these, I created an Affinity map to discover patterns and frustrations of each design.
I did multiple iterations on lo-fi designs to evaluate the user flows and validate my assumptions with stakeholders and users. I iterated on multiple options and ran brainstorming workshops with stakeholders, product owner and engineers to collect all feedbacks and ideas and select the best winner option among all. I used multiple techniques during the workshops such as rapid sketching and testing and voting.
To get the best layout, I repeated this User testing and team voting several times for our main pages. I created other pages only by voting and updating wireframes.
I created a mood board to find the best style based on our expectations and brand requirement, and to ensure that all team members were on the same feeling.
I created a UI Kit to keep the design consistent even after adding new features and making changes. This would also make it easier for developers toimplement, and it would improve our collaboration and understanding. I also created all components of the UI to make future changes quicker and easier.
In each step I tried to validate my assumptions with stakeholders and users. After iterating on low-fi designs, for high fidelities, I prepared multiple options for each page and iterate on them to select the best possible options.
It was important to have a responsive UI to check how our implementation would look to users. I created all Figma artboards using Auto-Layout to adapt to both desktop and tablet screens, plus I added designs for the mobile version.
However, I spent some time in each step to validate assumptions for user flow and low-fi designs but after finishing all high-fidelity pages, I completed the final prototype of the website to verify all assumptions based on my research and findings by hi-fi usability test.
I used Framer and edited Javascripts to add some specific features to the website in order to increase feeling and interaction. Then all has been checked with front end developers for implementation and testing. The main interactions I decided to add to the design were a parallax effect (to make portrait ratio artworks appear in the scroll list view), load bar, scroll effect, etc.
In the end, I use analytics platforms such as google analytics to check out the users and their behaviors all the time. I use hotjar heatmaps to find out the most eye-catching parts of the design and check out how my design gives users what do they want. Moreover, I will use A/B testing to add some new features and make some new changes in the next releases.
