Creativitree
Research
UX/UI
Branding
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Creativitree is an arts and crafts learning platform that offers time management tools that aims to make pursuing creative goals more accessible for young professionals and anyone who might be struggling to find time to learn creative skills. Its features include a work plan generator that produces custom schedules for users, daily art challenges and a community where students and teachers can connect.
My Role
End-to-End UX Researcher and UX/UI Designer
Timeline
March 2024 - July 2024
(4 months)
*Working at a part-time schedule
Tools
Figma, Miro, Procreate, Lyssna, Illustrator
A personalized way to learn, crafted to fit your schedule
Problem
Young professionals interested in learning creative skills are facing challenges with balancing their daily responsibilities and finding time work on fulfilling their creative goals. Finding the right source to learn from is also time consuming and can further deter people from committing to learning a new craft.
01. Discovery
Background
Learning a new creative skill can be exciting but also daunting, especially when most of your time is already promised to other obligations, such as work or family. It might be difficult to stick to a timeline and hold one-self accountable because of many different reasons. It can also be time consuming to search for the right video tutorial, or surf the internet for blogs with step-by-step instructions. Maybe you are looking for a more direct and streamlined guide for learning or mastering that craft you’ve always wanted to learn.
Creativitree started by asking people about their experiences learning new skills.
Research
After identifying the problem, I set out to speak with potential users about their experiences and scope out other resources available to learn arts and crafts. Through conversations with potential users, I discovered that most people are interested in learning or keep developing their skills on a creative craft but they often struggle with making time for it, keeping themselves accountable, lack of motivation, and finding resources. The competitive analysis helped me understand the make up of the competition and any gaps in the market.
Preliminary User Survey
I conducted a survey prior to user interviews to gather insight on user experiences and inform interview questions. The survey questions focused on learning about people's motivations, potential pain points and preferred learning methods. This is what I learned:
Progress and Feedback
Measuring progress and receiving positive feedback helps people feel successful.
Motivations
People are motivated by personal and professional growth, curiosity, seeing other’s work, or getting recognition.
Accountability
Most people struggle with accountability and scheduling time to learn new skills.
Identifying Gaps and Opportunities in the Market
With the survey results in mind, I looked into existing products that offered similar services to identify opportunities for Creativitree to stand out . This secondary research focused on analyzing and comparing what competitors offer, how their users are reviewing their features, and their overall UI design.
Direct Competitors
Creativebug, Craftsy and Domestika: These three-subscription based platforms were the most popular for learning arts and crafts. While they seem to offer a good range of courses, they do not offer 1-on-1 feedback with instructors, their course libraries are not the most user friendly and course difficulties are ambiguous.
Indirect Competitor
Youtube: Analyzing this video streaming platform was important since it's the most popular resource for learning creative skills. Youtube houses almost all types of video content which can make it difficult to find the right video. However, a lot of people looking to learn a new skill refer to this platform because it is free and it provides more direct and personal insight into the artists' and creators' processes.
Opportunities
None of these platforms offer time management tools, progress trackers or 1-on-1 feedback. These gaps are presented an opportunity for Creativitree to offer unique services in the arts and crafts learning market.
User Interviews
Following the market analysis, we talked with potential users to further build upon the qualitative data gathered in the survey. I conducted 5 in-depth interviews with people in their late 20s who have experience with or are interested in learning new creative skills. Three of the interviews were conducted through video calls and the other two were in person.
The interviews helped me identify patterns in their motivation to learn creative skills, how they make time for it or what prevents them from making time for it, their motivations and preferred methods for learning.
Key insights from affinity mapping
Building on Their Skills
Most have practiced arts and crafts from a young age and wish to continue perfecting techniques and learning new skills.
Sticking to a Schedule
Most do not hold themselves to a strict timeline as they viewed learning crafts as a relaxing experience/hobby, but sometimes struggle with consistency or holding themselves accountable when working on the skill. Some said visual calendars or- deadlines help keep them on track.
Signs of Success
Positive feedback, interest in their work, personal satisfaction, incremental growth or taking on more challenging crafts are seen as signs of success.
Learning Material
Most learn through video tutorials. People want well organized content with a preview/syllabus of what is included in the course.
Sociality of Learning
Most viewed collaboration and competition in a positive light and as an integral part of the learning experience. People like learning in group environments because it stimulates creativity, classmates serve as resources and motivates them to be better.
Feedback
They like receiving feedback from teachers/classmates and being able to ask questions.
User Personas
Based on my learnings so far, I developed two user personas: Ema, an architectural designer who has always loved drawing and painting, but has struggled with fitting it into her daily routines. There's also Alberto, a physical therapist who has been drawing comic book characters by hand for years and looking for resources on how to draw digitally.
Story Boards
After creating the user personas, I started brainstorming possible solutions and drew storyboards based on my product ideas and the user personas. The main idea for the product was to create a work plan generator that facilitated custom schedules for students to follow that are based on their own set parameters.
02. Define
How might we provide time management tools to help young professionals make time to learn creative skills without neglecting their daily responsibilities?
Site Map
I started materializing ideas by creating an initial site map outlining the structure of the site. Here I defined key pages and features for the product.
User Flows
With a clear understanding of what the site might look like, I delved deeper into outlining essential user flows for the product’s performance.
Task Flows
Next, I focused on specific task flows that a future user would need to perform in order to use the product.
03. Ideate
Sketching Ideas
After designing the architecture of the site and identifying the most important flows, I finally started to draw what these screens would look like.
Mid-Fi Wireframes
After sketching the main screens, I moved onto digitalizing them, refining them and making any additional needed screens.
Mobile Wireframes
Desktop Wireframes
04. UI
Branding
Once I had a established how the screens would be organized, it was time to think about how I wanted to portray the product in order to be appealing to future users.
Brand Values and Logo
Creativitree aims to convey brand values such as growth, creativity, support, vibrance and community. Creativity is represented through the paint brush and stroke; support and growth through the figure of a tree; and the playfulness of the chunky, rounded typeface and sketchy tree speak to the vibrance and sense of community the product aims to create.
Logo explorations
Final iteration
Color Palette and Typeface
Vibrancy is one of our core values and I wanted to show that through colors. The selected typeface was chosen because of its playfulness and familiarity.
Pictograms
Since the product is a platform to learn arts and crafts, I also wanted the user to feel like Creativitree is artistic and playful. So I created these pictograms.
UI Library
Now that I had the logo, colors, pictograms, icons and font style, it was time to start creating the UI Library.
05. Prototype
Hi-Fi Wireframes and Prototype
Once I had established the structure of the screens, it was time to think about how to portray the product in order to be appealing to future users. So I started implementing all the colors and elements from the UI library to give life to the designs.
After designing all the necessary screens, I proceeded to create a prototype of the product with four main task flows would ultimately be tested.
Validate
Usability Testing
The goal was to test how smooth, difficult and how long participants take to complete a task. I also wanted to know how they felt about the UI design. The test results were used to further develop the task flows and prototype.
The testing was asynchronously conducted with 5 participants.
1
Create an account
2
Log in, find a course and enroll
3
Create a personalized work plan
4
Find and view generated work plan
Overall, participants were pleased with the design/aesthetic and thought the website was easy to navigate. Task #2 was confusing for some users because they were not able to use the search bar.
Suggestions
Some participants had suggestions that helped further articulate the product. They can be seen implemented in these screens below.
Learnings and Next Steps
I’ve learned many things during this research and design process that has helped me craft a product that caters to its target users’ needs to the best of my abilities. There are many opportunities to continue developing this website. Since the current design is an MVP, there were some intended features that I was not able to design fully, such as a search results filtering overlay and the Daily Art Challenges page and Other features that would come in later versions of the product would be integration and data synching with Google Calendar and Apple Calendar, a message center, page for scheduling 1-on-1 feedback sessions, the Inspiration Gallery page, and a button for the users to share progress or their work outside of the website.
