Artscape is a personal project intended to encourage 6th-grade through 12th-grade students and interested individuals to become more engaged with learning about art history. It is intended to be used by students and teachers alike for educational purposes.
💢 What's the problem?
Not all students in grades K through 12 have the same opportunity and resources to learn about art history. Students who have a chance to pursue art education can excel academically.
This is not an issue we found on our own. We sought the opinions and research findings of professionals in the education field. Here are some of the articles we will reference:
Professionals in Education
These studies found various benefits to getting kids engaged with art early in their educational careers including higher GPAs, reduced disciplinary infractions, increased writing achievements, and increased compassion. Despite these benefits, art electives are neglected in grade school environments.
💬 "In two separate databases, students who had arts-rich experiences in high school showed higher overall GPAs than did students who lacked those experiences."
💬 "Increasing students’ arts educational experiences reduces the proportion of students receiving a disciplinary infraction by 3.6 percentage points; increases writing achievement by 0.13 of a standard deviation; and increases students’ compassion for others by 0.08 of a standard deviation."
💬 "The vast majority of elementary school teachers (81%) report that other subjects are getting crowded out by extra attention being paid to math or language arts (62% middle school; 54% high school)"
There is a desire for a more user-friendly and enjoyable platform that allows learners to explore art easily in their own time.
🗣️ Who is affected?
We need to see how learners and teachers feel they are impacted and what other frustrations they are facing.
So we took to social media and posted a survey to start gathering information.
We posted a survey to a handful of art and learning Subreddits.
Our Findings:
Personas
To better outline our audience we took all of our findings and created two persons.
👷 How Can We Address the Issue?
Now that we have a better understanding of our users' frustrations we will begin addressing the issue. We started iterating with Paper Wireframes and got feedback before moving to digital wireframes.
As we moved into digital wireframes we reached back out to our survey participants for feedback.
Using paper allowed us to quickly draft a few ideas
We decided on 5 necessary features:
Feedback
After speaking to more users, we found two features that should be included.
Favorites Tab
Time Range
Usability Testing
With a few iterations done for the digital wireframe, we moved over to Adobe XD and made a Low-Fidelity Prototype. We brought in a few users for usability testing and gathered some of the following insights:
High-Fidelity Mockup
We address the problems outlined by our usability testers and address some issues identified by our team. We created more iterations and produced a High-Fidelity mockup.
🏁What's the Next Step?
We feel like this app is in a good place but needs a few iterations. We’ll conduct a few more rounds of usability testing before partnering with developers to draft the first version of the app.
