Bisqd.
A mobile app to help students track and find their pottery at a busy community art center.
The Problem:
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At a community art center, it can be hard to find your pots on a cart mixed in with 100’s of other students’ work. In addition, when working on multiple pieces at different stages of the production process, and without control over when the piece goes in or comes out of the kilns, it can be easy to lose track of where a piece is in the creation process. As a studio monitor and teaching assistant, these were the most common frustrations I heard from students.
My Role: UX researcher and Designer
User Research:
I set out to discover how students currently tracked their pieces and what their biggest challenge was in locating their work after firings. I interviewed seven members of a community art center, using virtual interviews and a online survey. Recruitment included asking students and teachers directly to participate in an interview and a flyer posted in the art center.
Key Challenges:
Although students used a combination of keeping notes, photos of pieces, and noting the cart number their glaze work was on to track their work- they often were inconsistent with their methods
Students didn’t know when to expect their work to come out of the kiln and didn’t always understand the firing schedule or organization of carts, and even when they did, it was still a challenge to find their work or to know when their work was ready for pick up
Students often made unsuccessful extra trips to the studio to check for their pieces
Goals:
Create a low effort system for students to know when their pots where ready for pick up and which cart to check.
Use image recognition to help students find their pots on the carts.
Build on current kiln firing systems to ease cognitive load of studio monitors and students.
Design Solutions:
I needed a way to allow users to track when their piece went into the kiln and when it came out that built off existing systems in use at the art center.
Adding a scannable code on each shelf or cart allows students to track where they placed their work and for the kiln loaders and unloaders to signal when that shelf or cart was loaded and unloaded.
A date picker adds more data to help sort which kiln load holds which pieces.
Having a photo of the each project allows for an easy visual of what pieces are ready when and allows for image recognition to help locate the piece on the cart.
Usability Testing:
Usability testing was done with three potential users. All users where able to move easily through the flow of creating a new project and checking on what projects were recently out of the kiln.
Key Insights from Usability Testing:
Users didn’t know if the info they entered had been saved when they moved to a new screen
When entering information for a new project, users felt lost, not knowing how far along they were in the process
Users wanted to be able to archive a piece once it was finished
I added a progress bar to signify where the user is in the process of creating a new project. The progress bar is also used in existing project pages to show where the piece is in the making progress (See previous example.)
I added a toast that slides onto the screen to indicate the entered information has been saved before transiting to the next screen.
Iterations:
Prototype
Plan for future improvements:
Add a flow for kiln loaders/unloaders
Improve UI for project info to make it more dynamic, but for now it solves the problem
Add an archive action and archive page