Role: Product Designer
Timeline: ~3 months (currently being built)
Arternal is an all-in-one complete solution for art galleries, advisors, and art dealers. It provides a range of solutions such as a CRM to foster strong client relationships, Smartmail to easily compose and send out personalized emails en masse, inventory management to store artworks and detailed information associated with each artwork, as well as a bespoke invoicing feature for quickly creating invoices to send out to clients. This platform streamlines operations for art professionals, making their workflow more efficient and productive.
One of our new clients requested a pipeline kanban board feature to be built within Arternal. They said it would be integral to their daily workflow and having something like that built for them would be what they needed to jump onboard with us. Clients in the past had expressed the usefulness of such a feature, but it was never our top priority to build until now. With the implementation of this expansion, users would be able to track deals surrounding an artwork with ease. Having each deal displayed as its individual kanban card helps users visually see where a specific deal is on the pipeline and thus strategize on how to move it to the finish line.
Design goal
1. SCATTERED WORKFLOW
The client uses multiple separate programs in their daily workflow and find it incredibly hard to strategize as a team because of this.
2. LARGE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION
Each deal houses large amounts of information including prices, artworks, addresses, buyers, sellers, contacts, etc. And it was frustrating for the client to view it across different programs.
3. UNSATISFIED WITH THEIR PROGRAMS
The programs that the client uses are independently lacking. They feel their UI is not intuitive, and find it frustrating that they are not being able to sync info to different parts of the app.
1. CENTRALIZED FEATURE
To address our client's scattered workflow, getting them to use Arternal was the ideal solution; and once the deals pipeline is designed, it would have everything they needed to conduct their daily business.
2. INTUITIVE ORGANIZATION OF INFORMATION
Through the usage of tabs, sectional cards, and form fields, we would be able to successfully organize all of our client's data in an easy-to-read and glanceable fashion.
3. SYNC INFORMATION
A more nuanced but important design detail would be to include clickable links within the deals pipeline. This would allow users to seamlessly transition to other parts of the app if need be.
After initial meetings to get a good idea of what needed to be made, it was clear the kanban board pipeline was the biggest asset for the client to have in their work arsenal. I went straight away to researching UI and UX patterns of popular kanban boards such as Notion, Linear, Hubspot, and Asana, as well as pipeline products such as Pipedrive and Salesforce. Taking similar UI and UX components and using them as a foundation acted as a launching pad for designing our version.
The client had a lot of data to migrate over from all their currently open deals and past closed deals. Since their workflow before using Arternal was scattered, throughout this project, all that data had to be collected and placed into a centralized design system. It was definitely the most challenging part because there was so much to keep track of all the time, but close communication and frequent design feedback from my project manager smoothened the process out.
As the designer, the goal was to consolidate all the information they needed to form fields in the new feature. Leveraging tabs and modular sections allowed for sufficient organization of vital data.
The kanban board feature introduces users to a more visual way of following the progress of deals. And for the client, that means being able to look at a glance and strategize with the team on how to move a deal to the finish line. Each column represents a stage; ordered from left to right, they can be coded to change depending on different client needs. To add, each kanban card has important information pertaining to that respective deal. Information such as artist, artwork, price, and preset tags. Overall, with this new feature, clients can better visualize which stage each deal is at and work together to close them.
The latter end of this project included weekly, extensive QA sessions done privately by myself and then with the client team overseas. The goal of my individual QA sessions was to break what we built. As is standard procedure, I wanted to know the limits to what I designed and what the engineers made, so exaggerating actions and testing in numerous browsers were the key to a successful QA session. In the end, the deliverable was a product with much of its flaws already caught and fixed.
1. TIGHT COMMUNICATION
Throughout this project, it was vital that we kept in close contact with the client because of their location in Europe and us in North America. This made for a consistent call schedule, which benefitted QA and early strategy sessions.
2. CLEAR COMMUNICATION
Unfortunately, during the beginning of this project, there was some miscommunication with expectations, which led to extended talks and revisions to the contract. Moving forward, it's important that both sides are on the same page when it comes to deliverables.
3. QA, QA, QA!
Thanks to my extensive and frequent QA sessions, many improvements were found which led to better usability and fewer bugs.
