Timeline
4 Months
Platform
Web
Team
Freelance (solo)
My Role
UX Research, Development
Overview
Improving the online artwork shopping experience
Outcome
Stronger customer engagement
To measure the success of the redesigned website, I evaluated customer engagement rates, which reflect whether customers complete their shopping and return to the site after a positive experience.
Increase
20%
Artwork Inquiries
Increase
20%
Booking Appointments
Increase
30%
Returning Website Customers
Solutions
From wandering to spotting the right piece
Filter artworks
With thousands of artworks available, it's crucial to help customers find what they’re looking for efficiently. The filter allows customers to refine artworks by various categories, such as artist, date, medium, and size, streamlining the discovery process.
Explore related artworks
Exhibitions group artworks by theme so customers can understand the context more easily and discover pieces that relate to each other without effort.
To bring this benefit online, I connected the artwork and exhibition pages. Customers can move between them with ease, which helps them browse related pieces naturally and quickly.
Book appointments online
By allowing customers to book appointments online directly on the artwork page, I streamlined the shopping experience by removing friction such as making phone calls or sending emails to arrange their gallery visit.
Mobile friendly website
I created a responsive website design that adapts to different screen sizes. This ensures customers can easily browse and shop for artwork on their phones without needing to zoom or deal with layout issues.
Research
Auditing the old website
To understand the artwork shopping experience, I audited the old website and defined three main problems.
1. Inefficient artwork browsing
Customers often search for artwork by specific categories such as artist, medium, year, or size.
However, the old website lacked a filtering system, forcing them to browse artworks one by one, making it difficult and time-consuming to find what they wanted.
2. Manual appointment booking
Since the gallery doesn't sell artwork directly online, customers need to book appointments to view and purchase pieces in person. The appointment process relied on calls or emails, often resulting in missed calls, delayed responses, and scheduling conflicts.
3. Poor mobile experience
About 40% of visitors used mobile devices, yet the layout, text sizing, and navigation weren’t optimized. This made navigation difficult, leading to a customer leaving the website.
After auditing the site, I realized that the artwork shopping process involved too many steps, causing customers to spend more time than needed. To streamline this, I focused on two areas.
01
How might we improve artwork discovery for customers?
02
How might we simplify the process of scheduling a visit?
Ideation
When filters became too many…
We finalized ten filters in total, and displaying all of them at once felt too lengthy. To organize them, I conducted a paper-sorting exercise with the gallery team to prioritize the options. Each team member ranked the filters from most to least important.
Based on this input, I categorized the filters into two groups
Primary filters: The six most important options, displayed in an expanded state
Secondary filters: The remaining options, tucked into a dropdown to reduce visual clutter
This structure makes using the filters more approachable and less overwhelming, allowing customers to explore filters in smaller, manageable chunks.
Development
Build, review, and update
After building the website framework, I worked with the gallery team in review sessions using the real artwork collection to test usability. Through this process, I refined the design to ensure the site could present artworks across all price ranges and categories.
Team's Feedback
“Can we make the filters more visible?"
Initial Design: Side Drawer Filters
What i learned
Learning from stakeholders
Working closely with the gallery team was key to this project, as I was initially unfamiliar with the art industry. Their insights helped me understand their customers and how the artwork shop works, which guided the layout and informed my design decisions.
