Mobile-first digital drawing platform
Role: End-to-end UX / UI Designer
OVERVIEW
Sketchify is a digital platform for individuals of all skill levels who want to hone their drawing abilities. This platform gives users the opportunity to brush up on drawing fundamentals, build practice routines, and get feedback on their work – all in a friendly, supportive environment.
Problem:
Formal drawing classes are expensive and inconvenient, while drawing books / videos are force people to learn in a vaccuum. In essence: Most avenues for learning how to draw lack the consistency, interactivity, and convenience that new learners need to feel engaged in their learning process.
Solution:
A platform that allows users who are interested in drawing as a hobby to approach learning on their terms – with low barriers to entry, flexible routines, and the opportunity to share an often-solitary pursuit with fellow budding artists.
RESEARCH
Preliminary research, in the form of a Competitor Analysis and a series of User Interviews, provided a number of key insights into the scope of the problem as well as the opportunities to solve it.
Competitor Analysis:
High-level view of several big names in eLearning, including SkillShare, LinkedIn Learning, and DuoLingo was helpful in establishing the pros and cons of their respective approaches to course structure, interactivity, and pacing, ultimately informing how a new product could set itself apart from available products in the creative e-Learning industry.
User Interviews:
I approached these interviews with four main objectives in mind:
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Learn why people want to learn how to draw in the first place and what they expect from their experience.
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Understand what motivates people to continue with (vs lose interest in) a new hobby or skill.
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Understand the impact of pacing or teaching style on user confidence and engagement.
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Learn how much free time an average user needs to feel connected to a new hobby or skill.
I conducted my 1-on-1 interviews (three in person, one remote). While my participants varied in their relationship to drawing (some actively practiced, some had tried in the past and abandoned it), each had a history of periodically taking on new skills and hobbies either for work or for fun.
Based on my interview data, I found four key factors that could make or break a subjects’ experience with a new skill or hobby:
Measuring Progress:
A tangible sense of momentum inspires confidence and perseverance in pursuing a new skill. Subjects feel encouraged to continue press on through difficulty or frustration when they can point to the milestones they’ve reached.
Community:
Purely-individual learning can be isolating. Subjects felt that the ability to share experiences with a friend or seek encouragement from peers helped them feel rewarded for their efforts.
Attitudes Toward Feedback:
Though essential to improvement, feedback can feel daunting. Each subject indicated a willingness to seek out and accept feedback – provided that it was balanced, actionable, and came from a source they could trust.
Time Management:
Though wary of scheduling-away their free time or being trapped in a rigid schedule, subjects agreed they feel most confident and committed to a pursuit when they engage with it on a routine basis.
Personas:
These insights became the basis for my user personas. While I initially created three (a casual user, a hobbyist, and an artist) I realized that this broad target would stretch the final product too thin. After reviewing interview and competitor data, I surmised that the highly-skilled, dedicated individuals would likely feel comfortable spending the time and money on formalized drawing courses, or already have a practice routine.
Therefore, the target users from my two final personas would be those with a more casual outlook. My challenge as a designer was to create a product that could engage this less-dedicated group, and encourage them to see the value in continued learning and practice.
Example Persona: "Curious Dabbler"
"How do you define success at a new skill?"
"When does a hobby become a chore?"
"How do you feel when sharing your work?"
Affinity Map based on User Interviews
PROJECT SCOPE
Prior to the user-interviews, the primary focus of the platform was going to be a linear drawing fundamentals course with lessons and assignments. Based on the research insights — and with the understanding that my more casual target users would need additional features in order to feel engaged — I shifted my focus for the remainder of the project to crafting additional features that would supplement the course and address the user pain-points.
I began this process by reworking my four key insights into HMW questions:
Time Management:
How might we encourage users to engage with their learning exercises on a consistent basis without inviting the stress of "scheduling-away" their free time?
Community:
How might we give users the opportunity to turn their drawing pursuit into a shared social experience?
Attitudes Toward Feedback:
How might we incorporate critique in a way that feels empowering rather than daunting for users who are self-conscious about their skill?
Measuring Progress:
How might we allow users to measure their drawing progress in a way that reflects and rewards their efforts?
Ideation:
These statements, in turn, became the basis for brainstorming and feature roadmapping. Based on feasibility and potential impact, four features were chosen to move forward into the design phase.
Daily Challenges:
A variety of unique, self-contained drawing challenges, updated on a regular basis. Timed to 5, 15, or 30 minutes, these challenges present users with a means to engage with drawing in on a regular basis and build routines without the pressure of a formal schedule.
Streaks/Stats:
A home-page modal where users can view their progress through the fundamentals course and track the number and variety of challenges they’ve completed. A “streak” marker shows how many daily challenges have been completed in a row, encouraging users to consistently engage with the platform.
Crit Requests:
A feature where users can seek critique on their work when they have questions or encounter difficulty. Users upload a work-in-progress, along with a brief description of their issues / questions. This request is then forwarded to a body of vetted user Crit-Givers who can review the drawing, leave annotations, and message back-and-forth with the artist to offer guidance and help them improve.
Community Library:
A collection of user submissions from each daily challenge. Each user who completes a challenge and uploads their submission has can share their work their peers in a digital gallery. This feature affords users with an opportunity to feel connected to their fellow users and get inspired by their work.
Because interviewees were wary of social media's sense of competition, users cannot comment or see a “likes” total on any submission; rather, they may “Save” any posts they found interesting.
Full feature roadmap, displaying all feature concepts prior to narrowing of project scope
DESIGN
I created 2 user flows based on common tasks a user would perform on the platform:
With these flows in mind, I began mapping the features out in mobile-first wireframes, first in basic sketches, then in medium-fidelity mockups in Figma – the latter of which was immensely helpful in understanding space limitations, visual hierarchy, and the number of unique components that would need to be designed once the branding guidlines had been established.
Challenge / Community Library:
Lo-fi sketches
The Challenge flow was difficult because, being that the drawing is done on paper (vs. in-platform) I didn't have many points of reference from existing products on which to base my design. I knew the bare necessities would be a prompt, a timer (large enough to glance at while focused on drawing), and standard image-upload modals. At the med-fi stage, after writing an unintentionally-confusing placeholder prompt, I realized a "Show Example" button would help users who wanted more clarity.
Connecting the Community Library to Challenges was intended to give users a unique and inspiring reward for their efforts. For familiarity's sake, the structure of the full library and individual-post screens were modeled on Instagram's Explore tab, the main differences being 1. that the given challenge prompt would be pinned to the top for user reference, and 2. the individual-posts would only allow "Saving" a post, rather than liking, commenting, or following.
Medium Fidelity wireframes
Requesting / Interacting with Crit:
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Request
Interact
Crits, as well as fellow users posts and other community features, are accessible through a page called the "Artist Hub". The structure of the Crit flow was inspired by 1. the platforms I'd used in college for submitting assignments online, as well as 2. my own experience giving / receiving Crits at in-person drawing classes. From the first, I knew I needed upload modals, an interface for comments, and prominent notifications. From the second, I knew that crits work best when the artist offers context on what they were "going for" as well as the specific issues they're having. Given the visual medium, being able to place annotations on the image itself makes the feedback much clearer. Lastly, users can upload multiple drafts to make sure the feedback was implemented correctly.
Crit Request flow
Interaction / Reviewing Crit flow
Branding:
One common interviewee pain-point in previous eLearning was the sense that the overly-cutesy, tone of brands like DuoLingo felt condescending, or gave false expectations of ease, leading to frustration.
This balance is reflected well in the branding of the New York Times Games app, which became a source of inspiration.
In light of this, I decided to orient the Sketchify brand around the principle that drawing is a discipline where challenge and fun go hand-in-hand, and good-natured support is never far away.
Whether they think of themselves as artists or not, nearly everyone has doodled at some point with what materials they have on-hand.
NYT Crossword Illustration
The final color palette was chosen to subtly evoke the household drawing implements with which users would be familiar: the dark blue of standard pen ink, the light blue of notebook paper lines, and the pink pop of a standard eraser.
Humanist fonts such as IvyPresto and Figtree – clean and legible, yet with slightly rounded edges that give them with a dash of playful personality – reinforced this balance of discipline and casual enjoyment.
Moving to High-Fidelity:
With branding solidified, I implemented this visual language into components and revised my existing mockups into high-fidelity wireframes.
High-fidelity screens including the Home page and selects from the Challenge, Community Library, and Crit flows (requesting and interacting).
TESTING
With the wireframes complete, I built working prototypes of several common tasks for usability testing.
I conducted my tests with four subjects via screenshare, observing their interactions and taking notes on any thoughts and questions they expressed as they proceeded through four tasks:
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Completing a Featured Challenge
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Saving another user’s post from the Community Library
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Requesting a Crit on a draft drawing
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Interacting with a Crit-Giver who had responded to their Request
Flow 1 - Challenge
Flow 2 - Community Library
Flow 4 - Interacting with Crit
Flow 3 - Submitting Crit Request
With regard to usability, were able to quickly navigate and complete each task, which reinforced to me that the platform's interface was mechanically sound. Subjects praised each feature – especially Crits – as “helpful”, “cool”, or “fun”, and it was rewarding to see my interview insights validated so clearly.
In my post-test debrief with subjects, the most commonly-voiced issues were:
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Reluctance to upload their challenge submissions to a public gallery (mandatory at the time of testing)
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Lack of clarity regarding Crit-Givers (i.e. who they were / how they were vetted), and
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Expectation of more positive feedback for completing a Challenge
REVISIONS & IMPLEMENTATION
Reluctance to Upload to Library:
I realized I'd neglected an aspect of my interviewees’ attitudes toward social sharing: that the pressure to share work can be worrying, but the option to share can be validating. I addressed this by reworking the Challenge flow, making it possible to submit privately, while still making the option to share work – crucial for building community – prominent and inviting. At the same time, some subjects were surprised that they weren't able to comment on Community Library posts from other users (see Next Steps for more on this).
Lack of Clarity on Crit-Givers:
In focusing on the feature’s design and usability, I hadn’t fully considered the structure in which Crit-Givers would fit, a fact reflected in the vague copy I’d written for that flow. I took several steps to address this:
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Mapping out a process for becoming a Crit-Giver (users who complete the Drawing Course send a brief application and get approved by administrators)
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Rewriting the copy in the Request Crit flow for clarity
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Including a “Become a Crit-Giver” section below the Request Crit button to make it clear that said individuals are fellow users who opt into a vetting process
Revised copy and content sections from home page, Artist Hub, and Challenge submission screen
Positive Feedback & Rewarding Interaction:
Lastly, in order to deliver on the brand promise of encouraging routine and rewarding user efforts, I tweaked the Challenge flow – incorporating new visuals and copy to make the “Congratulations” page more exuberant. I also created a post-submission pop-up modal which displays a brief breakdown of the their challenge streak and other statistics to give them a more tangible sense of their progress. The design was largely inspired by similar pop-ups that appear in various NYT Games.
Screenshots of stats modal and Congratulations screen
NEXT STEPS
To incentivize continued practice, engagement, and use of the platform’s features, future iterations of this platform will incorporate achievements and badges for anything from an X-Day Challenge Streak, or Completing a Course Lesson, or Submitting a user’s first Crit-Request.
Some test subjects expressed an interest in having the chance to “like” and comment on public Community Library posts. The interview data isn’t fully clear on this point, as there seemed to be an equal wariness towards the kind of competition and self-consciousness that these social media staples can create. In light of this I plan to interview more subjects – specifically those engaged in creative pursuits – to determine the pros and cons of introducing these elements.
With the base product largely solidified, I plan to turn to a more comprehensive mapping out of additional features that would be available through a “Premium” Sketchify subscription, taking note of requests expressed by users during testing – for instance, the opportunity to schedule a one-on-one Live Crit session with a vetted drawing expert, being able to view top-performing user posts, or access to a wider variety of Challenges.
Lastly, in light of subjects criticism of somewhat-vague processes (specifically how Crit Requests are fielded and how Challenges connect to the community library), I will formulate and beta-test a comprehensive onboarding flow which, following account creation, would help new users better know what to expect from these more complex features.
Mockups of possible new features (Live Crits & Top Posts)
LEARNINGS & OPPORTUNITIES
Reflecting on this project, there are a number of things I would have done differently. First, I would have expanded the scope of my Competitor Analysis to include existing apps and platforms with a specific focus on learning how to draw.
Second, I would have liked to interview more subjects who had prior experiences with drawing specifically, as their views might differ when it comes to general skills vs more "creative" ones. While I was ultimately satisfied with the overall appearance of the platform, if I had more time, I would have dedicated more energy to sourcing or designing illustrations and other visual elements to reinforce Sketchify's playful personality. I learned that impersonal or abstract interview questions (i.e. "rate your experience on a scale of 1-5") tend to prompt unhelpful answers. Reframing these questions (i.e. "was there anything about the interface that you weren't expecting?") gave subjects space to open up and articulate their thoughts.
This project reinforced to me the importance of adaptability in design. Sketchify became a better product when I listened to the user, and made the pivot from a focus on the Drawing Fundamentals Course to formulating, and ultimately prioritizing, the extra features that would bring the user the most engaging experience.
Finally, my research into what motivates or frustrates individuals when learning a skill or working on a hobby helped me structure this platform, but the insights gathered there (regarding feedback, routine, progress-markers, etc.) are widely applicable in the world of UX design, and I plan to incorporate this understanding into future projects.