Tattoo Artist Tool
How User-Centered Design helped us craft a task-managing tool for tattoo artists.
Tattoo artists lead busy lives.
Between meeting with clients, updating social media, and booking appointments tattoo artists struggle to find time to pursue their creative passions.
With Tattoo Artist Tool (TAT), tattoo artists can manage their tasks to maximize their free time.
Paving the User-Centered Path
My team’s admiration toward tattoo artists’ careers motivated our investigation into the work lives of tattoo artists around Seattle. In just 10 weeks we designed TAT to diminish the daily frustrations of tattoo artists.
We carried out this problem-solving in three main phases: Research, Design, and Prototype.
Empathizing with Toby
After interviewing 4 Seattle tattoo artists and observing 1 local tattoo shop, our team crafted Toby: our ideal user. We used Toby as a reference when making design decisions and to maintain empathy in the process. We found that those tattoo artists:
Desire a way to manage tasks
Crave creativity
Use social media for professional development
Then we crafted a user journey map to detail what a normal workday may look like for Toby. With this map, we could better understand certain pain points identified during the interviews and observations.
Making Difficult Design Decisions
From our user research, our team drafted design requirements that detail elements and goals that we wished to accomplish in designing TAT.
Provide a way for artists to balance work and life
Facilitate communication between artists and clients
Enable artists to manipulate their work schedule
Allow artists to view urgent emails from clients
Visualize artists’ engagement on social media platforms
Keeping our design decisions in mind, we created storyboards to highlight the scenarios in which tattoo artists may use certain portions of the application.
We constructed an information architecture diagram to clearly lay out the functionality of the application. By doing this, we could fully comprehend the decision points made at each page and TAT’s hierarchy of information.
Crafting TAT
Applying our information architecture and user research, we made a paper prototype of TAT. We created a paper prototype to generate honest, genuine feedback during our usability testing.
Employing our paper prototype, our team held user evaluations to test its functionality. Our participants completed 3 tasks and relayed frustrations that would aid in our prototype iterations.
We implemented the advice we received during the user evaluations in producing our TAT wireframes. By creating a thorough wireframe, we could grasp each feature of TAT and make more informed decisions of what we wanted to include for our high fidelity prototype.
Adopting our wireframe as a reference, we were able to generate our high fidelity prototype. This prototype represents the cumulation of research and critiques we received throughout this project. It exhibits each main features of the application and employs both visual and functional elements of the system.
Growing in User-Centered Design
Considering that my team only had 10 weeks to complete this project, we could not spend as much time on each step of the UCD process as we might have preferred. Ideally, we would have done more thorough user research and had more time to develop a problem statement that would resonate with tattoo artists. Our user group consists of people with a variety of experiences with vast opinions on how they proceed with their work. This made it hard to narrow down specific goals or features that would be beneficial to the work lives of tattoo artists. Though we were able to persevere and develop the features of TAT based on the data we collected.
Despite the time shortages that were present in this process, our team managed to meet frequently to complete each deliverable. We all put tremendous thought into every aspect of the project and, as a result, grew together as a team. Each team member worked tirelessly to make TAT what it became and we are prepared to undertake collaborative roles in future projects!
