New app feature

Currently being built at ARTERNAL.

Background

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.

A pipeline feature akin to Salesforce and Pipedrive was requested a few times by clients, but was never top priority to build until last fall. With the implementation of this amazing new feature, our users would be able to track any sort of deal surrounding an artwork with ease. Having each deal displayed as its own 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.

Tasks

• Extensively researched the market including top competitors.
• Designed with migration of information in mind.
• Consulted and strategized with the client in order to build an MVP for their operations.
• Iterated on multiple rounds of critique from both the Arternal team and client team.
• Ran detailed QA sessions with both the Arternal team and client team to ensure product was flawless and ready for launch.

Research & Inspiration

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, 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.

Track progress to the finish line

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.

Transforming data into design

The client had a lot of data to migrate over. Their workflow before using Arternal was scattered, as they used multiple separate programs to do the bulk of their work. And so during the research phase of this project, all that data had to be collected, considered, and placed into a centralized design system.

As a 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.

Extensive QA

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.

Valuable lessons learned

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
Thanks to my extensive and frequent QA sessions, many improvements were found which led to better usability and fewer bugs.