UX Planet — Medium | Moses Kim

The world of computer graphics hasn’t had a better time than today. Gaming industry, film production and overall technological advance took the digital art industry to the highest level ever seen and furthermore, laid the groundwork for future progress. With computer-generated art being at the top of its demand it makes perfect sense that more and more artists emerge and require a platform for their voice to be heard.

THE DISCOVERY

Our fruitful partnership with Cubebrush begins about two years ago. One of the best computer graphics artist in the industry, Marc Brunet came up with the idea to establish a versatile resource where digital artists around the world can share their work, learn from each other, get tons of helpful stuff, and monetize their passion for creative work. He created such a platform and named it Cubebrush as it remains to this day.

Haven’t posted this here yet, Impossible LOV3 ver.4

 — @bluefley

When we partnered up with Cubebrush to develop the website for them, we have already had experience and vested interest in digital art resources — we did all the development for another community, called Computer Graphics+. So it was our second shot at the creative industry and in a way, it was different. The main difference was the diversity that Cubebrush had ingrained into it.

The goal was simple — Help artists level up their art.

— Marc Brunet

Cubebrush was not supposed to be just an online store, but also a source of inspiration and a social network for everyone into digital art and illustration.

THE FORMATION

The fact that Cubebrush was affecting so many intersections with commerce, entertainment, art, and community, led us to the understanding of its User Experience concept. Marc says:

“There were obviously a number of good existing selling platforms to look at but while their back-end was solid and a great source of inspiration, their designs always felt neglected. When the designs were great it either came with a price tag or the UX was terrible. There really was no good “best of both worlds” and so we got to work!”

Even though Cubebrush had already been in the business, they hired us to build their new website, change the direction, and bring new opportunities for artists to step their game up. One thing that was clear right away was formulated into something like a slogan by Marc:

Educate artists — Help them make money

This implied that we had to make this new version of Cubebrush into a staple, leading us to the original objectives:

• Design the UI in a “shop-window” style, where artworks would actually be pieces for sale.
• Design the UX in a way that would emphasize ingenuity and accessibility of commerce, as the focal point remains the artistic content itself.

THE DRILL

The initial team included a full-time backend developer working his magic behind the curtain, a UI/UX designer and a project manager. As a team accomplished in remote collaboration and agile methodology, we were used to working with all sorts of concept delivery methods, however I admit, there was a bias…

GOING INTO VISUAL THINKING MODE

As a design-oriented digital agency, we have always been intuitively leaning towards visual thinking which is a great approach when dealing with complex and confusing information in large amounts. For example, Swyft — our long-time project that is essentially an intersection of e-commerce and automated retail business, used visual thinking techniques to perpetuate comprehension of the complicated methodology behind the project.

Once things can be put on paper, you can do them. It’s insane how simple things tend to get complicated once you try to actually structure it with a pencil, or on a wall (like we did before we started using RTB). Digression is inevitable and obvious, but also it’s a good way to map out your thoughts and locate blank spots.

With the help of visual thinking initiative and reliance on the viewing experience, rather than textual, we managed to synch up with the client and come up with a logical and reasonable implementation schedule with the objectives placed in a feasible order.

RENDERING THE CONCEPT

Okay, visual thinking does look like doodling and the form might be simplistic, but in our case with Cubebrush, we were dealing with a great CG artist, so his doodles were state-of-the-art on top of being the greatest source of cognitive info.

With the objectives clear, we dove into the design concepts using our primary visual synchronization and hand-off tool, RealtimeBoard which made perfect sense as the Cubebrush project did intend to scale horizontally both in terms of UX pathways and implications, and product menu expansion.

Having started with IA (information architecture) wireframing, we rapidly reached mutual understanding in the design direction and managed to perceive further UX design in a fast pace.

The original UI structure brought us to a more complex navigation where the smooth and intuitive flow of artwork design was starting to get compromised by a more convoluted architecture then we expected. Luckily, we did work it out and turned it into one of Cubebrush’s strong sides. Alex, Lead UI/UX Designer says:

“In terms of UX I am really proud of the versatile menu and categorization. This creates sympathy with the store from the start, a very human-centered approach.”

The fact that we established a good consecutive flow using RealtimeBoard allowed us to never miss a thing when it comes to the web application operational use. The IA wireframes on top refer to the chapter blocks in the middle and get contextual representation in the prototypes at the bottom of the whiteboard.

This saved us a ton of work on structuring the info and putting together the effort estimates which benefits us as a development workshop in terms of predictions, and our client in budget optimization.

THE VISUAL THINKING & DIGITAL PLAYGROUND COMBO

Visual thinking principle with instantaneous communication in the project, direct and clear collaboration that RealtimeBoard offers we managed to:

• Bind the variegated team with same project vision.
• Distribute responsibilities according to the layers of work discovered with visual thinking.
• Estimate the future body of work by approaching every white spot in detail.

It is specifically important for a visual UX platform to be as pleasant in delivering the artistic content as the art itself. The computer graphics artists community is uniquely close and consolidated, so providing a perfect scene for them is what we inherently aimed for with our inclination towards visual thinking and prototyping.

TECHNICAL EXECUTION

As we moved along the project development timeline, it became perfectly clear that the growth of Cubebrush depends directly on the success of the artists and contributors involved with it. Marc wanted to reinvent his online forums and turn them back into a hotspot where digital artists could hang out without being affected by the avalanche of distracting content you get on social media.

So forums it is. We suggested to use Discourse, the “next-gen forum engine” as our integrated forums backbone for many reasons, one of them being it’s build on Ruby on Rails, the same framework we used for Cubebrush. So a perfect backend integration was a matter of time. In terms of the forum UX, i think we nailed it, it is clean and engaging, intuitive, and plain beautiful. This is what the forums design iterations board looked like:

THE AFTERMATH

Our ongoing work with Cubebrush was a game changer in a lot of ways. Things we were able to accomplish laid the basis for some of our future projects, like the Discourse integration. It’s a feather in our cap and we’ve been using it ever since.

The collaboration skills were upped tremendously, partly because of the personal relationship we established with Marc, and partly because of the great media that RealtimeBoard turned out to be. There is no better tool to iterate UX design concepts, exchange visual opinions, and keep introducing new members to the project without losing one bit of it.

This project keeps bringing new challenges with every sprint and feature we are working on. Building an experience for artists is a complicated and interesting task that requires different thinking. For us, this was visual thinking — something we mastered along the way. As a development-heavy team, concentrated on performance, visual appeal #1 priority was the new and uncharted territory and I think we can amount to it. Today, we are building a new-level mobile experience for Cubebrush and have a lot more coming.

If you are anywhere near digital art, 3D-modelling, graphic design and illustration, concept art, texturing, UV mapping, and so on, come check out our friends at Cubebrush.co and support them.

As I said before, the results we’ve achieved after we induced our project management with RealtimeBoard, were staggering. We highly recommend using RTB on all stages of UI and UX design process, as it helps immensely improve things (or at least wrap your head around what you are getting yourself into) with your project endeavor.

Designing Visual UX For Artists was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.