Introduction

Motivation and Goal

InterArt is a platform where artists can share their unfinished artwork and get feedback and inspiration from others. The goal of InterArt is to take advantage of collaboration of the crowd on a piece of art to define further direction for the piece in a novel way. Furthermore, we are targeting amateur artists/designers with hopes of giving them different stylistic directions to take on their artwork based on the feedback they receive.

Driving Question and Hypothesis

The initial question is whether or not artists are willing to collaborate with other artists in the process of creation. If not, are designers better suited for the platform since the process of design and the type of required feedback are well-defined and is out of the artistic black box? Next, we want to figure out what is the best way to motivate collaboration. Do artists/designers feel comfortable with having their creation upvoted? Besides our two main questions, we have other questions such as the prefered method of directly editing the artwork on the interface (via basic built-in drawing tools), the use of public news feed vs. private to a small circle of friends, etc. The detailed list of questions are available in the study design section. Our hypothesis is that artists would use this website because a variety of styles coming from a community of artists can inspire new directions, and an upvoting system would encourage artists to provide the best feedback as a means of improving their credibility as an artist.

Methods

Study design

First, InterArt is introduced to the users, describing to them the website’s functionality and its purpose. Then, users are asked to do two tasks which represent the core functionalities of InterArt. Finally, the following questions are asked from the users.

Description: InterArt is a website that let’s you upload your unfinished artwork to get feedback inspiration from a community of other artists and designers. They can contribute to feedback by drawing directly on the artwork as well as giving comments to help give you ideas about new stylistic directions you may want to take. The original poster can see the comments from people and upload new versions as their artwork progresses.

Task 1:

Upload a developing artwork to the website
Give feedback by adding comments and/or drawing directly on the artwork
Upload an updated version of your artwork, having seen feedback from others

Task 2:

Browse the news feed

We asked the following questions during the study:

How do you feel about it?
What do like best about it?
What do you want to change about it?
What is your process for making art? Tell me about a recent art that you made.
Where do you find inspiration? Do you get stuck? How do you solve it?
Have you ever collaborated on art/design?
Is this enough collaboration? Do you need specific comments on each pic?
Would users use photoshop to edit the artwork or prefer to a simple built-in drawing tool?
When would you find this useful and why?
Are people willing to give comments?
Do people like to have friendlists? Being able to share to certain friends? Should everything be public?
What do people think about branching (showing all versions branching out from the original design in the form of a tree graph)?

Also, we asked the users to answer the following survey after the study:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1C5Hr8Y7Pwu7s0f2yRm910tsIVyOj07YKnWa1dLzADfs/viewform?usp=send_form

Users

We’ve gathered six users proficient in the space of art and design. One of the artists is an art teacher who is willing to let us run user testings with her students if we decide to follow the art direction. All other users are our friends who are majoring in HCI.

Results

During the user studies we realised realised that some essential features to InterArt were missing. Users mentioned needing a categorization for the pieces instead of a tag based search. They suggested having a profile with a link to the portfolio. They also mentioned that an upvoting system would help them get motivated and evaluate the credibility of the feedback they receive. Also, the users got overwhelmed about the exact type of feedback that they should have given on the images.

Most of the users mentioned that they reach out for feedback if they have immediate resources to give them feedback. 1 user mentioned that she didn’t like uploading her unfinished piece of art because she thought art needed to be complete to convey its message.

Most of the users liked the feature of directly drawing on the uploaded sketches. However, one user mentioned that drawing on a painting with a single color is called redlining and probably cannot be used for inspiring the artist.

One of the said: “ the important part of InterArt is to motivate the users to give feedback and the right feedback. It is hard to ask questions in art. it is harder to give feedback in art because things are not as well defined as design.”

Users mostly liked the idea of keeping versions of their work. They mentioned that it is not something that they would do on their own.

We faced 2 main usability issues. 2 users could not immediately figure out that they had to click on the images to give feedback. 1 user wanted to erase her lines on the sketches but she couldn’t.

Survey results

Here is the survey results:

Scale of Answers: 1 (not likely) - 10 (extremely likely)

Average

Std. Dev.

1. Using InterArt for receiving feedback on art

2.3

2. Using InterArt for receiving feedback on design

2.9

3. Using the feature of drawing directly on the drawings/designs

3.5

4. Uploading the piece of art/design to a public news feed

1.4

The scale of directing InterArt as a platform for artists vs. designers was pretty balanced: 3 users were pro-artist, 3 were pro-designer, and 1 was undecided. As a result we decided to list the pros and cons of each in a table and decided based on that. The table can be viewed in the discussion section.

Based on the survey results, we decided to keep the public newsfeed. Also, we decided to make the drawing feature optional because of the high standard deviation of question 3.

Discussion

Based on the features of art and design listed in the following table, we decided to follow the art direction. Design direction might be easier to implement since design has well defined steps and clear type of feedback. However, the art direction seems more novel since there has been less work in this area.

ART
There’s more potential for diversity in feedback which may ignite interesting directions
Could have more social interactions because each style has different potential which spurs more discussion/conversation
Stronger sense of community between artists
More novel, as there are many existing platforms for design
DESIGN
Has a specific problem to solve, it’s easier to ask a question and get answers
Art is more abstract and personal so useful/constructive feedback might be art to obtain
Clearer direction on how to get feedback because design has a purpose
Art doesn’t take form unless it’s finished

In order to capture the true user experience of InterArt, we need to monitor users for a few days while they are drawing. As a result, we have decided to run our future user studies with a few artists and ask them to upload different versions of their piece of art in InterArt.

Implications

We listed the features that are essential to be added to InterArt based on the study results. The list is ordered from most important to least important. We are planning to implement or modify the first 5 features for the next milestone and the rest for the second development milestone.

Categorization of searches: categorizing pieces of art and showing different categories on the newsfeed.
Description/context/specific questions on what type of feedback the artist who uploads the work is looking for.
Upvoting system for pieces of art as well as comments.
Adding a more complex drawing tool, having eraser and more colors etc. for editing and adding to the pieces of art.
Adding a page for users’ profile including artists’ name, email, and link to portfolio.
Having an option to link to other pieces of art instead of giving feedback. Viewing other professional pieces of art is an important step in artists’ learning process.
Adding a carousel of art versions.
Adding Friend lists and being able to ask a circle of friends for feedback
Adding some kind of “how it works/learn more” page.
Layering versions on top of each other transparently
Add comments directly on the painting not in the input box below it.