InkMarket’s vision for this project was to redesign their entire website with users in mind as well as a fresh UI design. At the time, InkMarket was functional but had not launched yet. The company aimed to iron out all the pain points in the process of creating an account, navigating a market, and collecting NFTs.
UX designer with a focus on research and prototyping. I had a hand in every part of the process but was responsible for tackling the entire prototyping process on my own.
3 week sprint
Competitive Analysis | User Interviews
Affinity Mapping | User Personas
User Flows | Wireframing
Prototyping | Usability Tests
Figma | Miro | Adobe Illustrator | G Suite
InkMarket is a platform for tattoo artists and collectors to buy, sell, and trade their tattoo flash. For each piece of flash, InkMarket mints a unique NFT, as a keepsake and certificate of authenticity. InkMarket aims to provide tattoo artists with an alternate source of income besides their hourly rate for tattooing while simultaneously providing tattoo clients a new platform to draw inspiration for tattoos from.
After COVID, a lot of tattoo artists find that they are booked months or years in advance and the constant work has revealed some problems with the conventional way they make money. Often a client describes a design that they want and the artist spends potentially hours drawing it without compensation. They only get paid a small deposit and then their usually hourly rate.
Because of this conventional process, tattoo clients also don’t know what their tattoos are going to look like until they show up to get it done and see what the artist designed.
A new tattoo flash marketplace backed by NFTs could help solve both of these problems while also generating revenue for all parties involved. But how do we make something like this?
We started by doing some competitive analysis. Since NFTs are an emerging technology, there were many brand new marketplaces out there. However, we had to be careful. A lot of platforms are simply cash grabs and discerning between those and the legitimate projects was extremely important. Also, being so new, most of our direct competitors selling tattoo NFTs had not launched yet, so we had to look much more closely at our indirect competitors. Here is a summary of the most common features we found and how InkMarket compares:
We conducted a series of interviews with tattoo artists, tattoo clients, and NFT collectors. Our platform is such a new, uncommon crossroad of crypto and tattoos, which meant that the user base is mostly unknown. We interviewed these individuals with the intention of learning about what tattoo clients and tattoo artists would want from a service like this, as well as what an NFT collector would come to expect from a marketplace like this. We took all the information we got from those interviews and split it up into statements and quotes before putting them on sticky note and grouping them in order to find trends and insights.
There are three specific users that would most commonly use the site. Tattoo artists who sell their art, tattoo clients who look to buy the NFTs with the intention of getting them tattooed, and NFT collectors who are make investments in the crypto space and are looking for trustworthy, reputable, legitimate projects to invest in. Based on our data, we compiled three personas shown below.
We have three main problem statements that we drew from the data.
Tattoo artists need a convenient way to showcase their artwork in order to facilitate an environment that allows them to overcome the current limitations placed upon them. The limitations that artists face have not allowed them to be fairly compensated for their work. In addition, their current environment has restricted their ability to properly display their creations.
Tattoo clients need an easy, time-efficient way to research and decide on a tattoo because the current process lacks complete transparency between them and tattoo artists. The current process often leaves tattoo clients feeling frustrated and uncertain of their decisions.
Lastly, there is a problem with the crypto space in general. There is a huge barrier to entry for companies like InkMarket of getting customers to buy into crypto and NFTs as a whole. There is a lot of controversy surrounding NFTs with their environmental impact. NFTs can also be used to steal other artist’s work and make money without their consent.
Our marketplace will be a solution to the tattoo client and tattoo artist’s problems. It will give users the ability to post their work for extra income, connect clients with artists, and allow clients to see their tattoo flash before committing to the tattoo.
The NFT problem above requires a much more abstract solution though. We drew from the data all the difficulties and pain points associated with NFTs and decided to design our platform with these four pillars at the forefront.
By designing an intuitive, trustworthy, professional, and informative website, we could help dissolve the barrier to entry for new crypto users and build enough trust with crypto savvy users to create a service that everyone will be comfortable using.
To add to our research, we ran a design audit on the existing website. Using the Nielson Norman Groups 10 usability hueristics for user interface design, we examined all aspects of the current website to find places to improve. Ultimately we found that the website failed in these places:
Error Prevention
There was no way for users to recover accounts, change passwords, or reset passwords. There were also no confirmations when users performed important actions such as purchasing.
User Control and Freedom
There were no cancel buttons in critical parts of the site. The user also didn’t have a way to exit from certain flows such as the sign up flow without having to restart the whole process.
We also put the original site in front of 6 potential users and had them complete tasks. In a follow up interview we learned the following:
None of the users felt comfortable enough with the site to sign up and make an account.
None of the users felt like the site would keep their info safe.
On average, it took users 32 seconds to understand the company’s value proposition. This is three times the average bounce rate of a website.
These takeaways gave us a lot of metrics that we could directly reference when looking to improve the site.
Original Site Below:
It was important to us to iterate constantly as we developed. Since we were pioneering a new marketplace without much precedent to draw from, we needed to be sure users would be able to understand the terms we use and how to navigate the site. It’s much easier to do the testing early and make changes in lower fidelity, so we did it in steps and iterated from feedback as we went.
Given that there are going to be people using this site with many levels of familiarity with crypto and NFTs, we wanted to make sure everyone is accounted for without slowing down the users who knew what they were doing. For example, some users have a lot to learn about crypto. We translated this into in-line help bubbles that aim to answer the most common, immediate questions without having to go to a help page or slowing down familiar users. The crypto savvy users don’t trust small crypto projects/companies. We created an about page to allow those users to learn more about the project as a whole as well as meet the team. With photos and small bios about the founding members, the website will come across as trustworthy. These design decisions and many others based on our research created a platform that is accessible to all users.
We were a little constrained in the visual department because if we made the design of the site bright and distracting, we may take the user’s attention away from the NFTs that are on sale. However, we need to have enough visual interest to make the site appear professional and trustworthy so as not to scare away the crypto savvy users. We settled on a style guide that used a soft cream color and an off black combined with some simple tattoo flash art on appropriate pages. It made for a clean, fun, and trustworthy visual experience that should satisfy all users.
After a lot of design and iteration, we ended up with a final, high fidelity prototype created in Figma that is meant to demonstrate a desktop experience. Our data with crypto savvy individuals made it very clear that most people will use this site on a computer; this is especially true because crypto wallets have not really caught on in app form on mobile. I made the entire prototype myself with contributions for styling and small changes based on feedback from usability tests from teammates. The prototype includes all of the functionality of the website, which becomes available to you after you finish signing up. I invite you to click through it or view it below in a video demonstration.
Although the original website was essentially just a placeholder, we have numbers and impressions from our user tests. Once the new site goes live, we will run those same tests again to see if there is an improvement in how the users perceive the site.
Ultimately though, our client was blown away by the prototype we produced and research that we conducted. Please check out InkMarket in early 2022 to see our designs live!
