Design by: Michael Bush

Student Project. General Assembly UXDI Winter 2013

Letterpress RallyA community for letterpress print artisans and enthusiasts alike

About the Product:

Letterpress Rally is a bespoke community iOS app for letterpress print artisans and anyone who loves their work. It allows artists to show off their creations, get plugged into local events they’ll love, and put their prints up for sale.

About the Project:

Letterpress Rally is meant to help the small community of letterpress print enthusiasts to connect with others who share their specific interest. It was developed specifically for Zoe Fisher, who loves to collect prints and attend workshops and connect with other artists.

https://popapp.in/projects/528d44f06fa13fde09000187/preview

home screen event screen add to bag

Letterpress Rally

DESIGN RESEARCH

Method: I spoke in depth with Zoe Fisher to explore what she does throughout the day and try to map some of the most important things to her. Through this I identified her needs, both general and specific to her online shopping behavior.

Findings: Through the interviews, I discovered that Zoe really values her creative outlets in life and the experiences where she gets to make connections with other creative types. Letterpress printing is one of the main contexts in which she seeks these things out. She has a hobby of purchasing prints and likes to find workshops related to the craft.

She is also very sensitive to her own well-being, placing special emphasis on exercising as well as purchasing local, organic foods from the farmer’s market as much as she can.

Opportunities Identified: From the conversation, she seemed really anxious to find more experiences like the letterpress printing workshops she had attended and to see and purchase works from artists nearby. She already enjoys shopping on Etsy, but could likely benefit from an application that could be more focused and would allow her to connect to a nearby community of artisans.

In terms of local, organic foods, she admitted that she would often need to supplement her farmer’s market purchases with normal grocery trips. Ideally she would not need to do this, and so I suspected that she might benefit from an application that would let her instead supplement her farmer’s market purchases with online purchases from local producers.

DESIGN ITERATION | DESIGN HYPOTHESIS

ITERATION 1

Method: I started by suggesting an application that would allow Zoe to explore local foods in addition to the general local arts and crafts scene. I provided Zoe with a variety of paper cut-out features and asked her to arrange them in a way she thought would be most compelling.

Findings: Zoe focused on building an events page that would ideally feature large images and would inform her of workshops and classes being held nearby. Additionally, she wanted to have a constant navigation at the bottom to allow for exploration of events, items to purchase and the people in the app’s community.

After I drew up an initial concept based on her ideas, she admitted that the food part of the app was not as interesting to her.

Opportunities Identified: Given her lack of interest in the local foods part of the app, and also the focused nature of her interest in letterpress prints, I thought it would be great to narrow the focus to just the community of letterpress print enthusiasts. Her response: “Yes, I really want that. I would definitely use it.”

DESIGN ITERATIONS | PROTOTYPE

SAMPLE

Method: I created a new version of the mobile app as a prototype in POP based on hand-drawings. This prototype focused on the happy path from the very first contact to the completion of a print purchase. I completed incremental iterations after testing each time with five different people.

SET UP AND FIRST RUNFirst time experience - seeing an intro to the app - checking out local print-makers’ works - completing a purchase

Core Product ExperienceUploading your workSeeing the work of other print-makers both locally and globally popularSeeing local and global eventsA marketplace to buy and sell prints

THANK YOUMichael Bushmichael!ush@gmail.com