Concept for a tattoo finder app

Overview

Getting a tattoo can be an incredibly personal experience... and sometimes you might not remember it happening at all. How might it be possible to facilitate this journey? During my UX Immersion course with Career Foundry, I created a concept for Blott, an app that helps people to find tattoo inspiration and empowers them to confidently connect with tattoo artists.

Competitor Analysis

I conducted a competitor analysis of four established tattoo finder apps. I wanted to design an app that looks a lot less gloomy, and promotes more inclusive and engaging content. 

User Interviews

I interviewed tattoo enthusiasts and people who have no tattoos as of yet. This enabled me to uncover some common behaviours, needs, frustrations on the often long journey to finding that perfect tattoo. An interesting insight was that tattooists are often recommended through word of mouth or social media, and that a bond of trust between the user and tattooist is paramount to a good experience.

Personas

I created user personas to reflect the insights from my user interviews. Designing for these two hypothetical people would serve to sharpen my design thinking, before sharpening my pencil.

Information Architecture

Using the insights from my user interviews and personas as inspiration, I started to organise the user flow, detailing which screens I would need to design for the app as a whole.

Wireframing

I sketched initial wireframes using the ‘rapid prototyping’ technique which generated a mix of ideas; some good, some so-so, some really quite bad. The good ones were digitised using Sketch and then built into an interactive prototype using InVision to carry out usability testing.

Usability Testing

I assessed how users interacted with the prototype to uncover areas of the design that could be made more intuitive. Analysis highlighted areas of visual design that needed urgent attention, for example some choice feedback for the icon design for the pin was that needed to be more ‘pointy’.

Reflections

Although this course was super intense (I found out later real world projects rarely follow the same pattern...!) during this project I gained a solid understanding of how to plan and execute common UX techniques, and when to use them.