1. Letterpress
Rally
A community for letterpress print
artisans and enthusiasts alike
Design by: Michael Bush
Student Project. General Assembly UXDI Winter 2013
2. 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.
4. 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.
5. DESIGN ITERATION | DESIGN HYPOTHESIS
Method:
ITERATION 1
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.”
6. DESIGN ITERATIONS | PROTOTYPE
Method:
AM
S
LE
P
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 RUN
First time experience
- seeing an intro to the app
- checking out local print-makers’ works
- completing a purchase
Core Product Experience
Uploading your work
Seeing the work of other print-makers both locally
and globally popular
Seeing local and global events
A marketplace to buy and sell prints
