Print-on-demand marketplace for buying and selling skateboard artwork

CHALLENGE

There are currently few marketplaces to sell and promote their work and artists are limited to Do-It-Yourself printing on skate decks.

This is a problem because it is a missed opportunity to tap into a growing market and create space for emerging artists to sell their work and for collectors to find unique artwork to invest in. 

ROLE: UI/UX Designer - UX research, stakeholder interviews, user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and prototyping.

CLIENT: Under

TEAM: Brett Benson, Noor-e-Jehan Umar, Jorge Arroyo

PROJECT TYPE: E-Commerce Site - Desktop & Mobile

Background

I teamed up with a small design team led by the Product Design Lead to develop their idea into an MVP the organization could pitch to investors.

The skateboard market is booming, with sales reaching $144.4 million in 2021, and artwork being sold printed on skateboards is increasingly becoming viewed as a serious part of the collection market in the art world with Sotheby’s Friday collection selling for $800,000.  

While working with Under, company leaders were interested in investment opportunities and exploring targeting this market with an e-commerce marketplace.

Research

STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS

We met with The Co-Founder of Under and the Project Manager and asked several open-ended questions about the business's goals and what the business already knew about the market.

Business Goals:

• Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the online marketplace that capture the main user flows that the organization can pitch to investors.
  
• Foster community with the marketplace by connecting artists with each other and people interested in their work.

Target Demographic

• Designers
• Artists
  
• Creators

• Art collectors
• Investors
• NFT traders

MARKET RESEARCH & SWAT ANALYSIS

I researched not only various e-commerce sites some skate-focused, but also branched out to websites like Society6, and other marketplaces that allow creators the ability to upload their own art onto products to sell.

One of the largest print-on-demand online marketplaces in the world for both professional and amateur artists and designers to easily create their own online shops to sell their artwork on prints, posters, canvases, etc.

Zumiez is the world's largest retailer of both hard and soft skateboarding goods, as well as, other action sports. But how does an artist get their work sold on skateboards in Zumiez stores around the world? 

INSIGHTS

I organized my takeaways from market research to better understand how we could relate our findings to the user, understand their needs, and see how we could fulfill said needs.

Process

PERSONAS

My insights from market research led me to two main red routes that I developed into personas. These personas helped me to understand who exactly we wanted to market to.

USER JOURNEY MAPPING

I took those two scenarios and built them into one user journey, helping me map out the persona’s story and the user's journey to our marketplace.

CONCEPTING

We came up with 30+ ideas and came back together to workshop them and narrowed them down to these four main ideas that we felt added the most value for our target users.

Upload skatedeck feature

A feature for artists to be able to upload their artwork and format them properly for on-demand printing.

Skatedeck customizer

Customization feature for buyers/collectors to customize deck sizes, materials, shapes, etc. before purchase.

Digital NFT Marketplace

Stakeholders expressed interest in the NFT space so we wanted to visualize what it could look like if your purchase of a physical skate deck came with a digital NFT token that one could trade with other collectors.

Community Forums

Stakeholders also emphasized the community aspect of the E-commerce site so we wanted to develop ideas surrounding how to build community in a digital space that would play well with collecting/trading artwork.

USER FLOWS

After narrowing our ideas down we developed our personas into user flows that helped us to build out the task flow of the site focusing on the red routes of: the artist & the collector.

WIREFRAMES

I first began by creating different options for the landing page. After a discussion with the team, we narrowed it down between two options. 

The first is a simple landing page with a design inspired by skate magazines. The second is a similar design style but with a skateboard customization feature built into it that would allow users to build their own skateboard.

STAKEHOLDER FEEDBACK

Stakeholders wanted less focus to be made on the skateboards to be sold to be used for skating and more emphasis on the skateboards being presented as collectible art pieces.

They didn't think the customization feature on option 02 would be necessary and encouraged us to continue to develop option 01 in the same art style, as well as, further push the community aspect of the website.

Visual Design

VISION BOARD

I created this mood board to visualize both the aesthetics and features of the site to pay homage to skateboarding’s roots and envision a platform for community building.

SITE STYLES

From here I worked on creating the site styles; I wanted to appeal to designers with a clean interface and graphic images that felt reminiscent of skate magazines but with an updated modern look using an atomic design structure to build out the design system.

LOGO

I wanted to create a recognizable image that could be branded to the site, the image is a placeholder for now but I wanted it to still convey the brand identity.

I took three images I liked from skate magazines that expressed movement and played around with textures and styles in Photoshop until I found a style I liked.

After I found a textural graphic style that I liked I played around with different images that I felt were powerful, eye-catching, and conveyed movement.

While I did so, I discovered a potential name for the site; KCKFLP - based on the skateboard trick, “kick flip” and came up with the final logo.

High Fidelity

I finalized site styles and began building the three main flows based on our user stories: 

• The Designer: uploading the design to the skate deck,
• The Buyer/Trader: browsing skate decks to purchase
• I also added a checkout page because we decided we needed a checkout flow.

Prototype

Summary

We presented our work to stakeholders who approved our designs. The next steps are to continue refining these flows and ready the pitch to investors. I am really happy with what I created and am excited to continue to work with the Under team to further develop this project and take it to get shipped.

There are a few ideas I tried out that we didn’t include in the final MVP that I would like to incorporate into future iterations. Such as, we had the idea of creating the option for artists to create a digital NFT of their art so that when someone buys their board they get a digital NFT token of the deck that they could trade on the marketplace. I also created a community forum flow as well that I think would be interesting to explore.