vtartworks
What is VTArtWorks?
VTArtWorks is an initiative to develop a central site, a one-stop-shop,
where Community Cultural Development (CCD) practitioners can communicate, network and document with colleagues, external funders, audience and students, with a single click. It is a crowdsourced archive site with communication and project management features, filling the gap that Community Arts Network (CAN) website has left bare in the field.
The new website will address the silos in CCD in two ways:
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A hub that integrates dialogue and knowledge exchange to encourage communication and documentation at one spot
A holistic market that will reflect the field of community cultural development through multiple disciplinary lenses, including but not limited to the arts, the humanities, public policy and governance, public administration and elected officials, community development and community organizing, public education, and urban and regional planning.
Why the change?
The Community Art Network (CAN) was a journal-based HTML website, which was ran by two staff members at Virginia Tech, who manually edited and uploaded blog posts and other document types in the HTML format, while editing all submitted documents. The website nationally and internally served artists and non-artists involved in Community Cultural Development (CCD).
Despite its popularity, in 2010, the Community Art Network (CAN) website had to be taken offline due to low financial and human resources, which could not meet the exponentially increasing demands of the users. The absence of CAN left many CCD practitioners in dismay, unable to find a perfect alternative to CAN. Thus, several CCD leaders started their own websites, showcasing their work and organization's events and projects, a theatre-focused website, peer-review journal website, and several civil and environmental movement websites funded by universities.​
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However, the atomistic nature of the newly emerging websites in the field, appeared divided and did not meet the holistic needs of the CCD practitioners. Since 2012, initiative to revive CAN, CAN 2.0, took place in Virginia Tech led by Bob Leonard, a prominent leader of CCD and a professor at Virginia Tech. In 2015, the VTArtWorks project was initiated with a goal to build a holistic website for the CCD field, encouraging dialogue, critical discourse, and knowledge building between the CCD artists and non-artists
Team: VTArtWorks
Project Director
Project Investigator
CS consultant
Theatre intern
Front-End Developer
Lead UX
CMS investigator
Phase of the Project
Research
Analyze
Conceptualize
Prototype
User Test
Iterate
Although the idea of the website was driven by the CAN website, no other reference was provided other than the existing websites of the key stakeholders in the field. The whole process had to be rebuilt, starting with contextual inquiry.
My role...
Research
We agreed that a three step analysis (interview, survey, case study) of the work domain, CCD, would be most appropriate for the issue at hand. Although the initiative was clear, we needed to understand the specific causes of issues and the CCD practitioners’ direct needs in order to eliminate unnecessary developments that won’t be utilized.
Interviews
A semi-structured interview with the stakeholders and the potential primary users guided our research focus on identifying the common domain-wide problems. We conducted 22 in-person/phone/web conference interviews with CCD leaders. We prepared 5 questions about in-field and out-field communications, field-wide gaps, and documentation process; and obtained data through comprehensive note-taking and audio recording at the discretion of the interviewees, which were further number coded for confidentiality.
Survey
From the initial interviews of the 8 stakeholders, we pulled recurring issues and concerns about the CCD field, and developed 10 survey questions to address a larger crowd. The questions included isolation issues, infrequency of technology usage in the field, lack of documentation resources, financial and economic issues and absence of best practices of process documentation in the field. We received 32 responses.​​
Marcellus Shale Retreat
The third step of the analysis was to try a test case with a simple Google Site to observe the kinds of documents and materials CCD practitioners may feel important to document and/or share with the public. We recruited a user test-group, a class of theater students at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, who allowed us to monitor their progress as they prepared for a performance of Marcellus Shale by Paul Zimet from Talking Band.
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One observation of note was that while the class was composed entirely of young adult university students, we received many questions about how to use Google Sites (e.g. how to log in, how to add users, how to edit pages). The questions we received indicated a relatively low level of technological literacy or creativity among the students, which could suggest that even though VTArtWorks users who are artists might be younger, they are not necessarily capable of or interested in using at all complicated technology
Analysis
The interview notes and the transcriptions from the audio recordings were color coded to identify the major and minor themes of the issue that we aimed to address. The themes were further categorized and built into a hierarchical table and visual charts for effective presentation to the VTArtWorks team.
Conceptualize
The interview notes were also analyzed through a Work Activity Affinity Diagram (WAAD), flow models and several primary and secondary personas in order to better understand the work domain of our interest, our primary user needs and website requirements. The results also provided knowledge for several iterations of design-informing models: flow models, personas, site map.
Design
Low Fidelity Prototype
1st Iteration
High Fidelity Prototype
Challenge
My first project as the UX researcher & designer, a lot of the struggles came from collaborating with the director and the stakeholders from the performing arts background. Their work processes were very different from the UX processes and did not take iteration in development into consideration. Several times, we would have weeks of inefficient meetings because the weekly meetings would be focused on editing grant proposals.
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Soon, I started to work a step ahead of the meeting. Providing questions, design-informing models, sketching, and designs, specifying what has to be done was effective in keeping the meetings short and on topic.
"Speak up"