Designing a Voting Platform to Realize a Global Art Contest for Children

MY ROLE

UX/UI design
Wireframes, Lo-fi & Hi-fi prototypes, User flows, Visual design, Style guide, Responsive web design, Design iterations
‍
UX research
Competitive analysis, Interviews, User testing

MY IMPACT

Identified primary user flows and information architecture
Drive collaboration between stakeholders
Created responsive designs for desktop & mobile
Increased task completion rates

TEAM

1 Project director
1 UX/UI designer (me!)
6 Web developers
2 Data scientists

COMPANY

International Child Arts Foundation (ICAF)ICAF is a national arts organization established in 1997. It is dedicated to promoting the arts for children worldwide.

TOOLS

Figma, Adobe Suite, Google Suite, Slack

DURATION

3 months, May - August 2023

OVERVIEW

1M+

approximate participants in this contest

87.5 %

task success rate achieved

The primary goal of this project was to create and iterate on designs for a voting system launching a month before the 2024 Paris Olympics. In this initial phase, building an MVP which will serve as a foundation supporting future features is our main goal.

I led the design of this online voting platform where children from around the world can upload their artwork and the public can vote for their favorite pieces.

PROBLEM

Children show low interest in watching the Olympics

45%

of children don't plan to watch the Olympics

30%

of children think the Olympics Games are boring

25%

of children don’t know when the Olympics will be held

Research revealed that around 50% of children don't plan to watch the Olympics, with nearly one-third finding the event boring. The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics had the lowest primetime viewership on NBC, averaging 10.7 million viewers per night, compared to 15.1 million for the next lowest, the Tokyo Olympics.

Sources: ICAF

SOLUTION

Create a voting platform to promote child art and inspire children's interest in the Paris 2024 Olympics

To increase engagement for the 2024 Paris Olympics, ICAF held a global art contest with the theme: My Favorite Sport. This contest aims to promote the work of young artists worldwide and to increase children's engagement with the Olympic Games.

LEADING THE DESIGN PROCESS

Establish an effective timeline in the absence of an existing concrete schedule

The project director gave me the flexibility to determine the timeline of the design process. However, to enhance collaboration with the development team of around ten members, I proactively proposed a schedule that is beneficial for driving the project forward while fostering collaboration across functional teams.

STAKEHOLDER & USER INTERVIEWS

Define design goals from stakeholder and user interviews

Stakeholders expressed in meetings their concerns on how to effectively promote the event globally and whether children would be willing to use our platform.

We also found through user interviews that judges wished to understand how impactful their votes would be.

USER FLOWS & WIREFRAMES

Optimize user flows to enhance technical development efficiency

During the design process for user flows and wireframes, the initial version (V1) separated the submission of artwork by artists and the voting process into two distinct flows.

However, after collaborating with the engineering team, we identified that combining artwork submission and voting into a single streamlined flow (V2) would enhance efficiency for technical development.

Previously, the artist and judge registration pages requested user information differently. I unified the registration process by consolidating common input fields on a single page, while relocating artist-specific details, such as country and city, to the following page.

However, we still needed to inform users about the different age limits for artists and judges. To address this, while the back-end remains the same, the front-end displays tailored age limit information for each user group.

DESIGN ITERATIONS

How can we help voters understand the impact of their votes?

From user testing, we found that users want to know how many votes each artist has as well as their current rankings, in order to understand the impact of their votes.

After discussing this with data scientists, I created a filter for users to arrange artworks by time or ranking, also updated the design to showcase the vote count for each artwork, thereby increasing voter engagement.

Create playful imagery by incorporating child illustrations

To infuse new energy into the ICAF's visual style, I gathered children’s sports-themed artwork and transformed it into elements that both capture the desired vibe from stakeholders and showcase ICAF's commitment to promoting young artists' work.

For example, adding an illustration of a man reading a newspaper to the newsletter subscription section adds a playful touch!

VISUAL DESIGN

Incorporate Olympic motifs into ICAF's visual identity

I conducted comprehensive style analysis on both the website for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and ICAF's original website. This process helped identify the representative stylistic tendencies of their distinct visual designs.

Leveraging my findings, I proposed keywords and created a mood board to showcase how the motifs of the Olympic games can be conveyed through ICAF's existing visual identity.

Website Style Analysis

Mood Board

DESIGN SOLUTIONS

Enhance promotion and engagement through social media sharing

To promote the contest, we added buttons for voters and child artists to share the event and artworks on social media. This increases the event's exposure and enables children to share their artworks with relatives and friends to garner more votes.

Simplify the artwork upload process

To reduce obstacles for children during the artwork submission process, we incorporated a tool enabling users to complete a signature using their figures and offered various artwork upload methods, allowing users to choose the one most convenient for them.

REFLECT

What others said

"I enjoyed working with Liang-Yu. She is creative and thoughtful, imaginative and disciplined. She helped make ICAF.org responsive and designed another website for us. She will be an asset to any team. I recommend her enthusiastically."

Dr. Ashfaq Ishaq
Founder and Chair at International Child Art Foundation

Takeaway

Collaborating with cross-functional teams requires translating design concepts into common language

This project provides me with ample opportunities to collaborate with developers, data scientists, and the project director. Since the entire team worked remotely, and teammates have diverse backgrounds. It is important to communicate effectively and create documentation to convey design concepts in common language.

Define the scope of MVP

Through the process of designing the MVP, I've learned how to balance functionality and added complexity, ensuring that the design can be realized with technical simplicity, while leaving room for future feature additions.