David Zwirner Sales App

David Zwirner Gallery’s sales team travels globally to attend art fairs, interact with clients, and assist in showing art. During the busy fairs, it is very challenging to access and maintain critical information in real time, leading to missed sales opportunities and a fragmented customer experience. This inefficiency hampers sales teams' ability to quickly track artwork availability, manage client interactions, and effectively capture client data.  

These issues led to the creation of the Sales App, a cross functionally designed and developed tool for the gallery. The Sales App empowers the sales team to access real-time information, manage inventory, send offers, and close transactions seamlessly—all while aligning with the gallery’s brand and vision.

Role: As the lead designer for the Digital Gallery app, it was my responsibility to drive the research, end to end UX/UI design, testing, and dev handoff. Additionally, I managed the design process and reviewed the work of two other designers.

Team: I worked with a design pod comprised of a CD, one additional designer, a Product Owner, and a Project Manager. I also worked closely with a dev team.

Platforms: iOS
Disciplines: UX, UI, User Research, Prototyping, User Testing  

Tools: Figma, Origami
Timeline: 10 weeks

Research

Method:
User Interviews & Naturalistic Observation

My team & I conducted interviews with 12 of the 32 sales team members. Additionally, I observed how the Gallery sales team interacted at fairs by attending Art Basel Miami and Frieze New York. Interviews and observations gave key insights to their experience, problems, and needs.

Insights include:

Difficulty engaging with customers while searching for inventory
Need to discreetly hide data while interacting with customers
Desire to create and send an offer on the spot
Need to quickly filter and search for artworks or artists

Sitemap

Since the app was being built from 0:1, the initial focus was to get the structure correct

The key pages are outlined in purple which are Home (Exhibitions), Artists, Artworks, and Inventory List

Creating this early was key because sitemaps offer a great way for business and dev stakeholders to understand the scope of a project and translate user needs into a concrete product

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Simple wireframes of the app are a good point to get feedback, so there are no visual distractions and stakeholders could focus on a structure that made sense to them

Below is an early iteration of the Home Page. I tried a tabbed structure for Exhibitions & Lists so the user could easily navigate between this two key sections. However, after speaking with stakeholders, it became clear that they had concerns about opening up sensitive information around clients. They wanted a Home Page that was always client friendly with no private data.

Current Exhibitions of the gallery was relevant and always safe for the salesperson to open the app. Further iterations of the design include this decision.

High Fidelity Wireframes

Below is an early version of the Make an Offer flow. The feedback was positive overall, but there was a desire to be able to edit and remove artworks from the offer.

Later iterations include a more dynamic approach to creating offers for the client.

Testing

Usability testing on the wireframes provided key information to guide the final UI. I was able to sit down with 15 salespeople and observe their interactions with the app.  

Testing Questions

Are different sections easily searchable? Artwork inventory, Artist Pages, etc?
What information needs to be private vs public?
Is the offer flow easy to use?

Lessons

At a glance Home Page view with current Exhibitions worldwide
Add sorting options for Artwork Inventory
Toggle for private information
Ability to edit and delete artworks from the offer and integrate with email

I used these findings to go back to the wireframes make some edits led by an iterative design process.

The gallery Sales Team is able to easily browse exhibitions, find and add artworks to an offer, review and edit, then send an offer. Once ‘send an offer’ is pressed, a pre-populated email will open to send to a client of their choice.

Make an Offer Flow

Artwork Detail Interaction

Using Origami, I mocked up an interaction for the artwork detail viewer. This greatly helped the dev team understand the exact interaction design needed for this key page.

Final Designs

Results

All Sales Team members were onboarded within 3 months ahead of the fair season
The Sales Team completed actions an average of 24% faster with the new app
Saved DZ thousands yearly in software fees by bringing the tech in house
General feedback from partners was very positive and there were many reports on the ability to complete tasks much more seamlessly