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.
Platforms: iOS
Disciplines: UX, UI, User Research, Prototyping, User Testing
Tools: Figma, Origami
Timeline: 3 months
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
To the left 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
Here 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 inspired by an iterative design process. Then, the final UI was ready to be developed.
Make an Offer flow
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.
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.
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
Prototype
Please view the Interactive Figma Prototype for all views