Procreate is a raster graphics editor app for digital painting by Savage Interactive for iOS. The app has been designed keeping in mind the possibility iPad and apple pencil provides to manipulate pixels and thus creating stunning artworks wherever you are.
I along with my three team members analyzed the app, where we created an overall Mind map and then worked on different user journeys within the app.
While making the mind map we realized that procreate as an app creates an experience where they do not bombard you with all features at once. Hence they nest features within features to create several levels. So from surface, the procreate UI seems minimal with very less features but then the user goes deep exploring new features as he spends time with the app.
User journey
The next stage in the process was to pick up an user journey for different screens within the app individually and going much deeper into the psyche of the user, the sentiments and pain points he have. and thus looking for opportunities to solve them.
I chose to look at the process of organizing files in procreate.
I found out that though procreate is loaded with tons of features to create artworks but there wasn’t that much to organize them. It was here I founded the need. As user spends more time with app , the gallery keeps filling with artworks. You have to scroll long manually to look for your artworks. The only feature to organize is to create stacks(similar to folders but has its own limitations).
Pain point 1
As I looked where the flow started and ended I founded some of the pain points that need more attention. If organizing files in procreate was hard then looking for them/finding them was even harder. One pain point was if your file is somewhere in bottom of your galley user has to scroll down for long to access that file.
the Opportunity I found out was to have a search option in gallery with a suggestions list of recently accessed artworks. As you search the artwork or choose from recents list, it takes you directly to it in your gallery and it gets highlighted for a brief time so you know its position among others. User can tap to work on the artwork or use other features like exporting for it.
Search may seem a basic feature but in a race to create a minimal UI procreate missed on this vey basic but essential feature especially for procreate long time users who have 100s of artworks in their gallery.
Pain point 2
Other was was if you want to take a file you created much earlier which is in bottom of your galley to top of your gallery which is the active working area(each time you open the app, top of gallery is default view), you have to hold the artwork from one finger and scroll up from other. most of times the artworks get involuntarily stacked with another artwork in this cumbersome process of dragging.
The opportunity I ideated was that while you are in bottom of your galley and you select an artwork or artworks an up icon appears along with other already existing options which emerge after clicking on select option, your artworks is taken directly to top of your gallery(if more than 2 artworks are selected it creates a stack) so you can work on the artwork again.
low to high fidelity wireframe for it :
both of these opportunities are connected and thus can be used in a single user flow and independently as well.
Learnings
I mentioned specific learnings throughout the article. Here are the more genearal holistic ones. Through this project I learned to better understand user psyche, process of finding pain points and developing opportunities. It gave me a better understanding of the UI/UX field than before.
Credits
My team members Jigyasa Gupta, Suzanna Rabindran and our course faculty Rayna Batavia.