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Case Study

Prints

ArtStation Prints

ArtStation is the go-to platform for artists working in the film and games industry (with a growing segment of independent digital artists).
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Many artists maintain profitable side businesses selling digital goods on the ArtStation Marketplace. Seeing how successful ArtStation can be as an e-commerce platform (and after years of requests for this feature), we decided to go ahead and build ArtStation Prints, a framework for selling high-quality art prints on-demand.

Role

UX Research, Product Strategy, UX & UI Design

Team

Frantz Rogeon - Product Management
Artem Budiansky - Frontend Development
Ruslan Gatiyatov, Nikita Kononov - Backend Development
Serhii Korol, Reeval Gimaev - QA

Process & Products

Research
For Sellers
For Buyers
Results

Business GOal

We wanted to build a system that allowed ArtStation artists to sell prints directly to fans.

We would take care of the listing, ordering, printing, shipping, and returns and charge a commission per print.

Who Are our potential sellers?

Jasmine
Busy Studio Artist
Los Angeles, CA
Environment artist @ A Big Animation Studio
Primary goal
Easily monetize work.
Key drivers
Quick and easy money (no-brainer uploading)
Everything (portfolio, jobs, store) in one place (ArtStation)
Vincent
Art Perfectionist
Nice, France
Freelance Character Illustrator
Primary goal
Make more money, and grow his online presence.
Key drivers
The ability to customize everything (cropping, settings, prices) to optimize sales.
Quick or customizable?
If you read the Key Divers of the users above, you can see that they disagree on one crucial part of the Prints feature.
Quick
When interviewing artists, about half said that speed and ease of use was more important than granular customizability.
Customizable
The other half disagreed, and said that being able to select products to sell and set their markup individually was more important than simplicity.
Why not both?
We chose to accommodate both hands-on and hands-off artists, so a big part of this feature design process was about finding that balance.

Who is our potential buyer?

Patrick
Art hobbyist & art fan
Vancouver, Canada
Web developer
Primary goal
Buying art prints from artists he likes to decorate his office and home with. Supporting artists monetarily.
Key drivers
Quick and easy money (no-brainer uploading)
Everything (portfolio, jobs, store) in one place (ArtStation)

Competitor Research

Where are our potential users selling and buying now?
What issues are they running into?
General on-demand print stores

For Sellers

Pros
Get to keep all of the profits
Able to customize prints extensively
Cons
Have to do everything themselves
Time consuming
Expensive production and shipping

For Buyers

Pros
They already know about these websites
Good buying experience
Cons
Don’t feel catered to, like the art on there is more general and more like decor
Artists print artwork and sell directly to fans

For Sellers

Pros
Get to keep all of the profits
Able to customize prints extensively
Cons
Have to do everything themselves
Time consuming
Expensive production and shipping

For Buyers

Pros
Money directly to support artist
Can barter, request lower price
Cons
Shipping is expensive and takes forever
Many artists don’t want to sell directly
Contacting artists is uncomfortable

So what are we going to build?

We are going to build a system that:
Makes it easy for sellers to upload & start selling
Covers ordering, printing, shipping, support, & returns, so the seller can just make art
Gives buyers the opportunity to support artists they love with their money
Lets sellers set their own markup if they want to
Lets buyers order art they love, not just decor
Connects artists to fans, enriching the ArtStation experience

Seller print publishing flow

Set up payouts

Add bank account

Upload

Upload image
Add title
Optional
Turn off product types
Set prices for product types

Publish

Print uploading

Built-in quality control

To maintain the highest product quality, we insist artists upload large, high-res images.
We don’t give artists the option to override the required sizes because, in the end, no one benefits from a buyer receiving a pixelated print.
Product sizes that are available to a seller according to the size of the image they uploaded.
If the artist wants to sell bigger prints, they are told exactly how big the uploaded image needs to be.

Product type editor

If a seller wants to be more granular in their approach, they have the freedom to set a specific markup for each individual product type, or completely disable that product type if they don’t want to sell it.

Product type states

Default product type
Disabled product type (by user)
Default product type (expanded pricing)
Disabled product sizes expanded (image too small for print size)
Great! The seller has uploaded, customized, and published their print!
Now what?
How do they track their sales?
How do they publish products that are in the draft state?

Managing products

The seller needs to be able to:
See Their:
Digital and print products in one place
How many of each product type they have listed
Sales per product type
Filer by:
Product published / draft
Product on main AS store or only artist’s website
Navigate to:
Product on AS store
Product on their website
View:
Individual product listing
Thumbnail
Title
Sales Count
Status (published / draft)
Price range
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Manage store page

All set on the seller side, now what do our buyers need?

Remember Patrick from the user research?
What does he want?
He wants an “endless” catalog of art prints he likes.
He wants to support artists with his money.
He wants detailed product info, so he can buy the right thing.
He wants the traditional checkout process. He expects checkout, shipping, and tracking at the level of big online stores.

Buyer purchasing flow

product Index

Our prints home screen lets users filter products by type and relevant options (size, price, subject). We updated the product preview grid  to give product images more screen space.

Print product page

The product page elements are laid out according to their significance for the buyer.
More important
Price, print size, and other product options (like wrap color for canvases). The buyer must make these decisions before clicking Add to Cart.
Less Important
Product details, other product types for this print,  artist’s notes, sharing. These are less critical for the purchasing decision.

From purchase to delivery

We fully integrated prints into our checkout experience and keep the buyer up-to-date at every point in the production and shipping process.

Results

We released Prints to great fanfare and had a month-to-month sales growth rate of around 11% in the first six months post-release.
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The amount of uploaded printed products nearly doubled every month for the first year.
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The flexible layout allowed for an easy transition to a new fulfiller and let us quickly add new product types.

What i learned

This was the first feature that I designed from the ground up at ArtStation (though I restructured and redesigned the checkout, navigation, and digital marketplace they had already existed). I got to dive deep into the business side (market research, pricing, logistics) of this release with the product management team.
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Working on this feature really tested my product strategy skills when negotiating MVP and direction with developers and stakeholders. I had to stand up for good design on a VERY tight release schedule.
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On a more technical note, we worked with a fulfiller that was out of our control so we had to get creative with the user-flow (see suggested address modal above). Working with automated image mapping when creating the product previews pushed me to get more involved with the developers to understand their code and their decision-making.
Asset credit: YURI SHWEDOFF, Stéphane Wootha Richard, Rodolfo Rojo, Paul Chadeisson, Pascal Blanché, Tony Skeor, sparth, Daniel Liang, Nelson Tai, Jeff Rigal, Anna Shvets, Daria Shevtsova, Florian Doppler, the CatHead is my own illustration

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