ASE in the beginning
A company I worked for was contacted by the ASE team to develop an MVP version of the platform for the initial release to the public. The ASE team had a long list of requirements that needed to be processed but they had a fantastic approach. Before development, they wanted to spend resources to produce prototypes. When we started talking they revealed that the reasoning behind that decision was to define exactly what was to be developed in order to avoid any misunderstandings and to use those prototypes as a tool for raising funds for further development. Therefore I joined the ASE team as a product consultant.
Emphatize
In essence, what ASE does is allows users to buy or sell artwork on online auctions but also gives them the option to invest in art by purchasing shares of the artwork before the auction and profiting from them when the artwork is sold on the auction. All this was to be powered by blockchain. Sounds easy enough, however, in order for the whole process to be automated and manageable, certain things had to be aligned. It didn’t help that the requirement document provided by the team was full of concepts and ideas that give users options that are only nice to have and are not an obvious unique value proposition. Those concepts also made a project not financially feasible but also counted on supply and demand aligning and staying aligned at all times
What I realized needed to be done before designing prototypes is to narrow the scope and advise the team to focus on the Unique value proposition instead of trying to solve every problem in the art industry and include every trend. In order to succeed in this I first needed to do some user research and competitive analysis to figure out what really is our UVP and what should we focus on. During extensive research, I found only one true direct competitor which was Masterworks. In order to differentiate in the market we decided to focus on having an open market and blockchain as our UVPs. The competitive analysis also showed numerous indirect competitors that already went through “childhood diseases” of online auction marketplaces and
not only served as an inspiration for design later but also helped us to learn how to solve logistical issues that may arise that we didn’t even know existed. User research helped the team to empathize closer with the user base and with designing multiple user personas for different user groups which later further helped during design and development.
Define
I proposed a working process where we would first define the minimum viable list of requirements to which we would adhere then later proceed to define possible paths that the product could take off on and then create solutions and later prototypes for these so that we could use them for the purposes of raising funds.
After the consensus was reached on the scope layers, I wanted to clearly define user flows for these solutions before proceeding with the wireframing and prototyping process. Through this process, we found numerous problems that may arise when trying to automate each step of the user flow and resulting in the introduction of ASE agents which ended in lowering the cost of development for the MVP.
Ideate and Prototype
After clearly defining the user flow it was time to develop prototypes. Because I had my hands free in many ways I decided to start with producing wireframes immediately and ideating on possible solutions with the team in iterations.
A few challenges arose in the process. One thing that I had to figure out was how to allow users to bid on multiple artworks. This was solved with the introduction of cascade bidding which ensures auction lots close at staggering times, one after another.
Another challenge was to ensure that people do not get outbid in the last few seconds before the auction lot closed and lose on the artwork because they didn’t have enough time to answer. We solved this by introducing what we call popcorn bidding which extends each lot’s closing time by a set increment (for example, two minutes) if any bid comes in with less than two minutes until closing. This allows for other bidders to have ample time to counter back with another bid if they choose.
Because we had users interested in the artworks in the marketplace for different reasons, One group looking to purchase artwork at the auction, and one looking to invest in the art shares, we had to figure out a way to present artworks from multiple perspectives. This resulted in one of the most original and dynamic marketplaces that showed users information based on their predefined preferences and activities.
After several iterations back and forth with the business team and we reached a consensus and finally had several versions of the product designed and developed into prototypes.
Testing and Back to Design
Because many of the team members were prominent members of the art community, I had an easier time finding participants and doing usability testing. We had limited time and resources for the testing but we managed to find out multiple pain points and solve them before proceeding with the design of the high-fidelity mock-ups. Participants expressed their problem with having the pay for certain services before making any profit. We solved this by removing certain paywalls for the MVP version in order for people to get used to the platform features. Also, we managed to solve the issue of shipping by aligning restrictions and limitations with the feasibility of the ASE shipping partners.
This is where ASE stands at the time of writing this, heading for development and expected to hit the market once the funding is secured