CANVS App

Transforming the way people interact with street art worldwide

OVERVIEW

A curated guide to discovering street art

CANVS is an innovative art-tech platform that redefines how people explore cities and engage with public art worldwide. Leveraging proprietary technology, CANVS hosts the world’s largest catalog of street art and artists, offering users a unique, interactive way to discover and connect with urban creativity.

In collaboration with the CEO and Experience Design Director, I helped strategize new approaches to enhance user acquisition and retention. We prioritized the launch of the “Collections” and “Walking Tour” features, initiating a work stream to build a feedback loop that allows us to test and measure the CANVS app’s potential to drive curated city exploration experiences. Imagine CANVS as your personal guide, curating routes through diverse neighborhoods and enriching the urban experience.

DISCOVERY

Understanding the street art world

My initial research explored how street art is experienced and navigated. Organized efforts, such as street art festivals, city-funded programs, and walking tours aimed at promoting culture and urban exploration, emerged as a significant focus. The street art ecosystem is a vast network connecting diverse groups with vested interests in public art.

Conversely, I also identified more spontaneous methods of street art discovery, such as stumbling upon murals by chance or finding them through social media. This contrast inspired me to integrate various ways people engage with street art, ultimately creating a comprehensive solution that combines the best aspects of each approach. The result is a feature designed to provide festival organizers with a one-stop platform to immerse and engage their attendees in the festivities.

Street art ecosystem

Targeting street art festivals

During the discovery phase, I identified street art festivals as vibrant hubs where the entire street art community—artists, enthusiasts, and industry stakeholders—converge. This insight made these events a clear focus for developing a feature specifically tailored to their unique dynamics.

To deepen my understanding of street art festivals, I conducted an in-depth analysis of 10 of the world’s most prominent street art festivals some examples include the Vancouver mural festival, Wynwood walls in Miami and Jersey city mural festival

I identified key patterns and gained valuable insights into their offerings. To complement this research, I attended the Jersey City Mural Festival, immersing myself in the community’s energy and engagement firsthand.

Key observations

Mural mapping

Many festivals provide maps detailing the locations of murals, installations, and events. This allows attendees to navigate the festival area effectively and find murals in the physical space.

Guided tour

To offer attendees a more immersive experience, street art festivals often include guided tours. These tours allow participants to explore key murals, gain insights and connect with the local street art scene.

Event listings

Most festivals showcase the artists participating, highlighting both local and international talents, giving attendees a sense of who they can expect to see creating art during the festival.

DEFINE

The Collections Feature

Through backlog grooming led by the Executive Design Director, the core team decided to prioritize the Collections feature that would best allow us to build a feature that would bring a curated and engaging aspect to attendees experiences.

What is a collection?

Mural collections are curated groups of murals connected by a common theme or concept, like playlists for street art. This feature empowers users to create personalized galleries of public art centered around any topic or subject and share them publicly. It’s an engaging way to spark discovery and craft stories around murals, fostering deeper connections with public art.
Within the collections feature, we’re introducing a specialized subset called “Walking Tours.” This allows curators to transform collections into step-by-step, self-guided tours, turning the CANVS app into a dynamic tour guide. In essence, the collections feature consists of two types: general (basic) collections and walking tours.
Content hierarchy of Collections
Birds
Collection featuring birds
USA
Collection featuring USA inspired imagery

Path to validation

Through my research and ethnographic observations, we identified street art festivals as the ideal setting to introduce the collections feature. These events attract an avid and dynamic audience actively seeking guided street art experiences. However, during our initial interviews, where we presented mockups of street art-focused collections, we uncovered a crucial insight…

A false positive

Once we defined the feature concept, we began creating low-fidelity mockups to initiate a feedback loop with stakeholders. We scheduled interviews to gauge interest and identify which aspects of the collections feature would resonate most with clients, partners, and other key audiences. During our first call, we discovered that while street art festivals were viewed positively, limiting the collections feature to these events was unnecessary.

Early stage mockups of the collections feature targeting street art festivals

Once we defined the feature concept, we began creating low-fidelity mockups to initiate a feedback loop with stakeholders. We scheduled interviews to gauge interest and identify which aspects of the collections feature would resonate most with clients, partners, and other key audiences. During our first call, we discovered that while street art festivals were viewed positively, limiting the collections feature to these events was unnecessary.

TAKEAWAY #1
Refining UX Strategy Through Stakeholder Collaboration

Refining the problem statement through stakeholder collaboration proved invaluable in broadening our perspective and ensuring the feature truly met user needs. By actively seeking feedback and validation, we uncovered a crucial insight: the collections feature didn’t need to be tethered exclusively to street art festivals. These conversations allowed us to reframe our focus, shifting from a niche audience of festival attendees to a broader user base of anyone interested in street art exploration. Without this collaboration, we might have missed the opportunity to design a more versatile and inclusive guided tour experience.

Refined problem Statement

How can we create a guided tour feature that empowers users to explore and connect with street art year-round, independent of festival events?

DESIGN

Modifying the Content structure and Information Architecture (IA)

Through collaboration with stakeholders, we refined the information architecture and content structure to align with the evolving problem space. A key modification was designing walking tours as a unique type of collection, inspired by the simplicity and curation of a Spotify playlist but tailored for murals. These tours incorporate an interactive element, bridging digital content with physical exploration. Mapped in an ordered sequence within a walkable radius, the walking tours offer a curated journey that blends navigation with storytelling, emphasizing engagement with the murals and their surroundings.

UPDATED: Content structure and heirarchy

The Walking Tours Feature

This idea was inspired by the guided tours often seen at street art festivals, where users follow a mapped route to explore curated murals. We realized this approach wasn’t just effective for festivals but could also be a powerful way to discover street art year-round. By integrating this concept into CANVS, users can enjoy the experience of a guided tour anytime they want, turning exploration into an engaging and accessible activity beyond the limitations of festival schedules.
Walking tour detail page
Walking tour detail page (further below)

Parity between mobile and web

CANVS is a multi-sided platform, consisting of a mobile app, web app, and API integrations. The web app is primarily used by organizations and artists to manage mural and artist directories. The mobile app is the public-facing app that anyone can download, and it features the largest collection of crowd-sourced, documented murals—displayed on an interactive map.
Organizations (or any authorized web app user) can easily curate and manage their own guided tours, allowing them to highlight specific street art pieces or themes relevant to their audience. By separating the user interface from the management environment, we ensure that all features operate harmoniously within the CANVS ecosystem, providing a comprehensive solution for both users and organizations.
Web app for tour management and Mobile app of a tour
TAKEAWAY #2
Enhancing existing features, reduces development cost and time.

Collections already existed on the web app, serving a straightforward purpose of grouping murals like Pinterest boards, allowing users to save them as a collection. Recognizing this similarity, we enhanced the feature to support the new Guided Tour functionality.

Our improvements ensured that Collections could coexist seamlessly with the Tours and Exhibits, avoiding any potential conflicts or inconsistencies. This approach not only improved the overall user experience but also significantly reduced development costs and time, showcasing the efficiency of building upon existing frameworks to introduce new features.

User testing and iterations

We dove into the details of design and functionality, presenting the design to multiple stakeholders and users. Their feedback provided valuable insights that we used to iterate and refine the design.

Adjusting Collection Thumbnails for User Understanding

We refined how collections were visually represented on the app’s landing page. Initially, collections were not clearly depicted as groups of murals, which created some confusion. To address this, we added a grid of murals to each collection’s thumbnail, making it more apparent that it represents a collection of murals. This visual adjustment helped reduce cognitive load for users, allowing them to quickly understand the purpose of each collection and gain insight into its contents before choosing one to explore.
BEFORE: Collections landing (thumbnail doesn't represent the meaning of a collection)
AFTER: Collections landing (thumbnail shows multiple murals and descriptions)

Making directions accessible at a glance

Users exploring tour stops had difficulty locating directions to each mural. Directions were tucked away in the mural’s detail page, creating friction in the user experience by making this essential information less accessible. This issue, rooted in both information architecture and user flow, led us to move directions to a more visible spot in the tour interface, allowing users to get location information immediately when needed.
BEFORE : Murals on the tour without directions
AFTER : Murals with directions readily available

CONCLUSION

Walking Tour experience

The result of this collaborative and iterative process is a comprehensive, interactive walking tour experience that goes beyond simple navigation. This feature empowers users to explore street art with delightful interactive features at ever stage of the tour.

What's next?

  • The design has been finalized, and the project is now moving into the engineering phase. We’re working closely with the development team to ensure the design is executed smoothly and effectively.
  • Feedback from the initial presentation is being integrated to refine the details and make technical adjustments where necessary.
  • As the project progresses, we’re excited to see how users interact with the tour experience in real-world environments and plan to continue iterating based on their feedback to enhance engagement and accessibility further. The journey isn’t over, and there’s plenty more to come as we bring this experience to life.