Reinventing the Creative Industry Through Mediums

Getting to Know Mediums

Mediums is a new 24-hour creative landmark, selling a variety of products to support everyone's creative needs. Mediums aims to be a go-to for artists, creatives and daydreamers of all types.

The brand set out to re-imagine the creative industry and the art supply and stationery scene to be accessible for everyone.

Challenges, Problems and Our Solutions

Like many complex projects, the Mediums app was not without its own challenges and obstacles.

Both UX and UI work was considerable, as the MVP version of the app alone had more than 200 screens. Given that this was also a very short project, risk mitigation and fallback plans as well as several checkpoints were necessary to ensure that the desired functionality was included and value was delivered for the chosen MVP features without sacrificing quality or performance.

Keeping the team fully engaged with each other and with the client was imperative to mitigate risk.

Getting the environment for mobile apps up and running was surprisingly difficult, due to lacking ADB2C and MSEL documentation and code examples. We also had weekly calls with Microsoft Azure support to sort out problems. While some of these issues still existed, we were able to compensate and build successful temporary workarounds for them.

Other issues stemmed from the client's backend system integration points not being fully developed and available. However, we were able to work through the designated UAT time to complete the custom proxy service and successfully test, pushing the UAT to just a few days before its designated launch date.

Scope of Work and Timeline

Mediums' project goal was to enable people to live a more sustainable lifestyle. The carefully crafted mobile application would make art and design as open as possible, enabling customers to have the most frictionless experience directly from their mobile devices. Mediums would use these online aspects to help shoppers better utilize their time to focus on creating rather than shopping.

Mediums envisioned a few key areas for their initial product offering as proof of concept.

Design System

A design system is the single source of truth which groups all the elements that allow teams to design, realize and develop a product. The design system is not a single deliverable, but a set of deliverables.

Iconography

Mediums icons are designed to be simple, modern and friendly. Each icon is reduced to its minimal form, expressing its essential characteristics.

Development

For the MVP phase of the project, we built native mobile apps in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, while incorporating a NodeJS-based backend API proxy service to integrate with Microsoft Azure and several secure internal systems.

Initially, the conversation called for the mobile apps to directly interact with the various existing back office systems via their native APIs. However, the discovery process quickly revealed that a proxy approach would be much cleaner and add a layer of abstraction so that authorization, authentication and session management could be more consistent across the wide variety of internal and external systems. It also afforded the team much greater flexibility in managing changes, as much of the heavy lifting was moved to the NodeJS backend proxy and could be altered without needing to rebuild and deploy the mobile app.

Wireframes

We focused first on wireframes. A wireframe is a diagram or a set of diagrams consisting of simple lines and shapes that represent the skeleton of a user interface, keeping the focus on core functionality.

New User Experiences and Interfaces

Re-imagine your creativity at your fingertips.

Our final design was based on multiple iterations throughout the UX and UI phase. We came to this end result by utilizing the pain points of current users as well as the goals and objectives set initially.

Search and Browsing

Since there are two different behaviors, from novices to experts, we designed around both specific search and navigation through browsing.

Search helps users who are looking for a product they already have in mind. Category browsing helps those who might not have something specific in mind by letting them recognize products through categories.

Optimizing the Product Detail

The content on product pages plays a significant role in whether the user will purchase or not. We provide all the information without overwhelming users, which helps them gain a better understanding of what the product is, what it looks like and how it works.

Product variant selection is also built seamlessly into the product detail page.

Cart and Recommendations

Optimizing shopping cart recommendations is the cross-selling tactic. The end result of deploying cart page cross-sellers is bigger basket sizes. Additionally, customers can add products to the cart there and then, without the need to go through product pages, which minimizes the risk of them leaving the website.

Real Time Order Tracking

Showing customers where their order is in real time with accurate information.