Immersive Street Art Discovery Feature for CANVS

I designed a curated guided tour experience for exploring street art in a more fun and interactive way.

Overview

A curated guide to discovering street art

CANVS is an art-tech platform that transforms how people discover cities through public art. With the world’s largest street art catalog, it offers interactive ways for users to explore and connect with urban creativity.

Working closely with the CEO and Experience Design Director, I helped develop strategies to boost user acquisition and retention. We prioritized launching the "Collections" and "Walking Tour" features, creating a feedback loop to test CANVS's ability to deliver curated city exploration experiences, like having a personal guide through vibrant, art-filled neighborhoods.

  • Domain
    Travel & Tourism
  • Timeline
    Jan 2024 - June 2024
  • Crew
    Experience design director, UX designer, Engineering team
  • My Role
    Research, Heuristic analysis, Wireframing, Prototyping, Interaction and Motion design

Discovery

Understanding the street art world

I began by studying how people experience and navigate street art. Organized efforts such as festivals, city programs, and walking tours showed how public art promotes culture and urban exploration. At the same time, spontaneous discoveries through chance encounters or social media revealed informal but powerful ways people connect with street art.

Street art ecosystem

Targeting street art festivals

I identified street art festivals as vibrant hubs where artists, enthusiasts, and stakeholders come together, making them a natural focus for feature development.

To deepen my understanding of street art festivals, I analyzed 10 of the leading street art festivals including the Vancouver mural festival, Wynwood walls in Miami and Jersey city mural festival. Istudied key patterns across their offerings and further immersed myself by attending the Jersey City event to experience the community firsthand.

Vancouver street art festival

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

Collections and Walking Tour Feature

During backlog grooming sessions, we prioritized the Collections feature to deliver a more curated and engaging experience for festival attendees. Collections are curated groups of murals linked by a theme, like playlists for street art.
For festivals, we introduced a specialized form of Collections called Walking Tours, designed as step-by-step, self-guided routes through murals. While initially built for festivals, Walking Tours would later evolve beyond their original scope....
Birds
Collection featuring birds
USA
Collection featuring USA inspired imagery

Path to validation and a false positive

My research and ethnographic observations pointed to street art festivals as the ideal launch setting for Collections, given their dynamic audiences seeking curated experiences. We developed low-fidelity mockups and began stakeholder interviews to validate interest and refine the feature.

Early stage mockups of the collections feature targeting street art festivals

A false positive

Then came the unexpected insight. In our very first call, it became clear that while festivals offered a strong starting point, limiting Collections to these events would be a mistake. Users and partners saw a bigger opportunity, one where Collections could power discovery across entire cities, not just at festivals.

Takeaway #1
Refining UX Strategy Through Stakeholder Collaboration

Collaborating with stakeholders helped refine our problem statement and broaden our perspective. Through feedback, we realized the Collections feature didn’t need to be limited to street art festivals. This shift allowed us to design a more versatile guided tour experience, expanding the user base to anyone interested in street art. Without this input, we might have missed the chance to create a more inclusive feature.

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 Information Architecture (IA)

A key change was designing walking tours as a unique collection type, inspired by the simplicity of a Spotify playlist but tailored for murals. These tours integrate digital content with physical exploration, offering a curated journey that blends navigation and storytelling, all within a walkable radius.

Tours in the heirarchy of the mobile app

The 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.
Tour detail page
Tour route

Parity between mobile and web management app

CANVS is a multi-sided platform with a mobile app, web app, and API integrations. The web app is used by organizations and artists to manage mural and artist directories, while the mobile app offers the public access to the largest collection of crowd-sourced murals on an interactive map.
Organizations can curate and manage guided tours, highlighting murals and themes for their audience. By separating the user interface from the management environment, we ensure seamless integration across the CANVS ecosystem, delivering a unified solution for both users and organizations.
Web app for tour and exhibit management
Takeaway #2
Enhancing existing features, reduces development cost and time.

Collections, originally a simple mural grouping feature on the web app, was enhanced to support the new Guided Tour functionality. By ensuring seamless integration with Tours and Exhibits, we improved the user experience while reducing development costs and time. This approach highlighted the efficiency of building on existing features to introduce new functionality.

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 the visual representation of collections on the app's landing page. Initially, collections were unclear, causing confusion. To address this, we added a grid of murals to each collection’s thumbnail, making it obvious that they represent a group of murals. This adjustment reduced cognitive load, helping users quickly understand and engage with the collections.
BEFORE: Thumbnail doesn't visually represent a collection
AFTER: Thumbnail shows multiple murals and descriptions

Making directions accessible at a glance

Users struggled to find directions to tour stops, as they were hidden in the mural's detail page. This created friction, so we moved the directions to a more visible spot in the tour interface, making location information easily accessible 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.