Art Investment AI Dashboard
OVERVIEW
Mintus is an art investment platform, allowing retail investors the opportunity to buy shares in multi-million dollar art from artists such as Andy Warhol and George Condo.
Mintus intend to impliment a custom-built Decision Intelligence AI to predict artist and artwork investibility, and project artwork values forward in time.
This will guide Mintus when making investment decisions.
ROLE
Product Designer
User Research, Product Research, Visual design, Experience Design, Prototyping & Testing, Pitching
"We need to have confidence in our investments without soley relying on very expensive experts"
Ben Clark (Mintus Board Member and CEO of Gurr Johns)
Background
Mintus is an online art investment platform offering a new way to buy shares and invest in exceptional contemporary art.
The team behind Mintus has a wealth of experience in the creation, development and management of globally recognised enterprises.
The art market has a longstanding track record of growth, and has outperformed the S&P 500 by 240% since 1986.
The business rely's heavily on a range of experts from different sections of the art market to advise and gudie their investment decisions. This is an expensive way to make decisions.
Mintus would like to use AI to reduce its dependence on experts and be able to predict market trends to offer the best returns to investors.
Original rejected dashboard concept before I was brought in - January 2023
As part of Phase 1, Mintus requied an internal SaaS dashboad to allow them to interact with the AI and view its recommendations.
I was the sole designer, working with a member of the board, as well as the Research and Operations manager.
My brief was to create a functional prototype of a dashboard based upon the companies current branding. Its focus was to provide an investment score on artist and artworks, with a data backed rationale of how the scores were arrived upon.
Understanding the problem
I conducted an in-person workshop with Ben Clark (Mintus Board Member and CEO of Gurr Johns) and Anthony Pulsford (Research and Operations Manager), as well as the CEO of Decision Sentry, the company developing the AI.
The goal was to understand the frustrations with the current dashboard, and understand what they really needed to have confidence in the system.
Ben Clark
Anthony Pulsford
Michael Fitzgerald
Problem
Goal
Mintus needs the knowledge of an industry expert because they want to make high-confidence decisions in a field that they themselves are not experts in.
Create a dashboard that will let users make investment decisions by empowering their decisions with the knowledge of industry experts.
Effectiveness will be measured by benchmarking the output against industry experts.
Persona's
Daniel, "Opportunity for All"
Age: 61
Gender: Male
Location: London, UK
Marital status: Married Kids: 3
Profession: CEO - Fintech
Income: £150'000K
Daniel is an experienced leader in the digital space working with global organisations.
He helps companies across the country digitally transform to improve how they work.
Goals
Build a brand that stands for integrity.
Become a more self-sufficient company.
Use technology to empower the business.
Develop staff into the next generation of leaders.
Frustrations
Following industry trends without strong justification.
Repetitive administration work.
"That will never work" mentality.
Susanna, "Lead with humility"
Age: 50
Gender: Female
Location: Devon, UK
Marital status: Married Kids: 1
Profession: CFO - Wealth Fund
Income: £120'000K
Susanna moved from San Francisco 5 years ago with her family to take on a CFO role.
She work is high-pressure and high-pace but she thirves in that enviroment.
Goals
Provide strong leadership for the confidence of the clients.
Motivate and inspire staff with the desire for personal growth.
Maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Frustrations
Having to split my attention onto multiple concurrent tasks.
Being unprepared.
Meetings without a defined goal.
Ethan, "Walk before you run"
Age: 45
Gender: Male
Location: London, UK
Marital status: In a relationship Kids: 0
Profession: Senior Financial Analyist
Income: £90K
Ethan is an experienced financial analyst with a passion for helping people grow their wealth through smart investments.
He holds a Master's degree in Finance.
Goals
Educating and empowering investors.
Building long-term relationships.
Generating consistent returns.
Promoting financial inclusion.
Frustrations
Lack of financial literacy.
Limted access to alternative investment opportunities.
Short term thinking among staff and clients.
Competitor Analysis
Crypto.com
Layout - Outstanding
Clear layout
Easy to digest information
Enough text to enable understanding, withot overwhelming.
Binance
Layout - Outstanding
Clear Call-to-action buttons.
Pages are easy to read using high contrast where required.
Yahoo Finance
Navigation - Outstanding
Clear header menu system.
Quick links to prioritised stock information.
Main story at the top of the page.
Defining the flow
The flowchart shows how a user will move through the dashboard.
Design - Lo-fidelity sketch prototypes
After the flow was defined, paper sketches were used to generate a range of ideas that could be developed, prototyped and tested with users.
Development - Hi-fidelity prototypes
To create the hi-fidelity designs, a mixture of inspirations and design decisions were taken based on the clients existing design language, aswell as direct and indirect competitors uncovered in the competitve audit.
UI Kit
Logo
Typography
Colours
Icons
Revision One
Artist Homepage
The Artist homepage's primary function is search. The user of the platform, 90% of the time will use the dashboard for a specific purpose.
In the event the user cannot remember the artists name, they are able to visually browse all artists.
The AI-powered Artist Investibility score is present.
Artwork Homepage
The Artwork homepage's primary function is search. The user of the platform, 90% of the time will use the dashboard for a specific purpose.
In the event the user cannot remember the artworks name, they are able to visually browse all artworks on the Mintus platform.
The AI-powered Artwork Investibility score is present.
Artist Specific
The page presents data at 3 levels of complexity to give users confidence in the data they are being presented.
Level 1 - Quick Glance - Headline datapoints and an Investibility Score
Level 2 - The data used to create the investability score from the last two years.
Level 3 - The data used to create the investability score from the last ten years.
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Artist Comparrison
The user can compare any two artists together, their investibility score and the data behind that score
Usability Study
A usability study around Revision 1 was planned with three members of the Mintus Executive board.
This was an informal group session where each participant was provided the design brief and asked to complete a few tasks on the prototye.
Research Goals:
Understand how users navigate the prototype and how much information they require to make a decision.
Tamer Ozman
Chris Kaldeen
Tad Smith
Insight 1
"The search bar could provide more functionality"
Adding a range of search filters to the search bar would be very useful and what users expect to see.
Add a physical search button so as not to rely solely on a user presing "enter" on their keyboard
Insight 2
"Artist and Artwork homepages, which are two very different pages, look visually identical".
Artwork homepage colour scheme was inverted from Blue (Primary) and Green (secondary) to Green (primary) and Blue (secondary).
Insight 3
"Data comparrisons are difficult to make without interrogating the data".
A sliding bar chart graphic was overlayed onto each data set being compared to allow comparrison 'at a glance'.
The Dashboard was presented at the July 2023 shareholders meeting where it was met with high praise.
"It looks and feels like a Mintus product."
"This is simple and intuative enough to jump straight-in"
The project is now focussed on the development of the proprietary AI Context Engine, which will power the investment score system.
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