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Project Context
Project Context
Goal: To determine what improvements could be made for Dream and Color's website and AI coloring book generator
My role: This project was a collaborative graduate-level project, and I took on the role as a UX designer and researcher. My responsibilities involved client consulting, interviewing users, conducting a competitive teardown, usability testing, and mocking up recommendations.
Tools used: Figma, Google workspace, Userinterviews.com/
Research methodologies: Competitive teardown, Moderated usability study
Duration: 6 weeks
Client and main point of contact
Name: Matt Kummer
Role: Software developer and founder of Dream and Color
Project Timeline
Project Timeline
Overview
Overview
Background
Background
Dream & Color is a Colorado based startup focused on leveraging state-of-the-art AI image generation and large language models to create artwork that is then transformed into coloring books/pages for educators, parents, children, educators, and hobbyists.
Users can upload personal photos, and the AI image generation model will create coloring pages containing unique line art, sketches, and vector graphics. Users can then download the coloring pages into a high-quality PDF coloring book ready for printing. These personalized coloring books are perfect for personalized gifts, classroom activities, or creative projects.
Dream & Color offers two AI image generation models*: Classic and Dream 3.0. Classic generation uses more traditional edge detection techniques while Dream 3.0 is a fully generative AI image processing pipeline.
Users can choose from 3 different subscription models: Free, $9 month, or $29 month.
*On April 30th, Dream and Color received a new Dream 3.5 update, which included new styles. This occurred towards the end of our project timeline
Website
Website
URL: https://dreamandcolor.com/
Platform: The website was designed and hosted using Netlify
Traffic: The majority of traffic was on desktop
1000-5000 unique visitors per month
Top sources of traffic: Most visitors land on the website from the following sources: Reddit and Google.
Target Audiences
Target Audiences
The website had 3 primary audiences including:
Parents: Parents of young children (2-8) who are seeking simple and cost-effective solutions to inject creativity into their child's day
Educators: Teachers and adolescence therapists who leverage coloring books to enhance learning, communication, and emotional development.
Hobbyists: Adults who want to take personal and sentimental photos (e.g. engagement, pets) and turn them into coloring books
Research Challenge
Dream & Color wanted to understand what, if anything, could be improved about their website. Specifically, they were interested in:
Usability: Identify what’s working + what could be improved about our website
Discoverability: Uncover how Dream & Color could increase discoverability and awareness of personalized coloring pages / books on their website
Usability Comparison: Understand what a similar AI generated coloring book website (Colorbliss.com) is doing well vs. not doing well compared to Dream & Color
Research
Research
Research Plan and Client Kickoff
Before conducting our study, we drafted an outline of our entire research plan and made a document for our first meeting with Matt. The purpose of doing this was to make sure we were heading in the right direction before investing a significant amount of time + resources for the study (ensure a suitable return of investment).
We wanted to get Matt's feedback about the following during the kick off meeting:
Business goals: Future growth, competitors, product advertising/outreach
Target audience: User groups, existing customer feedback
Product specifics: Features, subscription models, pricing
CUJ's: The Critical User Journeys we would test with users during usabiity testing
Screener questions/criteria: How we would determine who to recruit
User Recruitment
After confirming that our research plan aligned with Matt's goals, it was time to start recruiting users for our usability study. We used Userinterviews.com, an industry standard tool, to recruit 6 users who fell into the 3 main target audiences for the product.
With input from our meeting with Matt, we decided that it was important for our screener questions to determine if users were interested in the concept of generative AI for artwork and using coloring pages. This way, we could ensure relevant user feedback that would lead to more accurate and valuable insights.
Each participant was compensated with $20 to encourage honest feedback and thank them for their time.
Competitive Teardown
As we were waiting for participants to show interest in our study and schedule a meeting time with us, we conducted a competitive teardown between Dream and Color and Colorbliss. Colorbliss.com is a digital platform that functions similarly to our client's product. Matt expressed interest in knowing how his product stacked up against his direct competition, and Colorbliss was his main competitior of interest.
With this in mind, we took the Critical User Journeys (CUJ's) that Matt reviewed in our kickoff meeting and compared them for both products. We rated each CUJ with a grade letter scale and made sure to point out both pain points and areas of delight that influenced our ratings.
In summary, our findings showed that Colorbliss was stronger than Dream and Color in the following aspects:
Discoverability: Colorbliss showed up as the first result on a search engine more consistently and had a presence on well-known social platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram
Navigability: Page links/buttons were placed more consistently in easy-to-find areas on the website
Price point for features offered: Colorbliss offered more features at a cheaper subscription cost
Visual appeal: Stylistic choices better conveyed a creative community and looked less sterile
Usability Testing + Synthesis
To ensure consistency between all 6 of our interviews, I created a moderator guide (mod for short) that included all of our user tasks and questions written in the order we intended to ask them. Each interview session was video recorded using Zoom.
After conducting all of the remote interviews, we compiled the responses in a note taking grid. We made sure to include direct user quotes and color coded responses that were related to the same idea. This way, we could count how many users who expressed the same sentiment and find trends. These trends seemed to match our findings from the compeitive teardown.
Client Presentation
Client Presentation
Before our presentation with Matt, we were fortunate enough to receive feedback from Charlotte Hult, a senior UX Researcher from Google. Our session with her was extremely helpful to organize our ideas and utilize effective storytelling in our presentation.
We dive much deeper into our recommendations and mockups in the following video and the presentation at the beginning of the case study. Overall, we exceeded Matt's expectations with our research rigor, detailed insights, and effective presentation.
Dream and Color Presentation.mp4From Matt
"Thank you all for your hard work, I was very impressed with your findings and they will definitely influence our product development going forward!
The presentation went without a hitch and you could have fooled me that I was working with a group of industry hardened consultants in UXR. You all presented all of your findings and insights upfront, leaving nothing up to interpretation, and the few additional questions I had were answered succinctly.
Once I'm able to get some of the findings from your report incorporated into our product I'll reach back out so you can see the fruits of your labor irl."
- Matt
Moving Forward
Moving Forward
Looking back at this experience, I'm proud that Matt found our findings to be impactful towards his startup. If we had more time to work with him, I would definitely want to explore the Dream 3.5 update further. Of course, all client UX research reports have an agreed upon deadline, and the update happened to be released on the last week of our project timeline. Therefore, we weren't able to test the new features. As a UX designer, I would also be open to helping Matt redesign his site.
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