Flowdata – Data Management
Flowdata is an internal data management solution for Flow Art Advisory out of New York City.
THE DATA –
The main goal of Flowdata was to make usable a large sum of data spanning thousands of rows in excel. Up until the completion of this project that data was painstakingly updated in Google Sheets. It was near impossible for my client and her assistant to manage, and update the growing volume of data internally at Flow Advisory – let alone take advantage of it.
The data concerned art exhibitions, artists, and art spaces the art advisor was keeping tabs on.
The solution I modeled and then developed using Appsheet had to allow for new art show entries to be made, for those shows and their artists and curators to be intelligently searched and sorted, I also needed to develop a user friendly way for my client to take notes live on the shows she was touring in real time.
The goal was to take my client’s data about the nodal and loosely connected art world and make it digestible, editable, and to facilitate an annotation interaction all in one place.
My client required notes to be collected during her visits to gallery and museum shows – I tailored Flowdata to be the perfect environment for that. Rather than having to search through and then manually log notes into a cumbersome Google Sheet on a specific row lost in a whirlwind of data, my client could sleekly look up the current gallery show she was at and log notes directly into her iPad mini in the mobile friendly platform.
Fig. 1 Main FlowData view listing global art spaces
THE UI –
A location based gallery dashboard occupied the main page. My client has international clientele and as an authoritative voice was tracking the development of showings across the globe. This main dashboard acted as an access point into the entire global art world.
The client could click a gallery to get more details on it. She mentioned she often took her dog for walks in New York around to different galleries, and with FlowData, she could route directly to her next stops using the embedded Google Maps functionality. This feature would prove useful abroad or in other cities to locate and track local shows with concurrent exhibits especially during art fairs.
The decision to include the map was made because of the physicality of my client’s data. Modeling UI after the kind of data it handles is the only way to fully take advantage of data. Making a system with a strong intractable map UI allowed the gallery and museum data to be further exploited in my client’s work. The addresses which used to sit on Google Sheets were now points on a map which routed my client directly through her art viewing globally.
Fig. 2 gallery view with map expanded
Fig. 3 bulk edit feature
Lacking in her original data was the ability to bulk update her entries after visiting a new city, or an art festival, where she was too occupied with other art world professionals to be logging her visits. My client was adverse to Google Sheets and refused to learn the ins and outs of the intimidating platform of Sheets. FlowData supplies a more user friendly interface and supports bulk update with obvious touch targets which allowed my client and her assistant to easily update the high quantity of her data. It made the data more attractive, more useful, and more usable for her purposes out in the field. My client’s data used to slip away from the present, due to the difficulty to update it. She voiced this problem about her workflow in our first meeting. And unfortunately as data becomes less relevant to a client’s work it becomes less attractive and more difficult to use, constantly becoming harder to update. I was delighted when I solved this problem of hers.
THE PROCESS –
At the beginning I modeled interactions in a low-fi sketch manner before pitching the mocked up features to my client in zoom meetings.
Eventually we started developing, and as it happens went back to mocking up new flows on occasion to hammer out and adjust features per conversions that arose after demo tests of the prototype versions of the app.
Our prototype presentations were times for us to touch base on what worked and discover what still needed solutions.
Through this process we crafted the FlowData app with which she was able to aid the scheduling of her trips, and while touring her destinations, update her data, take notes, and strategies on the spot for future conversations with clients.
Fig. 4 Screenshot of the original data I was given to work with. Notes were being taken directly on the google sheet which I have deleted to preserve the privacy of my client’s reviews.
Fig. 5 Logo design for FlowData – the logo had to center its aesthetic around data, hence the mono-spaced type choice. However, it could not neglect the artistic nature of the data’s subject. The type chosen was altered to vary line thickness and break the machined nature of the stroke. The dots were squished to give more life and bounce to an otherwise static machine aesthetic.
In an effort to preserve general formal continuity, the slashes where drawn with a pen tool to exactly match the weight of the boarder around the logo as well as the the stem of the f and the a. This binds the logo in an equivalence which satisfies a visual desire for balance.