Pioneering Digital Curation in Web3

TLDR

As the founding product designer at JPG, I led a pioneering effort in web3 art curation, developing innovative tools for curators and gallerists. Despite challenging market conditions, my approach, marked by iterative development and user-centric design, significantly improved the digital art experience.

Introduction

This case study details my 18 months at JPG, an early-stage web3 startup aiming to redefine digital curation on the internet. In an era dominated by AI and a growing monoculture - evident in the uniformity of coffee shops, fashion, and viral music, largely driven by algorithmic recommendations - JPG sought to explore new models for social curation and commerce using web3 tools. Imagine earning through curated product stores or popular playlists, with financial incentives powered by NFTs and blockchain. Initially, JPG focused on NFTs and digital art, creating a platform where fans could build digital exhibitions and storefronts, contextualizing and monetizing digital art.

Role

UI/UX Design

Team

Billy Shih - Frontend

Jack Burrus - Frontend

Maria Paula - Marketing

Marshall Vylette - Backend

Rob - Backend

Trent Elmore - Product

Date

2023

Defining The Problem

Initial user research involved discussions with artists, curators, and collectors, revealing three significant market gaps. At JPG's inception, the NFT market was largely transaction-focused, with platforms like OpenSea and NiftyGateway catering to artists and collectors. While artists and collectors had robust support, the roles of curators and gallerists were neglected. JPG aimed to fill this gap by focusing on their needs.

"Existing NFT curation platforms lack essential features like contextual feedback, varied curatorial options, and robust discovery tools. This limits the ability to create engaging, inclusive exhibitions, detracting from the overall curation experience."

The Work

My role at JPG focused on two main areas:

Exhibitions - A tool for curators to create context-rich galleries of NFTs.

With exhibitions, there was an existing creative suit for building these tools - think a content publisher like medium, that allowed you to place NFTS within your article. When I joined, folks enjoyed the publishing experience, but we noticed internally that 70% of exhibitions were being left unfinished in a draft state.

We set about a redesign to offer more NFT suggestions, quicker creation, and more reliable publishing (the old build would crash, which was really disheartening to the community). The result of this redesign project led to a 15% increase in the amount of exhibitions actually getting published. Ultimately, a very successful and exciting redesign.

Canons - a social curation tool that allowed users to vote on and group NFTS - think a mix of Product Hunt and playlists for NFTs.

Canons was a zero-to-one product build out exploring the idea of social curation. I find it easier to explain the concept with music, although we launched with digital art. Imagine a playlist, users can submit songs to, and also vote on what gets added - if your submissions was approved by the community, you would gain reputation in the playlist - and over time, your submissions and votes would gain more power.

We wanted to test this out in a smart MVP approach, so built just one canon - even though we imagine a robust ecosystem. On the engineering side we also made some challenging decisions to operate the whole system in a web2 database, while pushing snapshots into an on-chain web3 database - a wholely unique concept at the time. The results were amazing, for a few weeks, we launched 7 canons in total - and for a few weeks - JPG canons were the most active governance community in all of crypto.

Takeaways

The final UI/UX design solution for the JPG curator tooling incorporates a range of key features and functionalities to enhance the curation experience. While we believe we designed and built a great product, the adverse market conditions in crypto led to unfavorable conditions, hindering growth.

This experience led to a few key learnings:

The market is always a decisive factor. The downturn in crypto and NFT interest significantly impacted our growth.
Targeting discovery as a user problem can be challenging. It often proves more effective when addressed by supply sources like marketplaces or social media.
Lowering barriers to creation on User-Generated Content (UGC) platforms is essential. High effort should be matched with clear monetization potential.

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Pioneering Digital Curation in Web3