Social Shopping Experience
About Imagekind
Imagekind is a commercial website that prints and sells images created by participating artists on-demand. It also includes a social networking and marketing site for artists and their customers. It was founded in Seattle, Washington in 2006 by Adrian Hanauer, a Seattle, Washington co-owner of the Seattle Sounders professional soccer team, and Kelly Smith, a software & digital media specialist who formed Curious Office as an incubator of online companies. It is now owned by CafePress. Imagekind is an online gallery featuring over 1 million images by independent artists from all over the world. Shoppers looking for unique wall art will find museum-quality reproductions of original artworks available for purchase as giclee prints and ready-to-hang canvas prints and framed prints.
Project Overview
Imagekind's goal was to develop a new online art experience that provides both consumers and artists with a new outlet for sharing, creating and buying art from digital files. They were the world's first community to serve as a hybrid art gallery, photo-sharing service and a print-on-demand service, and they have partnered with leading brands such as Walgreens, Snapfish, Flickr, HP and Costco.com to distribute its art and frames to the widest possible online audience.
While employed at Imagekind, I spent 4 months working on designing the Community section, a major new tab on the Imagekind website. The Community section featured a brand new space for Imagekind members to better interact and collaborate with each other. The new and improved features with this launch included Forums, Groups, Favorites and Fans and a Facebook-like Activity Feed. The overall concept was to increase user engagement while encouraging retail sales and exposing great content.
Curated Artist Groups
In conjunction with the new Community tab, Imagekind launched the brand-new Imagekind Groups, a place for members who share common artistic interests to discuss and share their work. Our goal was to create a member-moderated section of the site that would increase user participation and constantly expose new and previously-unrecognized artwork on the Imagekind site.
Because Imagekind Groups would be largely member-moderated (instead of staff-moderated), it was necessary to create front-facing admin tools for members to control their Group settings and information. User feedback on the admin tools was extremely positive, with users noting that Imagekind was becoming the kind of easy-to-use website that they enjoyed visiting.
