Seven Themes That Built the Architecture
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 🏷️ Status | Complete |
| 📅 Project | Hwang Yoo-Yup · Digital Legacy Platform |
| 🚩 Phase | Discover |
| 🧩 Input | Project brief · two-audience hypothesis (discovery vs. research) |
| 📦 Output | 4 qualitative interviews · competitive analysis · affinity map · 7 research themes mapped to design implications |
The Discover phase had one job: find out whether the two-audience bet was real or imagined. The hypothesis going in was that a legacy platform had to serve two users with incompatible needs — professionals who require credibility, and newcomers who require emotional entry before context. Discover tested that assumption against real people instead of designing for an average user who doesn’t exist.
Four in-depth interviews spanned the professional spectrum: an art advisor, a gallery dealer, a museum director, and a practicing artist. A comparative analysis of legacy artist websites established the competitive gap — most treat an artist’s recurring imagery as filter tags, none as an interpretive system. Archival and historical research situated Hwang within twentieth-century Korean art history.
Affinity clustering produced seven recurring themes, each mapped directly to a design implication — a traceable line from what a participant said to what the platform was built to do. The headline finding: the two user modes were consistent and real (professionals operated in research mode; newcomers in discovery mode), and they could not be collapsed into one experience. That finding became the dual-navigation architecture.
Method. Qualitative interviews with four participants across the discovery–research spectrum, a comparative analysis of legacy artist and archive websites, and archival/historical secondary research. Synthesis ran affinity clustering → thematic grouping → design-implication mapping.
The seven themes.