Hwang Yoo-Yup · Responsive Website · Live Prototype Sessions

🎯 About this study: Unlike a simulated test, this prototype testing was conducted with real individuals actively working in the art industry — an art advisor, a gallery dealer, a museum director, and a working artist. These are the same participants from the original user interviews, now reengaged to evaluate the hi-fi prototype. Their feedback directly shapes the final website before launch.

Target Audience

The Hwang Yoo-Yup digital legacy platform is designed to serve two real-world audience groups simultaneously. Understanding who will actually use this site — and what they bring to it — was essential to calibrate what the prototype needed to prove.

Primary Audience — Art Industry Professionals

These are the gatekeepers of legacy. They determine whether an artist is taken seriously, collected, exhibited, and studied. For the HYY platform, this audience includes art advisors, gallery dealers, museum directors, curators, and scholars. They arrive with high expectations for credibility, structured information, and historical authority.

What they need from this platform:

• Immediate historical and cultural positioning of the artist
• Exhibition history, institutional affiliations, and provenance data
• Bibliography and scholarly references they can cite or build on
• A tone that signals serious curation — not promotion
• A navigable archive that supports professional research workflows

Why they matter for this launch: This audience will determine whether the platform earns institutional legitimacy. A positive response from art advisors and museum directors directly supports the estate’s goals for future exhibitions, loans, and partnerships. If this audience doesn’t trust the site within the first 60 seconds, the platform fails its primary mission.

Secondary Audience — Culturally Curious General Public

Younger discovery-oriented users — culturally curious individuals, students, diaspora communities, and art-interested non-specialists — who may encounter Hwang Yoo-Yup for the first time online. They are not experts, but they are capable of deep engagement if the platform earns their attention through visual and emotional resonance before asking them to read.

What they need from this platform:

• An immediate emotional entry point — strong visuals before explanation
• Context in small, digestible layers — not academic essays
• Thematic navigation that lets them explore by feeling, not just chronology
• A sense that the artist’s life connects to broader human experiences they recognize
• A respectful, unhurried tone that doesn’t talk down to them

Why they matter for this launch: International reach and younger audience engagement are explicit goals of the estate. If this group can navigate the site intuitively and leave with a genuine sense of who Hwang Yoo-Yup was, the platform expands its cultural impact far beyond the art world.

The Design Challenge These Two Audiences Create

These are not two separate sites. They share one URL, one navigation system, one visual identity, and one content architecture. The prototype had to prove that a single platform can serve a professional researcher’s need for structured data and a first-time visitor’s need for emotional orientation — without compromising either.