Overview

SuperRare is a premium NFT art marketplace well-known for art curation, tight community, and revolutionizing the economics of human creativity. I joined the company as Senior Product Designer back in March 2022, and this has been a dream job for me so far. As a designer in a relatively small start-up, I’ve had opportunities to work on many interesting (and truly RARE!) features for Web3 and occasionally wear different hats, from user experience designer to user researcher, copywriter, and project manager. I’m very grateful for having a manager like Mike Deal who has become a thoughtful mentor guiding me towards simplicity and critical thinking. Let me share a bit about my journey so far at SuperRare. 

Purchasing journeys

There are three main design personas and user journeys we’ve been designing for at SuperRare: artists, art collectors, and art curators. While there are many overlaps, these personas have their unique needs, and the critical thinking process starts with design solutions for each case.

Many features we designed in 2022 were around improving art collection experience and monetization.

One of the important updates was a redesigned Explore page that allows collectors to filter the marketplace by category, currency, media type, and artists. Together with our updated search functionality and UI refinements, this release has significantly improved the Explore page visits and increased the engagement window. It also aids content discoverability and makes the entire art browsing and purchasing UX more interactive. Alongside a talented fellow designer Phil Readman, I worked on design tweaks and QA for this release, as well as the Currency filter functionality.

Besides the improved marketplace experience, we designed features that expanded purchasing horizons for art collectors with the ability to buy artworks with credit cards, accepting direct sale price offers, and buying with RARE tokens.

The Buying artworks with RARE tokens feature was important for the SuperRare ecosystem. 

What are tokens?

• A token is a digital unit of value that represents an asset or utility and lives on blockchain, essentially as a smart contract. 

• A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller directly written into lines of code.

• Blockchains are special databases that store information in blocks that are linked together. Hence the name.

• Tokens can be used to raise funds or to give access to particular services.control marketplace parameters, and help define the future of art and culture for the digitally native generation.

The introduction of the RARE token allowed the SuperRare community to have access to art curation at scale.

By owning RARE tokens, people become members of the DAO - Decentralized Autonomous Organization or a blockchain club. Membership in the SuperRare DAO allows them to curate the platform,

I designed the feature which enabled purchase of artworks with RARE tokens. The design deliverables included desktop and mobile mocks for two main artist journeys (setting and updating artwork price), collectors journey of buying with RARE, as well as the revision of the Dashboard, artwork pages, series pages, spaces pages, leaderboards, web and email notifications. A snapshot of Figma workspace illustrates our typical design project deliverable file and the amount of pages we typically update for a given feature.

We added a Currency filter for the Explore page - marketplace - that allowed people to view artworks available for purchase in RARE. Despite the seemingly straightforward functional requirements, we bumped into some interesting Web 3 limitations along the way. For example, converting from ETH to RARE wasn’t possible immediately, and sorting from highest to lowest and reverse wasn’t possible for RARE. Fun!

Creative journeys

Despite our focus on the collectors journeys in late 2022, I had an amazing opportunity to work on the user journeys that involved artists and curators. I designed the Collab feature that allowed artists to collaborate with each other, redesigned the artist application flow, and worked on the admin tool for Space curators. Spaces are independent galleries that are vetted and elected by the SuperRare community - RARE holders. 

I’m very excited for all these features to be shipped because I believe they help the digital community shape a new era that empowers more diverse artistic and curatorial voices worldwide.

Key insights

As a product designer at SuperRare, I’m surrounded by art everyday. This has had a significant impact on my personal and professional lives which allowed me to not only learn more about art but also study art curation. It also showed me one more time that it is important to design for products that you love.

I have a voice when designing features and products at SuperRare and I have the privilege of brainstorming ideas with the founders. Last but not least, we have an amazing team, we grow together, challenge each other, and are united in our belief that the future of the Web belongs to creators. In the spirit of celebrating art, here is a photo of me and my colleague Ina Hirzel at the SuperRare gallery opening in Soho, NY in May 2022.