Artpilot

Art services — delivery, installation, framing, storage — are still arranged by email and phone. Pricing stays hidden from the client, providers arrive without the site details they need, and the errors land on both sides.

Artpilot replaces the thread with one guided flow that settles price, scope and site requirements before checkout, so client and crew start the job already aligned. I did all of it: research, flows, prototypes, testing, brand.

Galleries and cultural institutions; corporate collections; artists and makers; private collectors; art advisors. Interviews and five personas showed the needs overlap, but the vocabulary and the scale don't: a residential client will never schedule a fifty-work install, and an office move is nothing else.

The first-timer decides whether the product exists at all. The expert copes with anything; she is the one the language has to be right for.

One flow for every order type, modelled on the consumer apps people already trust. Autofill, short step summaries and plain language keep typed input near zero: most answers are pre-populated, and the client mainly confirms each step — the feeling of being walked through by someone who has done this a thousand times.

Scheduling and payment can be handed to a caregiver, family member or assistant as part of the order itself, not bolted on. The same affordance covers anyone who can't meet the crew on arrival: people who need translation, or who can't point out where the work should hang.

Early rounds kept stalling in the same place: overlapping service names and art-world terms nobody outside the trade uses. Consolidating the order types into one flow and rewriting every label in the client's words all but eliminated the confusion in the next round — people who had frozen at service selection completed the step without hesitation.

Interviewees worried about stairs, tight doorways and oversized works, and felt the copy made those their fault. A few scoping questions asked early, in neutral language, removed that sense of fault entirely.

Gallerists and collection managers work from a desk in office hours, so the app got a browser-based counterpart. Knowing that from the start, the system was responsive before the screens were: variable tokens, icon sets sized against the type scale, components built on structure rather than fixed measurements, spacing meant to flex. The setup cost a week; every iteration after it was faster.

Every text pairing meets WCAG AA, touch targets start at 48px, and the card states carry their hierarchy in elevation, so low-vision users aren't reading colour alone.

Artpilot brings a gallery's standards to the client's door and leaves the intimidation behind: approachable in tone, minimal in form, never the cold formality that makes the art world feel closed. Suisse carries it — chosen for readability, language support and condensed styles that hold up where the brand works hardest: packaging, signage, uniforms, shipping labels.

Six weeks, one designer, two rounds of testing. Delivered: high-fidelity app prototypes for booking, order review and confirmation; a browser counterpart for the desk; a light brand identity carried across UI, motion and mockups.

Next, if it went further: an AR consult for remote condition reports and frame mock-ups, inventory management for large collections, service recommendation, and the delegated-access flow taken all the way.