MudLog Studio App

Building a Project Tracking App for Studio Potters

Overview

After starting my personal pottery practice, I quickly realized how challenging it is to keep track of my projects. How many pots are waiting to be fired? Which glaze did I use on this one again? What do I need to get done today at the studio? Is there an app for this? Maybe I should make one…

My Role

I was the sole UX designer and researcher for this project. Skills leveraged include: Competitor research, User interviews, User flows, Interaction design, Strategy, UI design, and Branding.

Why do potters need a way to track projects?

From the outside, pottery seems like a straight-forward process. However, there are many variables to track that can easily be forgotten if you aren't writing things down. Those variables include:

Clay body types
Clay types have varying required firing temp ranges, workability, and color.
Glazes + decoration
There are many types and each might be layered, dipped, or painted. You may also combine multiple glazes. These also come in different firing temp ranges and must fit the clay body.
Clay weight
This dictates the potential size of piece you will end up with after firing.
Shrinkage rates
Clay shrinks at different rates when dried and fired depending on the clay body.
Dimensions
Knowing the dimensions of your piece before and after firing will help you determine shrinkage rates for future projects.
Drying time
Thrown pieces have to be at the perfect level of dryness in order to trim them into their final shape. This state is typically referred to as "leather-hard". If a piece is forgotten about and gets too dry, it's difficult to shape and could sometimes mean discarding the pot.

If you or a fellow potter wants to recreate the results of a specific piece, or avoid a previous disastrous result, all of this information is important to keep as a reference. If you are a hobby potter who is regularly creating new pots and trying new decoration techniques, remembering these details is near impossible.

Discovery

Questions

  • Who are the main competitors in this space?

  • Are these current tools meeting the needs of their target audience?

  • What are the current pain points of the pottery community when it comes to tracking their studio projects?

Research take-aways

How are potters currently tracking their work?


  • Apps: ClayLab is the most prominent in the space currently and allows for basic tracking and status updates.

  • Coda.io: Allows you to build a database and customized spreadsheet

  • Excel: An easy and free tool to create a custom database. "Clay apps are just pretty spreadsheets".

  • Notion: Easily customizable, powerful, and free note-taking tool.

  • Physical notebook: Pottery is a tactile, non-digital creative medium and many potters like to keep it that way.


What do potters wish digital tracking tools did better?


  • Provide a space for inspo or aspirational projects

  • Ability to link inspirational piece to the attempted project

  • Ability to track layering of glazes, underglazes, oxides, etc

  • Ability to tag, search, and filter through projects

  • A space to track inventory for craft fair planning (for potters who sell their work commercially)

  • Provide a way to schedule and plan social media posts

Defining the scope

Goal

Create a digital space for tracking ceramic project details and statuses

Target
Audience

Hobbyist and studio potters who would like a convenient way to track ceramic projects

Scope

What it is: A place to track projects, input project details, save inspiration, and link inspirational pieces to attempted projects.
What it isn't: A tool for career potters to track the work that they sell. This would involve inventory planning and social media integration.
What I'd love to explore later: The ability to share glaze combinations and successful pieces with your pottery community within the app.

Understanding workflows

After scoping out this project, I wanted to define the moving parts of a potter's workflow to better understand where an app might be the most useful. I broke each piece of the process out into 3 segments: Status, Location, and To Do.


Having this visualized helped me to decide what was non-negotiable in a potential projects details page.

App UI concepting

Looking through various tools and project management software solutions, I narrowed down my focus to two potential frameworks to explore; Kanban and Project List View.

Choosing a direction

After sketching and exploring low-fidelity UIs for each potential approach, it was time to weigh out which option would best address the problems I am trying to solve for potters.


The Project List view offered more flexibility in the UI to give the user viewing options and put more focus on viewing multiple projects at once. The kanban approach didn't make efficient use of the viewport on mobile and felt too similar to existing tools like Trello.


Without time and resource constraints, I would test lo-fidelity prototypes at this stage with potters in the studio.

UI and Visual Design: Keeping it fun and simple

As an exercise, I created a stylescape to capture the overall mood I was aiming for within the app. I knew that I wanted a vintage yet modern feel with mostly 2D print-like elements.

UI elements

I landed on two playful but legible fonts, a limited color palette to maintain focus on important interactions, and soft rounded edges to counteract any harshness of the 2D components.

Final app interface

Homepage - View projects + Add a new project:
Add a project - Take or Upload photos:
Project details page:
Inspo page - Add an inspo project:

Challenges + Next steps

Challenge

Ceramics is a grounding, meditative, and tactile hobby so those who make pottery are not typically interested in having their phone nearby during the making process. It’s an opportunity to escape tech, connect with mud, and not look at screens! Also, pottery is messy - smartphones and water do not typically mix well. I think an opportunity to explore here is making it easy for potters to do their app tasks before or after their making session.

Testing

I would love to get a low-fidelity version of this app in front of users for testing to see how it might fit into their workflow and get feedback around its usefulness.

Features

Other features I would consider adding in future iterations based on research include: Search, Tags for filtering projects or inspo quickly, and Social sharing (projects and glaze combination inspo).

Ashley Blackwell

2024