60 Years of Modern Art at Your Fingertips

We developed an intuitive enterprise tool for art dealers for a large international gallery to deal with the demands of making deals on the fly. We kept it simple despite a fabulously complex back end.

Taking our cues from the existing, and successful web version of the app, we gave users the same features they had come to take for granted—added a few essential ones that were absent—and sought to simplify their interactions and make them more intuitive.

The app features a robust search/filter/sort functionality all accessed quickly from the art view. The app required that a given artwork be at the center of a wide-ranging mix of statuses, categories, flags, and assigned variables. Our challenge was to leverage the best aspects of iOS’s native environment to help the user navigate this web in a way that was clean, intuitive, and powerful.

While we wrestled with the best way to make the dense criteria manageable by keeping things simple and rational, we sought to have the artwork shown take advantage of the limited iPhone real estate. We dispensed with labels while viewing, allowing the user to rely on their essential knowledge of the artworks themselves and maximizing screen real estate. We developed a way to transition between single – two- three- and four-column views by pinching in and out. This let the user move fluidly, and intuitively through tens of thousands of artworks at the ideal rate and scale for them.