OVERVIEW
Art Market Insights Platform is a seven-day, self-initiated redesign concept. It builds on an existing art-market insights product to explore an open question: how might this product extend richer, more varied insight perspectives to a wider range of user groups? The original product centers on auction data and serves professional clients through custom research reports.
Analyzing the existing product, I noticed the platform had already accumulated a large body of art-market content, including auction records, news trends, exhibition information, artist profiles, and research publications. Yet this content is currently spread across different systems and pages, so users often have to integrate and cross-reference it themselves to piece together a complete view of the market.
This redesign proposes a new line of thinking: if those scattered contents were consolidated into a single research surface, and the business model and data-delivery path were adjusted alongside it, could the product create value for a more varied set of users and use cases? The scope spans product positioning, business-model exploration, and a reworked information architecture, validated through an interactive prototype (POC).
DISCOVER
In art-market research, auction prices are usually the most immediate and accessible data, so the existing product is built heavily around an auction database, with custom reports when users need deeper analysis. Looking closely at the current user experience, though, I found a few points worth revisiting that became the openings for this redesign:
The current access model runs on subscriptions and credits. A user has to enter the database, fill out a form to submit a request, then wait for the analysis team to respond. The flow suits deep professional research, but it leaves little room to serve people who just want to grasp the shape of the market quickly.
Auction price matters, but it is only one piece of the whole puzzle. A work's exhibition history, provenance, cultural context, and market attention shape its value just as much. Most of this information already exists on the platform, only filed under different content types.
Beyond auction data, the platform has built up a large amount of news, exhibition records, research publications, and artist profiles. Because these sit across different pages and systems, a user researching a single topic is often forced to switch back and forth between multiple tabs.
The legacy funnel: paid search at the core, with conversion relying heavily on users requesting reports themselves.
Initial insight
The platform already has a deep foundation of content. The core opportunity lies in building vertical and horizontal connections between those pieces, that is, layering a more research- and interpretation-friendly information layer on top of the raw data.
The data has been here all along. The real challenge, and the real opportunity, is how to connect it with structure.
DEFINE
This redesign sets out to explore a new direction: if the platform's existing content were consolidated into an independent research surface, and the business model and data-delivery path reshaped alongside it, the product could better serve a more varied set of user groups and research scenarios. The goals and principles below are the baseline used to narrow and frame the scope of this exploration:
The legacy user flow: after searching, users fill out a form to request a report, which the internal team then handles manually.
Design goals
Constraints
Design principles
DEVELOP
To intuitively connect AI features and Insights nodes across the whole site ecosystem, the system starts from two web-safe core colors, each extended into a complete set of semantic color tokens. Data Blue runs through all of the data insights, AI Violet stands for the AI-assisted features, and every step in each ramp passes an accessibility contrast check against dark and light backgrounds.
The Insights Card is split by perspective into Auction Insights, Gallery Spotlights, and an Overall Summary. Whether a gallery owner, a collector, or a market analyst, each person reaches the content closest to their own needs right away, instead of being made to face raw auction data first.
Placing the redesigned version alongside the old one: the new direction adopts a higher-contrast color scheme and refines the interaction logic of the filters, so power users can control each dimension more intuitively and smoothly.
The product's core users include gallery operators, auction specialists, art advisors, and investment institutions. These professional decision-makers are used to taking in multiple kinds of information at once, so the interface keeps a high information density, making sure charts and metrics from different dimensions can be cross-referenced within a single view.
DELIVER
The final output is a fully operable, high-fidelity interactive prototype, covering the Insights Card trigger points, the subscription-upgrade flow, the main analytics dashboard, and the AI retrieval interface, and it adapts cleanly across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
View the live prototype
Future metrics to watch and validate
Because this project is positioned as a proof of concept (POC), if it moved into real productization and development, the following core metrics (KPIs) could validate the business and user value of this design direction:
REFLECTION
At its core, this project is about rethinking the role data plays in a product. In today's art market, the underlying data is actually quite abundant; a product's real value and moat lie in how it turns that fragmented information into structured knowledge that is easy to understand and carries context.
Research questions worth exploring next