In 2022 I was hired by Marfa Art Garage as their first UX designer to help the build a website with the end goal of helping them boost traffic and sales. Marfa Art Garage is an art gallery that specializes in showing local artists. They have two locations: one in Marfa, Texas, and the other in Austin, Texas.

who they are connects to how UX approach 

I began by leading multiple online workshops with the management team to gain a better understanding of what they wanted from their product and how best to access their users.


I provided the owners of Marfa Art Garage with a questionnaire to give to their visitors. Over the course of a month, we recieved 33 responses, which I used to create three unique user personas to help us better understand how to approach ease of usability and trouble-shoot complications.

Over half of the users were only looking to view art, with a small percentage in the market to buy art. Focusing on the latter users we wanted to address all the possible pinpoints they might encounter when purchasing art online. Users needed to not only sort the art by artist, but by price (from high to low) and size (from small to large). It was also important that any sales in the physical space were reflected online, so a user wasn’t considering buying a piece of art that was already sold.

Moving forward with the information I gathered, I created wireframe options for the project managers to review. After making a selection, I moved forward with some front end design options.

I received feedback from the management about the first round of designs, and ended up including realtime updates about a piece of arts availability, as well as including a search function where you could set a desired price and size range.

Confident that the product would entice more sales and visits to their space, management put me in touch with their web development team.

Over the course of a few virtual sessions with the web development team we worked though Q&A’s and troubleshooting. The largest hurdle we faced was making sure the filter functions could be applied to specific artists and not always to the entire collection of art. Also live updating if a piece of art had sold in the physical gallery meant syncing their payment methods, which proved to be a larger endeavor than expected. The solution we landed on was to live update the site when a piece of art sold, meaning there could be a slight delay and confusion if someone tried to buy an already sold piece of art.